Category: Colorado Mileposts
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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…
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Colorado Monsoons
The weatherman is calling for thunderstorms tonight, as “monsoon moisture returns to the state.” I always feel weather forecasters are a little presumptuous calling summer moisture in Colorado monsoons. I mean, although we can have the occasional gully-washer, our piddly precip is nothing compared with the six months of torrential rain that most people normally…
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Blue and Black Magpie follows me on the trail
This magpie was my buddy at my BudBurst site on Apex trail in Jefferson County earlier this week. It and two others have been calling back and forth to each other for a couple of weeks, but this time, one of the magpies stayed with me as I made my way up the trail and…
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Gold on the trail! Or not.
The several days of light rains in Apex Canyon have washed a lot of fool’s gold down into the erosion control dams that cross the trail. Those portions of the trail glitter! Fool’s gold has a gold color that fooled many beginning prospectors from the ancient Greeks to the Colorado gold rush. It didn’t help…
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Project BudBurst Begins in Jeffco
Several months ago, I responded to an add in the local papers for volunteers for Jeffco Open Space. At their open house, they had many different options — desk worker, naturalist, trail maintenance. All these were possibilities, but the option I signed up for in the in was that of plant monitor for Project Budburst.…
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Neat feet betray coyote
We had a visitor come through the yard last night. There are three sets of tracks in this picture – my two dogs and either a fox or a coyote. How can I tell that it wasn’t another dog? My dog’s tracks are at the top of the picture. There are a lot of them,…
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More Snow a Good Thing
I know that we’re all tired of snow this spring. But believe it or not, we need one more storm to drop a couple of inches in the high country. Why do we need more snow? Last week’s storm brought 6-16″ of snow — and red dust from a dust storm in Arizona and New…
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It must be spring…
… the turkey vultures are back! As large birds, turkey vultures depend on thermals to work themselves up to as high as 10,000 feet to search for carrion (dead animals). Once aloft, they fly with their wingtips splayed out finger-like for better flight control while soaring. Because they need warm air to lift them, you’ll…
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Yellow flowers brighten November days
Do the grey skies of November have you down? Are you missing the colors of fall’s leaves? Don’t despair. There is one plant that is still blooming after hard frosts have killed everything else – rubber rabbitbrush. Rubber rabbitbrush, a light green shrub about three feet tall, blooms in late fall – September through November.…
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Birds flee drought areas
I have seen more different birds at my feeders than I ever have before in the summer. In addition to the usual house sparrows, house finches, American and lesser goldfinches, mourning and collared doves, house wrens and dramatic raids by Cooper’s hawks, we’ve had white-crowned nuthatches, chickadees, spotted towhees and black-headed grosbeaks – birds that…
Amy Law, Science Geek 