The Field

Yet another aluminum artifact, and a new toy

Cleaned up 2 bags of trash, 1 large item, and removed 5 Russian olive saplings today.  The field didn't seem too dirty, unless the tall grass and weeds are just covering it all.  I found a 23 year old coke can, dated by the writing "Treasure Tops '84" it had in a few places, apparently referring to some such contest.  It hardly surprises me anymore to find trash that's been lying on the ground for greater than 20 years -- the stuff just doesn't go away on its own. 

I also serendipitously found a nearly new 10" folding saw, which proved to be deadly effective against Russian olive saplings.  I cut down one that would have been too big to take by my trusty bend-and-snap method, and it was so much easier that I cut down two more little saplings while I was at it, and it was tempting to stay out and cut the darn things down all night.  But one's arms get tired, hauling trash and cutting tree-weeds, and it was getting dark. 

But I now have the weapon I've been looking for.  So don't fear the reaper, Russian olives.  Just fear me.  Bwa ha ha!

Mt. Audubon

My dad and I went to the Brainard Lake Recreation Area on Saturday, and despite an exceptionally late start, made it more than half the way up Mt. Audubon in the Indian Peaks Wilderness area.  It was beautiful, and we had the trail all to ourselves.  The lateness of the day and rainy weather earlier in the day had probably driven everyone off of the mountian.  The amount of snow on the trail was exceptional.  Drifts taller than me still covered much of the trail, even at the lower elevations.  Actually, that's where most of it was -- it had already melted off of the exposed tundra farther up, but remained in the shade of the forest lower down.  I can look west any time and see that there's still snow on the mountians, but... it was still shocking to see such quantities of it in the middle of June! 

We got a few small drops of rain, but the weather mostly held for us and it wasn't until we were well up on the tundra that I had to don a thin sweatshirt, which kept me warm the rest of the trip.  Unfortunately, we knew the light wouldn't hold out, and had to turn around at 7:00.  This is as high up the mountain as we got, looking up and looking down:

I think this is a limber pine.  These trees were beautiful, with their smooth bark, tufts of needles, and cones all clustered at the top, and they provided a nice contrast with the sub alpine fir and Engleman spruce.

Yucca flowers and beetle sex part 2

Small correction to my previous post... the yucca flowers aren't entirely the same yellow-white cream color -- the stigma is green and the sepals have a faded red color. 

Some of them are horribly infested with aphids, but they're also covered in ladybugs, doing their best to eat them up.  They're also doing their best to make some more troops for the cause!

Along with the adults are (for reasons made obvious by the above pictures) many larval ladybugs, who are also hungry for aphids.

Yucca flowers, cottonwood seeds

The yuccas are blooming.  A little past their prime by now, maybe, but still in bloom.  They normally blend in with all the grassy plants and weeds, but now each individual yucca plant is clearly visible.  In the field they only grow in any numbers on the hill, and in the area of the prairie dog town, which is a little higher than the rest of the field.  Maybe it has something to do with the soil -- could it be too moist in the center of the field? -- or maybe the rest of the field is too weed dominated for them to grow.  They're interesting plants pretty common in this region.  They appear as a rosette of long, stiff leaves with very pointy ends that grow upward and outward, forming a protective hemisphere surrounding a central, woody stalk.  Right now that stalk is covered in flowers, which, like the rest of the plant, are a little unusual.  They're large, succulent flowers that tend to hang downward from the stalk and whose every feature -- petals, pistil, and stamens -- shares a creamy, off-white color.  And a close look reveals that they're ecosystems.  Many are covered in aphids (or some kind of little sap sucking bug anyway) and with these primary consumers I also saw secondary consumers in the form of lady bugs, some of whom were mating.  Come to think of it, I saw a little moth escape from one of the flowers when I held it up for a look -- I wonder if it was one of those moths mentioned in the article!  Later in the summer they'll harden in to brown seed pods, which will split open in the fall, spilling little dark disk-shaped seeds on the ground.

The cottonwoods are already releasing their seeds, and have been for a week or two.  Cottony tufts carry their tiny seeds through the air, and when the wind blows the air is filled with them.  I drove under a tree the other day that was dropping so many sees that it almost looked like it was snowing.  This has always been a whimsical feature of early summer to me.