Tag Archives: Pasque flowers

Fire In The Meadow

Posted on by

2016-03-29FireInTheMeadow4214

There is a special meadow near a village called Red Feather high in the Rocky mountains of Northern Colorado where magical things happen. If you sit still and watch you may see a coyote slowly hunt across it’s grass-covered surface, pausing here with cocked head to listen, leaping there if it hears a mouse scamper through the new grass. Or see a Red-tailed hawk glide majestically out of the surrounding timber to splash its shadow across the land below as it too looks for it’s next meal.

Hummingbirds flit from flower to flower sipping the nectar from the new blooms and helping to pollenate the plants in this untamed garden. Before long the grass will be knee-high and cover the shorter blooms leaving you to discover them as you walk slowly through the dew covered stalks early in the morning.

There is an old fence line that divides the meadow into unequal portions, meaningful to  the humans who like to section things off and say that’s mine, but meaningless to the life that occupies or uses the ground on either side of the old rusty wire. Silent things that grow and stand tall and wave in the fresh breezes that occasionally wend their way down from the Never Summer mountains, their color dotting the meadowland like jewels left to catch the sun.

Now that the last of winter’s snow is making up its mind whether it will melt or not the earliest of the spring flowers are starting.  The Lenten Rose and Pasque flowers are peeking out beneath the snow close to Easter. Winter Aconite and the Common Snowdrop are breaching through the snow-covered meadow displaying their blooms, plus a favorite of all who see it, the Wyoming Indian Paint brush is beginning to appear. That pyrotechnical colored perennial that migrated down from the open plains of Wyoming and Montana to gently settle here and become a favorite native in this high meadow. It’s red and orange and yellows the exact colors of newly lit campfires. Scattered throughout the tall grass these brilliant flowers give the appearance of fire in the meadow with their brightly colored heads waving in the wind.

Spring is here, even though we just had a blizzard that produced a couple of feet of snow. The snow is nearly melted already and leaves in its wake what the locals call Mud Season, those several weeks of melting snow and saturated ground and mud everywhere. That’s spring in the high country. Enjoy it while you can. And while you’re at it go see the fire in the meadow. That’ll make you feel good.

And thanks to those gentle stewards of the land, Jack and Peggy, for the opportunity to photograph there. Enjoy your special place.

Spring Portraits

Posted on by

2016-03-28SpringPortraits2183

March is “When The Bluebirds Get Here” month. So is February. And sometimes April if the weather has been particularly bad, but this year the month is March.

In the past we had to rely on natural migration schedules to get our quotas of Western Bluebirds. They can be in short supply due to their being the most popular of the bluebird species, and they have often been coerced into going to other states by handouts of Bluebird chow, favorable nesting sites and one state who shall remain nameless but their initials are Utah, tried to make it their state bird, thereby gathering some legal advantage of some sort. In the past we have had to offer some of our sister states to the West a premium of two Stellar Jays and a Clark’s Nutcracker to get one Western Bluebird.

As you know The institute has its own Ornithology department with trained and highly intelligent bird guys (and girls) studying birds, bird books, bird seed, bird brains, and lately bird genetics. That’s the big one. That’s the one that is going to put us on the map bird-wise. Genetics is the new thing. It’s like plastic was in the 60’s. Huge.

They found that they can yank the DNA right out of a bird, futz around with it, and stuff it back in and make big changes to how a bird works. Our problem had been that bluebirds don’t like the cold so as soon as the temp drops much below 60 degrees they haul their little feathered keesters south for the winter. That’s the problem. While they’re down there they can be swayed by any one of those unscrupulous Orno guys from other states and we lose our stock of bluebirds.

The problem was birds head south, then we lose them. Solution, and this is where genius comes into play, is we took that bluebird DNA and added a whole bunch of genetic stuff to it before we repacked it back into the bluebirds. For instance we added the anti-freeze gene to it so now our bluebirds are good down to about -126 degrees, we added a fixed route from anywhere South directly to The Institutes front door to their GPS gene, we added the Horsepucky detector gene so that they can tell when they’re being conned by those guys from Utah, and lastly we added an extra amount of Bluebird blue to their blue color gene so we now have the brightest Western bluebirds in the northern hemisphere.

Their was one more big change we are experimenting with and this is the first spring to see how our experiment worked out. We added an extra gene to the Anti-freeze gene to make a small number of bluebirds hibernational. Hibernational is a term we just made up here in our Ornithology department that means these particular bluebirds can lower their body temperatures down to the approximate temperature of one of those Big Gulp Slurpee’s you get at 7-11 and then be buried in neat rows in the snow over the winter to be ready to emerge at the first sign of Spring.

When the snow melts as it does every spring the snow bound bluebirds slowly awaken as they respond to the sun’s rays on their little beaks, and they pop up through the snow like Pasque flowers and start hanging around, getting an early start on Spring. It gives them at least a two-week head start on those Utah bluebirds so they are already hooked up with a bluebird chick, found a good nesting box, etc. and our supply of Western Bluebirds is guaranteed. Their GPS gene tells them they’re already here so they don’t take off and go cruising somewhere else so we got them locked. Our own inbred species of Western Bluebirds. Neat Right? Science is really cool.

We are photographing each of our newly altered bluebirds and tattooing an ID number on the underside of their tongues so that we can better keep track of them. Here is the first reconstituted Western Bluebird to emerge from its snow bunker. He seems in fine shape. We’ll let you know how he does in the reproduction department as the data come in. So far it looks great.