Tag: nature
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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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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Don’t kill the snake!
Lately, as I go up to check on my Project Budburst site on Apex trail, I have met a lot of people with golf clubs. Since there are no putting greens on the trail, I have to assume that the clubs are brought along for another reason. The only reason I can think of is…
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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,…
Amy Law, Science Geek 