Author: Amy Law
-
Where have all the birds gone?
Look at this picture. Look at it closely. Count the number of birds in it. How many did you find? If you counted zero, nada, zilch, you are not alone. Since before Thanksgiving, I have seen very few birds at our feeders. In an email to Hugh Kingery, of the Audubon Society of Greater Denver,…
-
Angry bird’s feathers ruffled.
We had an angry young raven visit the backyard earlier this week. I don’t know what had annoyed it so much, but it was not happy. Actually, I suspect that the bird had just been put in its place by another raven that was perched in another tree a few houses down from ours. Crows…
-
Thanksgiving Dinner
There are two animals in this picture. Can you find them? The first is relatively obvious. The second may take some searching. There are two creatures in this tree. Can you find them both? I took this photo on Thanksgiving Day. I noticed the hawk in the tree as we were getting our own dinner…
-
Some loose, some win.
This is the time of year when the sun gets low in the horizon. The change in light must make our windows appear clear to birds visiting our feeders. One of the visitors has learned to take advantage of this problem. We have all sorts of birds come to our feeders — house sparrows, finches,…
-
Beautiful, mesmerizing, educational.
My mom sent me this website a couple of weeks ago. http://hint.fm/wind/index.html It shows the direction and speed of surface winds for the entire country. This screen shot doesn’t do it justice, because on the webpage, the wind lines flow. Beautiful. In addition to being mesmerizing and beautiful, the map is very educational. When you look…
-
Record-demolishing Storm
We have just survived what was probably a 1000 year event in central Colorado – a week of torrential rain that has left the Front Range in a shambles. This isn’t the first time that the Front Range has flooded. In the twentieth century alone, we had four monster floods: Pueblo, 1921; Denver, 1965; Big…
-
Hungry Hummer Can’t Wait
By Wednesday night, we’d had four inches of rain on Green Mountain, and the birds were cold, wet and hungry. The hummingbirds seemed especially desperate, as I suspect that all that rain has diluted the nectar in the flowers. The hummers were haunting our feeders, which I noticed, actually had more liquid in them than…
-
Don’t kill the snake!
Lately, as I go up to check on my Project Budburst site on Apex trail, I have met a lot of people with golf clubs. Since there are no putting greens on the trail, I have to assume that the clubs are brought along for another reason. The only reason I can think of is…
-
High Summer Humidity in Colorado = Thunderstorms
My son, in his first days as a freshman at Colorado State University, overheard some kids from Washington State commenting on how they loved the dry heat. He laughed. Yesterday was one of the most humid we’ve had in a humid-for-Colorado summer. How humid was it? At 4:00, when it is usually about 10-15% humidity,…
-
Let them eat pine nuts
Pine trees use two strategies when it comes to seeds. Ponderosas and many other pines produce cones with a spine or bristle at the end of each pine cone’s scales to keep animals from pilfering the seeds. Their seeds often have paper “wings” to help them float at least a little distance from the parent…
Amy Law, Science Geek 