ESTESBOG

Drawing by Wayne Lewis courtesy of Colorado Division of Wildlife.

by Peter Walker

            Three years ago my then 7-year-old grandson, Jason, introduced me to the recent hit animated movie “Over the Hedge.” One of the funniest scenes takes place in a tract home when the invading small animals are confronted by the woman of the house, armed with a broom.

            In the confusion the skunk turns to one of her compatriots and says, “I’m sorry you have to see this.”

Then she yells out, “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”

The view pans back away from the house as, “POOM!” a green cloud blows out simultaneously from the windows and doors. Read more…

(Photograph courtesy of Colorado Division of Wildlife)

by Peter Walker

            I don’t know whether curiosity actually kills cats, but I do know what sort of trouble curiosity once brought to a red fox.

            A Maine Game Warden buddy of mine named Smally Chandler told me about the incident. Smally worked the Camden-Searsport district on the Maine coast during the early 1970s. In those days there was a great deal of night time deer poaching west of the Penobscot estuary and it kept the district wardens in that region very busy. Read more…

By Peter Walker

The human brain is a complex organ. There is still so much about this natural computer with its enormous capacity for data storage and retrieval that is a mystery to science. Obliquely, my story today is about a little-used function of the human brain stem.

Evolutionists believe the human brain stem represents the original brain possessed by our reptile-like ancestors millions of years ago. As such, it was not capable of very much thought, but it served to keep body functions like breathing and heart rate steady. It was also capable of conducting certain instinctual reactions to external stimuli – reactions like fright response.

  Read more…

BY PETER WALKER

Let’s face it. Chickens are not smart. Inside that small, silly-looking head is a brain about the size of a garbanzo bean. That’s not much to work with. 

Still, insofar as a hen can cluck while at the same time walking from Point A to Point B, chickens are capable of rudimentary multitasking.

Read more…

This little wildlife drama was photographed and described to me by fellow photographer Mandy Colburn of Fort Morgan. Mandy’s 11-year-old stepson, Ouray Ocanas, is an exceptionally observant nature nut who seldom misses an interesting snake or bug or mammal in his wanderings.

            One day last summer Ouray noticed the family pack of weiner dogs were excited about something on the back lawn. Going to investigate, he spotted a gray and black object in the grass and it was moving. It was a baby bat. Assuming it had lost its mother, and knowing enough about bats to realize he probably shouldn’t handle it directly, the boy put on some heavy work gloves to capture the little bat and put him in a terrarium. He figured that the baby bat’s mother could access the baby through the open top and the little animal might be at least somewhat protected from cats and other small terrestrial predators.

Read more…

(National Park Service photograph)

by Peter Walker

There is great irony in wildlife damage to Division of Wildlife property.  But it happens.

I arrived in Colorado from Maine the end of March, 1984 on the tail end of one of the snowiest winters in modern history. The agency I joined was near the end of a major operation to feed big game through the long months of deep snows that had driven stressed and starving deer and elk into mountain valleys in their desperate search for something to eat. Read more…

BIRDING AND NATURE LIST FOR MORGAN COUNTY AND VICINITY JULY 19-26, 2009

What would you get if you crossed a lark sparrow with a meadowlark? Whatever it might be, it would probably look quite a lot like a dickcissel. Dickcissels were this week’s stars in northeast Colorado. This sparrow-sized bird with a big voice has puzzled taxonomists for years. The species apparently evolved to take advantage of temporary weed patches left in the wake of the enormous herds of wandering bison. As the plains ecosystem was altered by man, dickcissels adapted. They have a strong affinity for alfalfa fields. But they remain more or less nomadic, here one year and totally absent the next five or ten. July, 2009 marked the largest incursion of dickcissels in this part of the Great Plains since at least the 1970s. The males can be found on power lines overlooking alfalfa or shrubby habitats. They have at least two loud songs, both manifestations of “dickcissel” – one buzzy and one clearly whistled.

  Read more…

BIRDING AND NATURE LIST – JULY 11-17, 2009

I returned from two weeks in soggy Maine to find that things are still as wet here on the prairie as they have been since April. The plains are as green and lush as they have ever been in July in my 25 years here. A few fall migrants (sage thrasher, solitary sandpiper, greater yellowlegs) and post-breeding dispersal species (snowy egret) are beginning to show up. A trip to Poudre River State Fish Hatchery on a diagnostics call gave me a few mountain species to spice up my week list. My best bird this week was an adult Mississippi kite here in Fort Morgan. I’ve seen them here fairly consistently since the early 1990s and I suspect the species is trying to expand northwestward. I’ve only seen a nest here in Morgan County once in a huge cottonwood near the train station.

Read more…

Mother Nature was friendlier during my second week, giving me two full days of sunshine and a chance to do a little serious birding with my long-time mentor and friend, Don Mairs. We spent one of those days in the central Kennebec River Valley and the second in Sunkhaze Meadow National Wildlife Refuge. Between the two days we checked out both boreal and eastern deciduous habitats, lakes, marshes, rivers, and hayfields. One striking contrast between Maine’s wet northern habitats and high plains riparian woodland is the huge variety of nesting wood warblers. All warblers observed were in adult spring plumage, so the young were still in the nests at that time. Don’s excellent field speakers and I-Pod served us well in calling soras into camera range and pulling some of the more shy species into the open.

Read more…

by Peter Walker

            “You aren’t going to believe this one,” said the young Maine game warden as he poured himself a cup of coffee in the office of the fish hatchery in northern Maine one late fall day.

            Of course that got our full attention and all craned his way to hear every juicy detail. Not much goes on a typical day in an outpost village on the edge of the boreal forest.

            The state salmon, trout, and char hatchery where I worked that fall lay nestled in the balsam fir forest just downhill from the little village of Enfield, Maine. The next township to the southeast, and the last partially settled area before the start of the vast corporate timber holdings of Diamond International and Georgia Pacific, was Passadumkeag. The name is Abnaki Indian, but the locals simply shorten it to  “Dunky.”

Read more…