Category: Colorado Mileposts
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Female Cassin’s Finch Brought a Friend
A female Cassin’s finch showed up at our feeder a couple of weeks ago. (New Bird at The Feeder) Evidently, she liked our offerings so much, she brought a friend back. The bird on the left is obviously a male Cassin’s finch — red head feathers raised in a little crest, eye streak of white, and…
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New Bird at The Feeder
We had a newly identified bird at the feeder yesterday — a female Cassin’s Finch. The reason I say “newly identified bird” is because all these female finches look a lot alike, and when they are flitting about in a flock at the feeder, it’s hard to realize that I’ve got more than my average…
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2022 Pika Patrol, Part Two
My husband and I went up to our second pika site, this one on Halfmoon Creek above Leadville, Colorado, last week, looking for the little rabbit-relatives. If you recall, last year we unexpectedly had to walk an extra six miles to the site and back due to a Forest Service road closure. This year, the…
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2022 Pika Patrol Part 1
Every year, my husband and I look forward to hiking up to the high country to check on the pika that live there, as part of the Colorado Pika Projects‘ monitoring efforts. We’ve been doing it for five years now, but when pressed by friends as to what it is that we enjoy so much,…
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Cooper’s Hawk Snags a Finch
Trigger warning: The small bird died. I was getting ready to start making dinner last night when I saw a shadow swoop over the back porch, low, fast and dark. When I looked up, I saw a squirrel running down the top rail of the fence faster than I have ever seen a squirrel run…
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Patterns in Nature
I started off thinking this post was going to be about the fact that sunflowers make two different kinds of flowers, which I think is really interesting. When we think of sunflowers, we think of the big showy flowers around a central disk. But the disk is made up of flowers, too! And actually, the…
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Hummer migration
You know I love hummingbirds. I love to see them and I love to photograph them. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to watch them, at least. I’ve been getting up just before dawn (5:30 MDT) and can see them at a feeder in the garden. Photographing them has been a little tougher — at that…
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Turkeys in Ponderosa Pine
I haven’t been hiking as much as I’d like to these last few years, what with Covid and all. So today, my husband and I headed out to a trail a few miles from our house west of Denver that I used to hike a lot. We picked a rotten time to resume hiking —…
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Pollinator Week — Butterflies
It’s Pollinator Week! Pollinators are animals that pollinate plants. As my friend TZ at Notes in Nature (https://notes-in-nature.org/2022/06/20/pollinators/) explains, the group includes bats, birds, and bugs of all sort. This includes butterflies. Butterflies are incredible pollinators, visiting flowers of every type, in all sorts of environments. Western Swallowtails are some of the most common butterfly…
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Birds of the Bitter Cold
Temperature records fell throughout the central United States yesterday, as a cold front moved down from Canada. We dropped to -2oF, and we aren’t expected to warm up much before the weekend. We always think of our feathered friends on days like this, so I went out early to clean off the feeders. I had…
Amy Law, Science Geek 