Tag: nature
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Bald Eagle Egg #1, Day 1
The Bald Eagles at the St. Vrain Power Plant in Platteville, Colorado laid their first egg of the season sometime last night or early this morning. When I checked in on them around 10:00 this morning, one of the eagles was sitting in the depression they had carefully created in the nest.https://amylaw.blog/2019/02/10/eagle-cam/ I wasn’t sure…
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Library Goose
I love going to the library! You get the entire world at your fingertips — fiction, science, art, music, geese. Yes, geese were at the library this morning. Colorado has become a wintering stop for vast numbers of Canada geese, who earn their keep by turning dead grass on lawns into organic fertilizer. But this…
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Red-Tailed Hawk
As I pulled into my driveway this afternoon, I spotted a red-tailed hawk about 20 feet up in a cottonwood across the street. I think this bird is a female, based on her size — female raptors are bigger than males. And she is big. I’ve seen her several times in the neighborhood, usually being…
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Butterflies Galore
I’m not really an expert on butterflies. But while hiking recently in the Front Range foothills , I saw so many of such varied species that I had to check into them a bit more. All these different butterflies are from just one hike. Females lay single eggs near violets. Caterpillars do not feed, but…
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Goldfinches at lunch
Much of Apex trail follows Apex Creek, and so it has lots of stream side plants growing along it. But as I was going back down the trail, I came to an open area. I looked up slope and saw a family of Lesser Goldfinches perched on top of some Canada thistle seed heads. While…
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Hummingbird wants that flower…
Some days everything, including my camera, just clicks. Yesterday was one of those days. This female Broad-tailed Hummingbird tries to get nectar from American vetch. But she can’t quite get her beak into the drooping flowers. Animals don’t usually sit still and work this hard to get something. It just makes them too much…
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“…Active Rattlesnake Incident…”
I was just finishing up my hike when I heard a woman scream. As a good citizen, I went back to check that everything was okay (or not). The woman was standing on the concrete path, with her two dogs. Five feet further on, a rattlesnake was stretched halfway across the concrete. The woman and…
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Need a break from the heat
Denver hit an all time high temperature of 105o F (40.5o C) on Thursday. Fires rage throughout the West. Politics are just as heated. I need a break from the heat. Although I couldn’t get to the high country recently, I still have some good photographs from my trip up to tundra last month. These…
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A Little Housekeeping…
My husband and I were in the back yard recently, and saw our resident black-capped chickadee family checking out a gourd bird house we put out for them. First, they enlarged the opening a touch. Then mama chickadee checked out the inside. She brought some bedding in to see how it worked with the decor.…
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Hawk Nest Monitoring Begins
As many of you know, I volunteer for the Jefferson County Open Space along the Front Range of Colorado. Last year, I worked on a new-to-me program, hawk nest monitoring. The nest I watched last year seems to have been abandoned, so I moved to a new spot this year, watching Red-Tailed Hawks. So far…
Amy Law, Science Geek 