Tag: natural history
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Snow-eaters melt the snow
Where did all the snow go? Last week at this time, the Front Range was entirely blanketed in several inches of the white stuff. Today, it’s almost gone. Where did it go? The Answer: Chinooks. Chinooks are warm dry winds. They get their name from a Pacific Northwest Indian word for “snow eater,” because when…
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Where have all the birds gone?
Look at this picture. Look at it closely. Count the number of birds in it. How many did you find? If you counted zero, nada, zilch, you are not alone. Since before Thanksgiving, I have seen very few birds at our feeders. In an email to Hugh Kingery, of the Audubon Society of Greater Denver,…
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Angry bird’s feathers ruffled.
We had an angry young raven visit the backyard earlier this week. I don’t know what had annoyed it so much, but it was not happy. Actually, I suspect that the bird had just been put in its place by another raven that was perched in another tree a few houses down from ours. Crows…
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Thanksgiving Dinner
There are two animals in this picture. Can you find them? The first is relatively obvious. The second may take some searching. There are two creatures in this tree. Can you find them both? I took this photo on Thanksgiving Day. I noticed the hawk in the tree as we were getting our own dinner…
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Some loose, some win.
This is the time of year when the sun gets low in the horizon. The change in light must make our windows appear clear to birds visiting our feeders. One of the visitors has learned to take advantage of this problem. We have all sorts of birds come to our feeders — house sparrows, finches,…
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Beautiful, mesmerizing, educational.
My mom sent me this website a couple of weeks ago. http://hint.fm/wind/index.html It shows the direction and speed of surface winds for the entire country. This screen shot doesn’t do it justice, because on the webpage, the wind lines flow. Beautiful. In addition to being mesmerizing and beautiful, the map is very educational. When you look…
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Hungry Hummer Can’t Wait
By Wednesday night, we’d had four inches of rain on Green Mountain, and the birds were cold, wet and hungry. The hummingbirds seemed especially desperate, as I suspect that all that rain has diluted the nectar in the flowers. The hummers were haunting our feeders, which I noticed, actually had more liquid in them than…
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High Summer Humidity in Colorado = Thunderstorms
My son, in his first days as a freshman at Colorado State University, overheard some kids from Washington State commenting on how they loved the dry heat. He laughed. Yesterday was one of the most humid we’ve had in a humid-for-Colorado summer. How humid was it? At 4:00, when it is usually about 10-15% humidity,…
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Colorado Monsoons
The weatherman is calling for thunderstorms tonight, as “monsoon moisture returns to the state.” I always feel weather forecasters are a little presumptuous calling summer moisture in Colorado monsoons. I mean, although we can have the occasional gully-washer, our piddly precip is nothing compared with the six months of torrential rain that most people normally…
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Blue and Black Magpie follows me on the trail
This magpie was my buddy at my BudBurst site on Apex trail in Jefferson County earlier this week. It and two others have been calling back and forth to each other for a couple of weeks, but this time, one of the magpies stayed with me as I made my way up the trail and…
Amy Law, Science Geek 