I’m a rancher who raises cattle. I believe cattle “mutilations” are natural decomposition. And I have evidence – take a look. “Cattle mutilation” is a term applied to what has been presumed to be unnatural death of cattle with characteristic coring of udder, rectum, lips, and eyes, along with absence of noticeable blood. Some owners …
With the decline in bees, the pollinating insects we’re less familiar with become even more important. The hummingbird moth is so named because it hovers like a hummingbird, wings whirring, while it sips nectar and flits from flower to flower. During this May’s blooming of golden currant bushes in eastern Colorado, there’s an unusual group …
It’s tree-ordering time again (January 7, 2024) in areas east of Pikes Peak served by the Double El Conservation District, so I’m updating this article. I began planting windbreaks here in 1996 and have planted thousands of seedlings and young trees of numerous varieties since then. Maybe half of those, if that, still remain. This …
What do you do when your tadpoles don’t mature? Follow my journey through relocations and searches for just the right food to send my farm tadpoles onto their journey to maturity. Colorado’s high-elevation semi-arid shortgrass prairie east of the Front Range is home to ranchland dotted with shallow seasonal clay-lined “stock ponds” that hold water for a …
Have you experienced night? Not the manmade artifice of twinkling lights and traffic sounds that passes for night when the sun is on the other side of the earth. That is Experience, but that is not Night. I’m talking about the stillness of a night walk across a field in January. Moon not yet risen, …
The May/June 2008 Garden Gate magazine, issue 81, contained an article by Associate Editor Jim Childs, called “Woody Weeds, 9 pests you need to identify and get rid of now!” It was an interesting and informative article – but it doesn’t apply here in eastern Colorado. Having few naturally occurring trees in eastern Colorado, I …
August 20, 2002 Silence. Sometimes there is no sound at all. The loudest sound is the blood coursing through my ears. I have experienced that in three places. In the mountains after a rain shower was the first. It seemed incredible that in all that vastness of forest, nothing stirred. No animal made a sound. …
Back in the 1990s, we regularly got summer afternoon thunderstorms. Round about June, the weather was sufficiently warm that after an afternoon downpour, the prairie (plains) spadefoot toads – and maybe an additional variety or two – would emerge from their underground torpor to make the trip downhill to the seasonal stock pond for a …
What is this? It looks like a tiny clam. But it’s in a temporary stock pond in shortgrass prairie. One little mollusk is lying quietly in the upper left portion of the video by 3-4 seconds in. Two or three others swim through. Where did these come from, and where did they go? This is …
Life in The Other Colorado. What’s out here? Flat but slightly rolling semi-arid shortgrass prairie land, populated with more beef cattle than people. I grew up back east, among rolling hills forested with a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees, thick with an understory of shrubbery that provided plenty of nesting for many varieties of …