Last week in IPM: Wednesday and Thursday

Wednesday: Muckraking. We raked muck muck out of a tepid tributary to Boulder Creek. We we there to pull Eurasian watermill foil from the little creek, but we couldn't see the bottom for all the algae floating on top. So, we raked it out. It was a pretty swampy creek, but the dragonflies were cool. There were electric blue dragonflies, many of them mating and laying their eggs. One pair, firmly attached to each other, flew down and landed on a floating blade of grass, and, for a moment, they became a sail boat. With a grass blade hull and dragonfly wing sails, their eight resting wings caught a wisp of air and propelled them a few inches before they decided this was not a good place to deposit the eggs and flew off. There were also dragonflies with striped wings and some with white bodies and black wings, which were my favorite. I saw a garter snake that had wrapped itself around the upper branches of a rose bush. I got through the day without getting hit in the face with a flying glob of algae, so it can't have been a very bad day.

Thursday: We hiked the Cowdrey Draw trail to treat scotch thistle near Marshal lake. I thought I would be miserable today, because it was a tiring week, but the morning was so beautiful and I was in my element. Khaki hills with a mountain backdrop. This setting says to me "Home!" Far from tired, I felt great all morning. Upon clipping certain scotch thistle plants at their base, we were surprised to find a sudden profusion of half-inch long, black beetles go scurrying and burrowing for cover.  A few plants had 50-100 of these beetles congregated underneath them, apparently for shade... or something.

For lunch we went to the intersection of Highway 93 and Eldorado Springs Dr., where there's a gas station/cafe and an office building. Not open space, but very near open space, and we don't want those scotch thistle seeds blowing onto our open spaces, so we offered to do some weeding for them. Lunch was nice, with an iced soy chai latte from the cafe, but then it was 2:00 and 95 degrees F, and we were working on a steep hill between the highway and the parking lot, where it was more like 105. It was so, so hot, like a constant blast of heat. It hurt my eyes. It was like working in a sauna. After a few hours of that, we went back to the annex for ice cream. That was a nice way to end the week.