Category: Colorado Mileposts
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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…
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My Bad … It’s a Northern Shrike After All
Last night we got a wonderful photo of a shrike. In my excitement about identifying it, I got the website windows mixed up. Upon further review, this is a Northern Shrike, not a Logger head. https://amylawscigeek.com/2022/01/26/loggerhead-shrike/ So what’s the difference? Well, everything I claimed in my previous post was for a Loggerhead is really for…
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Loggerhead — OOOPS — Northern Shrike
Author’s Note — after writing this post last night, I realized that I got the two browser windows confused, and wrongly identified the bird we saw as a Loggerhead, when it was actually a Northern Shrike. I have struck out the wrong name where appropriate. My next post compares the two birds. (https://amylawscigeek.com/2022/01/27/my-bad-its-a-northern-shrike-after-all/) Like so…
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Owl Serenade
My husband nudged me awake last night at 3:30. “Did you hear that?” My sleep groggy brain struggled to consciousness. “What? A bugler? The fire alarm? Incoming missiles?” “No…there!” And I heard it: “Whoo HOO hoo oo! Whoo HOO hoo oo!” And the response in a different tone, from a slightly different direction: “Whoo HOO…
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Snow Pack Improves During December 2021
The good news at the end of a year otherwise filled with less than inspiring events is that the snow pack across the West has improved dramatically in the month of December. If you have been following my blog for a long time, you might have noticed my obsession with snow pack. Snow pack is…
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Snow, finally?
A much anticipated storm brought snow to the Denver area today. It remains to be seen whether or not it will produce the one half inch required at Denver International Airport to be recorded as our official first snow of the season. But here is the storm track anticipated by the National Weather Service: REALLY???!!!…
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2021 Pika Patrol, Part 1
It’s August, and so it is time for Pika Patrol! Every year, as part of the Denver Zoo’s Pika Project, my husband and I hike up to a couple of places in the tundra to see how the pika are doing. But before we go any further, I need to refer you to an article…
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Welcome to AmyLawSciGeek.com!
Thank you so much for joining me at my new blog location on my new website! I started this blog over ten years ago, with the intention of talking about nature in Colorado. While that will be my ongoing default, I’ve found that there are a lot of other areas of interest that I want…
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Sleeping Bees
While I was out rummaging in the garden several mornings ago, I made a surprising discovery: I found a bee asleep in one of my hollyhock blossoms. You’ll have to take my word for it, I suppose. But you can kinda tell by the way she is deep inside the flower, and yet not gathering…
Amy Law, Science Geek 