Category: Colorado Mileposts
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Colorado River Canoe
One of the things that I love about Colorado is that you can drive a few hours in any direction, and be in an entirely different environment. Normally, I spend a lot of time in the high country. But last week my husband and I traveled to Grand Junction, in the western part of Colorado,…
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Alpine Flowers
A couple of years ago, when I was giving presentations for my book (A Natural History of Trail Ridge Road: Rocky Mountain National Park’s Highway to the Sky), a member of the audience asked me where she could find wildflowers in the alpine tundra. I was a little nonplussed, because you can find wildflowers in…
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Pika Patrol, Part One
What do you do when you are forced out of your home? How do you find another place to live, when the sites you need are already full? American Pika, small rodent-like rabbit relatives who live in the alpine tundra of the Rocky Mountains, are facing this problem as warmer temperatures force them ever higher.…
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Hearts in Nature
Many people collect images of hearts in nature. I found this prairie coneflower as I was looking for prairie falcons this morning. (Focus on What’s at Hand) This is what prairie coneflower normally looks like. Prairie coneflower is in the sunflower family. You can see it if you mentally flatten the cone down a…
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Focus on What’s at Hand
It may not have been the best idea for a plant person to volunteer to monitor birds of prey. I mean, sure, I take lots of photos of birds. Some of them are even fair to decent. But mostly, the bird photos kinda happen to me — I’m sitting at the kitchen table and an…
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Hummers in Snowstorm
Here at the base of the Rocky Mountains, we often have late spring snow storms. In fact, these late storms are often some of our biggest and wettest of the year. Today’s snowstorm is no exception. It has been snowing hard all day, and we don’t expect it to let up until tomorrow. Normally in…
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Raven in the backyard
We often have ravens and crows in the neighborhood.Crows and Ravens Angry Bird’s Feathers Ruffled Last night we saw another lone raven in our back yard last night, preening on a post for about five minutes. It eventually flew away. Three minutes later we saw it come screaming back across the yard, mobbed by four crows.…
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Science not Silence
I spent the day protesting at the March for Science rally in downtown Denver to draw attention to the political attacks on science. In doing so, I was privileged to join some incredibly creative, passionate, smart and remarkably funny people. March for Science rally draws thousands . Marchs were held around the country and around the…
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Spectacular Starlings
In 1890 and 1891, about 100 European starlings were released into Central Park, in New York City. Beloved in Europe, they quickly became pests in North America. These aggressive birds often congregate in large flocks that can take over a feeder, leaving a mess behind. They evict native woodpeckers and bluebirds from their nests in…
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Maui: Part Two
When my husband and I weren’t watching whales, we were tooling around the island. At one point, we found some green sea turtles. According to the locals, they’d hauled themselves out on the beach to warm up. One had encountered a shark, the only predator of adult sea turtles besides humans. One of the…
Amy Law, Science Geek 