Tag: Colorado
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New and Improved Website
Welcome to my new and improved website! My old one was beginning to look like one of those old farmhouses that just having rooms tacked on, so I decided to update the whole thing. A big shout-out to Jessica of Sutol Designs who set up the new site and made it all work! For those…
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Coopers or Sharp-shinned? You be the judge…
After my missed photographs several weeks ago, I have been carrying my camera with me when we go out for walks. Today, my efforts were rewarded. Just a block away from our earlier sighting, my husband spotted this Cooper’s/Sharp-shinned hawk coming in to land as we approached the tree. This neighborhood has had a pair…
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Coopers Hawks are back in town
We took the dogs on our normal walk today, and we saw this … If I had brought my camera along, as I had been recently, I could have gotten a shot of a second, smaller Coopers in the tree above. Moral of the story? Never leave home without a telephoto lens in springtime.
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Blue Herons Fishing
I went for a walk with my best friend over the weekend. We chose to go around a local reservoir. Being mid spring, the powers that be have drained the reservoir before it refills with snow melt from the mountains, so the levels are very low. Less water but the same number of fish means…
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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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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 — Bees
One of the pollinators we are most familiar with are bees. I love to take pictures of these gals — no idea why. But they have given me some of my very best photos. Bees are special among insects because they are covered in hairs. The hairs pick up pollen for them. Bees go from…
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Red-tailed Hawk Gets Mobbed
We have had a lot of red-tailed hawks in our back yard this spring. I saw another one yesterday. Of course I grabbed my camera and started shooting. This guy was in the Russian Olive, looking back at something behind him. Then I pulled back on the lens a little and saw that he was…
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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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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…