Miscellaneous Wanderings and Maunderings
Miscellaneous Wanderings and Maunderings
I wrote previously about watching Blackfly larvae in a feeder creek of the Dolores River. While I was on this trip, I also saw a strange Caddisfly larva cemented to the rocks in areas of fast current. The larvae had…
We’ve been having an extended heatwave over the last couple of weeks (mid-June 2021), so I decided to head up to a creek in the San Juan Mountains to cool off. The creek was beautiful, flowing with clear, cold water.…
Here’s a neat thing we found on our hike into the San Juan Mountains this morning (Mid June, 2021). It’s a Quaking Aspen leaf that looks as though someone has been doodling on the leaf with a pen. That “doodling”…
A couple of days ago, my wife and I were getting ready to roam the Sagebrush Desert. While she was saddling her horse, I went to check on one of my favorite local ant nests. This one was a beautiful…
“You know,” my Wife said one morning, “Since you seem to have this gall-fixation thing going right now, you might want to look at the Sagebrush over by the horse corrals. The Sagebrush are absolutely covered in these strange galls…
In September of 2002, I was walking along a trail in Gardner Canyon, in Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains. I noticed a 4-5′ high shrub on the side of the trail. It looked like some type of scrub oak, or Emory…
When I was out at Sage Hen (Montezuma County, Colorado, roughly 6300′) a couple days ago, I was admiring the blooms on the Serviceberry bushes (Amelanchier sp). They’re quite spectacular right now. Then I noticed some funny red tabs on…
Ah, these are such marvelous ants. They are large, aware, alert, and relatively friendly to people. This one is posing in front of her nest entrance. They always seemed to have these relatively enormous nest entrances.
As I was hiking in Butler Wash, on the east side of Comb Ridge, Utah, I came across some striking, fluffy leaf-balls on a few of the Sagebrush (Artemesia tridentata?). The leaf-balls were soft, almost like one of those “office…
I was walking through one of the city parks in Cortez, Colorado a couple of days ago and came across what looked like a black, shiny liquid that had been poured onto the edge of the sidewalk. Looking a little…