If I had a shotgun... Snippets from Open Space, week of 6/22

[John Giezensomething]

The other day I sat in the boughs of a rather horizontal cottonwood, the only nearby source of shade in the middle of a rolling prairie, crunching a ripe apple. That was a good break. Later I saw a very yellow bumble bee land on a white larkspur, and the contrast between the white flowers and the yellow and black bumble bee was very cool.

The day before I found some fossil clamshells in a shale outcropping. I left them there, of course, but took a picture.

A few days earlier I was inside a bird closure area, near an osprey nest. I asked Christian, a wildlife tech and avid birder, if those people over there were allowed to fly their buzzing model planes so close to the bird closure. His expression changed and his tone betrayed the truth of his desire as he said, "If I had a shotgun, I would shoot that fucking thing down." I guess they are allowed to fly their planes that close to the raptor closure, but the people who favor the birds don't like it, not one bit.

We've been working hard, really hard, to kill all the flowering Mediterranean sage plants before they go to seed, but the wet climate this year has brought up an order of magnitude more plants than there were last year while the economy has seen to it that we have fewer staff members to deal with it. We were supposed to be done by now, but there's still hundreds of plants on our land out there, dropping their flowers and starting to dry out as they go to seed. Hopefully we'll be able to get almost all of them next week.