A week in SE Colorado...

I just spent the work week in southeastern Colorado driving around crop fields for our June inspections. We check up on those fields a couple times a year to see if the fields are illegally being irrigated with surface water that is supposed to go to Kansas instead. We had an interesting tour. Not so much the work, but we had several technical difficulties of the computer-kind. I also learned how to replace blown fuses in both the Kansas state truck and the Colorado guy's state truck. You can always rely on fried fuses to lighten the mood between KS and CO water officials. We had a pretty good laugh as we drove around to 4 stores trying find the right fuses. The culprit that blew the fuses was a bad inverter box that my laptop was plugged into. Of course the inverter died when I only had 20 minutes of power left on my laptop. I did get a nice picture of a showy milkweed plant along an irrigation canal and a picture of a deer jumping a fence. Enjoy!

Wildflower Weekend at the Bison Range

Sundrops on the Range

This past weekend I spent Saturday morning helping with wildflower tours at the Bison Range. The Friends of Sandsage Bison Range have this wildflower tour event every other year, so this was my first year participating. Despite the dry prairie conditions, I think we had a great time. It's amazing that just a week or two before the prairie was teeming with amazing wildflowers and now their gone.

Some of the plants we managed to find include spiderwort, sand lily, prickly poppy, purple poppy mallow, tall velvet gaura, purple prairie clover, sun drops, white aster, sand snowball verbena, buffalo gourd, sunflower, wild four o'clock, prickly pear cactus, pink barrel cactus (without flowers unfortunately), and a few others. I was excited because we saw 2 ornate box turtles, burrowing owls, a 6+ foot bull snake (who didn't appreciate being cornered under a sagebrush by a certain tour guide named Chelsea), 3 adult male turkeys, pheasants, quail, and of course bison. We had the whole herd walk by the tour trailer, and one of the cows had a cow when she couldn't find her calf who was on the other side of the trailer. I've never heard a bison grunt that much before! Oh, someone also found an intact snake skeleton! Too cool!

Then on Sunday I gave another tour to a youth church group from Kansas City. I think several of the teenage passengers were quite horrified when I found a dead turtle with the head and feet still attached. It's a really nice specimen and completely intact, so I had them pass it around to look at. For kids who live in Kansas City and wear flip flops to the prairie, it was probably pretty gross. I decided not to pass around the bison "meadow muffin" lest anyone jump out of the trailer trying to avoid it. Hopefully they will share those one-of-a-kind experiences with their friends and family and spread the appreciation for our native prairies!

Visited by a (sphinx) moth...

The evening of June 6th I was watering my flower garden and I took some cool pictures of a couple big moths feeding on my flowers. In the close-up picture you can see the moth's long, brown tongue sticking out! A couple of these moths were flitting around like hummingbirds, so you are seeing action shots here. I didn't even know the moths had red and black on their wings until I looked at the pictures!

*Update* I checked my insect book and the moth is called a striped hawkmoth, or also a whitelined sphinx moth. Its common in North America.

An Evening on the Sandsage Bison Range

Nothing says "summertime" quite like grilled buffalo burgers and a sunset tour of the sandsage prairie. On Sunday June 1st I joined my fellow Bison Range tour guides and board of directors for a relaxing evening of burgers and bison watching. Our expert griller was Tom Norman, the Wildlife and Parks manager of the Bison Range. While we enjoyed the meal we were serenaded by several species of songbirds. As it turns out, we were sitting right under a finch nest. The agitated bird-parents sat on a nearby telephone wire plotting our demise while we merrily enjoyed the good food and good company.

After supper the group loaded up on the tour trailer and took a 2-hour spin around the Bison Range. I was so excited because for the first time I saw pink barrel cactus, seen in the picture above along with a yellow-colored Englemann's daisy. I also photographed rusty lupine, which is a purple-flowered native plant that is only found in one spot on the Range.

Then for the first time this year I saw the whole bison herd together with all the babies. The current count is 32 calves. Too cute! We also saw pheasant, jack rabbit, cottontail rabbit, 10 mule deer, and 5 ornate box turtles! At dusk we also saw burrowing owls swooping in and out of the bison herd. The owls were after the grasshoppers that the bison were kicking up as they walked. Overall it was a wonderful evening and an experience I hope to share with many guests who come to see the Sandsage Bison Range!