Tag: winter
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Aurora Borealis at -35o
Up until now I have posted my own photographs on this blog, with very few exceptions. But my brother and his wife went to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, earlier this month to see the Aurora boriealis displays. The photos they brought back were stunning. Auroras are created when the sun burps plasma full of charged…
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Upslope Storm
We’re having a classic wet, sloppy, snowy spring storm today. It started last night and is expected to continue through tomorrow. So far, we’ve gotten about 9 inches of very wet snow, with about the same amount expected through today. This is called an “upslope storm” because winds circling around a low pressure in the…
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Another Storm
Welcome to another storm. The thermometer reads 9o as the snow falls. Again. I have lost count of how many fronts we’ve had pass through, dropping temperatures into the single digits and dumping a bunch of snow. I won’t turn down the moisture, but it is getting a little bit tedious to be hovering just…
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Spring is Coming — Promise
It has been a long cold hard winter along the Front Range of Colorado. We have gotten enough snow in February to wipe out the incipient drought we were headed into, which is a good thing. But it came at the cost of a snowstorm every couple of days. That was hard. We’re not out…
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Windy Days
We’ve had some windy days lately. Two days ago (October 20, 2019) we had gusts up to 40 mph (miles per hour) — it was hard to walk in that wind! As we battled the blustery weather while walking the dogs, I happened to look to the west, where I saw lens-shaped clouds hovering over…
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This Winter’s Weather Patterns
I’ve been obsessing for the last couple of posts about how dry we’ve been this winter. This image from the NOAA GOES satellite says it all: The blue is storm clouds — Winter Storm Quinn, to be exact, that dumped feet of snow on the Sierra Nevada. It hit the Colorado border and turned north…
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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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Not reindeer, but…
We had a small herd of deer come into our yard this week. We’ve had deer in the neighbor’s yards before (Backyard Deer), but with our dogs, this is the first time in years that they’ve come into ours. The recent cold weather has kept the snow from recent storms on the ground longer than…
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Spring is coming. Really.
If we can just hold on a little longer, spring is coming. How do I know? Robins, dark-eyed juncos and rufus-sided towhees are back at the feeders. Also, as I was walking into to library this morning, I heard a crow making a weird ringing “B’Dong! B’Dong! B’Dong! B’Dong!” call. It drew a crowd as…
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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,…
Amy Law, Science Geek 