Category: Colorado Mileposts
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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…
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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…
Amy Law, Science Geek 