Tag: natural history
-
Eyelashes and Hummingbird Tongues
I learned some new things about hummingbirds this week. First, I learned that for years now, I have had two types of hummingbirds coming to my feeders. I knew that I had broad-tailed hummers — they are the most common hummingbirds in the Western US. With a flashy red throat “gorget” and a metallic ringing…
-
Great Wildflower, Part 2
From our great spring crop of blooms, (http://coloradogeography.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/get-out/) this continues to be an outstanding season for wildflowers. Every time we begin to dry out, we get a rainstorm that waters the plants. And the flowers just keep comin’. According to the USDA Plants Profile webpage, http://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=MOFI&photoID=mofi_004_ahp.tif you can find pink bergamot all over North America.…
-
Mathematical Patterns in Plants
One of the things that I really enjoy about nature is that it produces proofs that it obeys natural laws in the most unusual — and beautiful — ways. This spring and early summer I ran across three examples of math in plants. Scorpianweed, like most plants in the hydrophyllaceae family, has a flower stalk…
-
Spotted Towhee
I love to wake up to the sound of birds singing. The “twup tewerp” of robins, the trills of house finches, the hyena-like call of Northern flickers. But in the past few years, I’ve started to hear a new sound in the mornings: “Cha cha cha che e e e ! Cha cha cha che…
-
Cornices
My brother and I took a quick trip up to the top of Berthoud Pass to take some photographs of snow cornices earlier this week. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a cornice is “the decorative top edge of a building or column”. A secondary definition, though, is “an overhanging mass of windblown snow or ice usually…
-
Miniature Upslope Storm
My husband and I took a quick trip to the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado last week to see the largest migration left in North America — The Sandhill Cranes! Up to 20,000 Cranes and 20,000 other ducks, geese, coots, plovers and any other type of waterbird that you can imagine migrate through the…
-
Backyard Deer
For the past several years, we have had small herds of deer living in our neighborhood on the west edge of the Denver Metro Area. They have been getting bolder, coming into our backyard at night. Several days ago, they even came to snitch food from the bird feeders before it was fully dark. My…
-
Birds have just moved a bit
Earlier this winter, I wrote a blog about how we had had seen a dramatic decline in the number of birds we see at our feeder. (http://coloradogeography.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/where-have-all-the-birds-gone/) When I emailed Hugh Kingery, of the Audubon Society of Greater Denver, he said that a lot of people had been mentioning the same lack of birds. People…
-
Mourning Doves bullied by newcomer Eurasian Collared Doves
There was a good article in the Denver Post this morning on how Eurasian Collared Doves have moved into every county in Colorado. http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25219440/invasive-doves-colonize-colorado-and-overshadow-good-doves Although they make a nasal honking sound, Collared Doves are beautiful birds. The problem is that they seem to be competing with native Mourning Doves. (By the way, in Natural Resources/Ecology…
Amy Law, Science Geek 