Tag: nature
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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…
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Great Horned Owls Laying Eggs
I got up to let the dogs out around 4:00 this morning. While I was standing at the door waiting for them to finish, I heard Great Horned Owls hooting back and forth. Great Horned Owls are laying their eggs now so their young will have hatched by the time prey like rabbits and mice…
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Cold Weather Birds
We woke up to 12o F (-11o C) in central Colorado — we have yet to have a significant snowfall in the foothills west of Denver. It’s been a little odd to see so many different types of winter birds coming to the feeder without snow. But they are coming! House sparrows. House sparrows were…
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Painted Ladies Part Two
After seeing thousands of painted lady butterflies a couple of weeks ago, I thought they were done for the season.Painted Ladies migrate across North America! Wrong! There are still so many migrating through the Denver area, that, when they fly a bit higher, they are visible on radar! How cool is that?
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Alpine Flowers
A couple of years ago, when I was giving presentations for my book (A Natural History of Trail Ridge Road: Rocky Mountain National Park’s Highway to the Sky), a member of the audience asked me where she could find wildflowers in the alpine tundra. I was a little nonplussed, because you can find wildflowers in…
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Sharp-shinned hawk misses flicker for lunch
The gregarious band of little bushtits took off in a burst of feathers and cheeping alarm calls. I looked up just in time to see a Northern flicker shoot out of the top of a tree, with a sharp-shinned hawk in hot pursuit. Luckily for the flicker, the hawk had made its move too soon,…
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Rocky Weekend
My husband and I spent last weekend in Rocky Mountain National Park. We took a hike up North Moraine, along the Ypsilon Lake Trail. About a mile up, I stopped to photograph this good looking male hairy woodpecker. I was really glad to find him. I had always wondered if I was correctly identifying the…
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Aspen on Mt. Evans
We love our quaking aspen in Colorado, and never more than at this time of year. They are turning now, and they won’t last long. I took a drive up to Evergreen last week and found a little meadow ringed with quakies, some of which hadn’t turned yet. Aspen are in the cottonwood family. You…
Amy Law, Science Geek 