Category: Colorado Mileposts
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Need a break from the heat
Denver hit an all time high temperature of 105o F (40.5o C) on Thursday. Fires rage throughout the West. Politics are just as heated. I need a break from the heat. Although I couldn’t get to the high country recently, I still have some good photographs from my trip up to tundra last month. These…
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Snow pack. Or Not.
In mountains where snow builds up — any snowy mountains — there is a unique form of water storage. It is the snow itself, and it is called snow pack. Here in Colorado, we rely on the delayed release of water from snow pack melt to slowly recharge the resevoirs into early summer. Above is…
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Nest watch
Yesterday I went out to the Red-tailed Hawk nest that I’ve been watching. Here’s what I saw: As I arrived, I saw the flash of orange of a Bullock’s oriole. These showy birds live in the mountain shrub community of the foothills. Always a pleasure to see them. Several Killdeer live in the marshy…
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A Little Housekeeping…
My husband and I were in the back yard recently, and saw our resident black-capped chickadee family checking out a gourd bird house we put out for them. First, they enlarged the opening a touch. Then mama chickadee checked out the inside. She brought some bedding in to see how it worked with the decor.…
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Hawk Nest Monitoring Begins
As many of you know, I volunteer for the Jefferson County Open Space along the Front Range of Colorado. Last year, I worked on a new-to-me program, hawk nest monitoring. The nest I watched last year seems to have been abandoned, so I moved to a new spot this year, watching Red-Tailed Hawks. So far…
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Great Horned Owls Laying Eggs
I got up to let the dogs out around 4:00 this morning. While I was standing at the door waiting for them to finish, I heard Great Horned Owls hooting back and forth. Great Horned Owls are laying their eggs now so their young will have hatched by the time prey like rabbits and mice…
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This Winter’s Weather Patterns
I’ve been obsessing for the last couple of posts about how dry we’ve been this winter. This image from the NOAA GOES satellite says it all: The blue is storm clouds — Winter Storm Quinn, to be exact, that dumped feet of snow on the Sierra Nevada. It hit the Colorado border and turned north…
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Spring Knocking at the Door
They may be having bomb cyclones in the East.winter storm riley. They may be getting feet of snow in the West. Winter Storm Quinn Pounding the West But in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, for better or for worse, Spring is knocking at the door. How do I know that Spring is on…
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Snowpack Levels Low
Many people don’t realize that the western part of the United States is generally arid to semi-arid. The Pacific Northwest gets biblical amounts of rain, of course, because of the coastal mountain ranges wring the water out of the wet air. Every range of mountains east of the coast catches the ever drier air, and…
Amy Law, Science Geek 