Author: Amy Law
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World of Spun Glass
After a heavy fog all day yesterday, we woke up this morning to a world seemingly made of spun glass. Overnight the temperature had slowly cooled everything outside to well below freezing. As the water-saturated air hit the freezing surfaces, it froze to them. Drop by microscopic drop, the water in the fog built up…
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Muskrat Love
I was walking along the wetland recently, looking for beaver, or better yet, mink, that a friend of mine had spotted. My efforts were pretty half-hearted — it was ten in the morning — long after any self-respecting beaver would be denned up. But I was having a difficult day, and needed a distraction. And…
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Banded Garden Spider
Trigger Alert: We’re talking about spiders in this post. Pictures, too. But it is a very gentle spider. The spider in question is a banded garden spider in our raspberry patch. It showed up in late July (unfortunately, my camera card with those photos on it became corrupted), and my husband and I have been…
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2024 Pika Patrol, Part 2
After our pika hike south of Berthoud Pass last month, my husband and I did our second pika site for the Denver Zoo’s Pika Project last week, climbing up Halfmoon Creek on the southwest side of Mount Massive. We went up to the site a day early because rain, and at the higher altitudes, snow…
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2024 Pika Patrol
If it’s fall, it must be time to look for pika! As always, we are going out as part of the Colorado Pika Project, a Citizen Science project monitoring pika throughout the Colorado mountains. This is the meadow (11,598 feet) where we start our search for pika. They live in the rocks directly in front…
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Happy Dog Day!
From all of my dogs, past and present, to all of yours! Sasha Kurama Darwin Tegan and Zoe
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Sleeping Bees
Several years ago, I saw a charming photograph of two tiny bees curled up together, asleep, in a flower. Ever since then, I have been on a quest to photograph sleeping bees myself. (https://amylawscigeek.com/2021/08/08/sleeping-bees/) I’m not very good at identifying bees, but I think this is a honey bee. The reason I hesitate is because…
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Angry Cooper’s Hawk
My husband and I were working in the yard yesterday and heard what we thought was Northern flicker calling as it flew overhead. Reflexively glancing up to see the bird, I was startled to see not a flicker, but a hawk or very large falcon slicing through the sky, crying as it did so. Whipping…
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Ladybugs emerge
The East Coast has been inundated with two broods of cicadas. At my house, on the other hand, we’ve had an emergence of ladybugs. Ladybug larva are not among the prettiest creatures of the earth. At least one expert compared them to tiny alligators — grey with rough skin. But the larva gobble up soft-bodied…
Amy Law, Science Geek 