Sunday, July 6, 2008.

As I write this, I am sitting in a popup camper in my son’s backyard in Salida, Colo. Salida is about 150 miles or so southwest of Denver. Situated on the headwaters of the Arkansas River below Leadville, the little town is surrounded on all sides by some of the highest and most rugged mountain ranges in the southern Rockies.

My wife, Elizabeth, and I arrived in Salida yesterday evening, just in time to set up the camper before dark. Our son and his wife and our two grandchildren could put us up easily enough in their home. But we like fooling around with the camper. And we need to get it shipshape for the next leg of our journey, which will take us up into the Grand Tetons in northwestern Wyoming near Yellowstone.

We have traveled some in the western United States in recent years, primarily in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. But all of our previous trips have been during the winter months. This is our first opportunity to explore the region in summer.

For us, this represents having an opportunity to observe for the first time breeding birds that are new to us.

If you’re not a birder, it may seem peculiar that mature adults would plan most of their free time and vacations around birding ventures. But that’s the way it is with lots of us who have quite literally “gone to the birds.”

Starting out Tuesday, July 2, our route along I-40 took us across the Mississippi at Memphis and on through Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle into eastern New Mexico, where we spent Friday night in Tucumcari. The nest day we meandered across the Kiowa National Grasslands in the remote northeastern corner of New Mexico before crossing the Raton Pass into Colorado.

In Arkansas we saw for the first time a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher displaying its incredibly long and almost gaudy tail feathers. In the same tree was a Western Kingbird, another new bird. Since seeing that first one, however, we have by now spotted more than a 1,000 of them. Their favorite activity seems to be harassing crows and ravens.

From an overlook in the Texas panhandle, we were eyeing the vast parched landscape when a slim and silent predator suddenly soared into view. Our first thought was falcon. But the long slim tail and white head and wing markings quickly indicated that it was a Mississippi Kite, a truly magnificent bird. Having now seen White-tailed Kites at Galveston Island, Texas, and Swallow-tailed and Snail Kites in Florida, we still need to journey to the southern tip of Texas along the Rio Grande to locate our first Hook-billed Kite.

This morning we made a short excursion around the immediate vicinity of Salida, checking out favorite spots from previous wintertime excursions. On the dead branches of a tree overhanging Sand Lake there was a bird that was almost a dead ringer for our Eastern Wood-peewee, a species that only breeds as far west as east Texas and North Dakota. We were, then, geographically certain that we were looking at our first western Wood-peewee. Around the same lake, there were hundreds of swallows that resembled Tree Swallows, a common species in the Smokies region. But these birds, which displayed white patches on their cheeks and flanks, were in fact our first Violet-green Swallows.

So, thus far we have encountered five “new” species. On our wish list are many others that we hope to observe for the first time in the next few weeks: Clark’s Grebe, Northern Goshawk, Lewis’s and American Three-toed Woodpeckers, Cassin’s Kingbird, Pygmy Nuthatch, Rock and Canyon Wrens, Virginia’s and Black-Throated Gray Warblers, Western Tanager, Rufous-crowned and Sage Sparrows, Lazuli Bunting, Brown-capped and Black Rosy-finches, and others. Along the way we are not neglecting “old friends” — those birds encountered in previous excursions out west.

Oh yes, did I mention that we have two grandchildren in Salida? Daisy Ellison is nine. George Ellison IV is seven. They’re OK, too.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at info@georgeellison.com.