This part of Colorado is mineral-rich. Silver, gold, lead, copper, coal, and uranium have all been mined near here, and the higher metal prices make it profitable to put old mines back into production. Some people object.
Mining has big impacts on water quality because abandoned mines leak acid into the river. Private citizens have worked for years cleaning up the old mines that drain into the Animas River, and the handful of new mining ventures in the region was a topic of discussion at a recent water meeting.
One question was: Are these big ventures? Are they national, well funded companies? (Do they have the money for proper environmental mitigation, and a reputation to protect?)
Oh, no, was the response. These aren’t modern mining operations. This is traditional mining, where small operators fleece big city investors and leave behind an environmental mess.
Which would be funnier if it wasn’t true.
A Californian consortium is trying to reopen a gold mine in Mayday. Here’s one local’s response:
There’s a nifty Burma Shave type series of signs that reads
TAKE YOUR
GOLD RUSH
BACK TO
CALIFORNIA please
and the last sign is
Whatever your opinion of mining in Mayday (or political theatre, for that matter) you gotta love someone who takes you from Uranus to heinous* in less than a half mile.
*love that word.
heinous
c.1374, from O.Fr. haineus (Fr. haineux), from haine “hatred,” from hair “to hate,” from Frank. *hatjan (cf. O.S. haton, O.E. hatian “to hate”).
| Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper |
I got a second set of photos from the top of Animas Mountain.
I didn’t realize landscapes were so hard to photograph.
I wanted to get a shot looking down on a glider or a redtailed hawk… but I couldn’t.
Oh, well.
Published on June 13, 2008
in water.
I wanted to take a nice picture of the river, so I took the five mile hike to the top of Animas Mountain. I didn’t get a good shot. This is the best of the photos I took, and it’s lame. So I am going up the mountain again tomorrow, this time with a picnic, and will try again. Patiently. (I don’t know if stubbornness is a virtue, but patience is.)
I hope to have a spectacular river shot for you on Monday.
Published on June 12, 2008
in Insects.
One of my lupines is hosting a group of caterpillars. I looked up their collective noun, and it’s an army of caterpillars (which seemed ominous). I just have a few. No army. But since I like to have butterflies and moths around, and since Wikipedia says hairy caterpillars turn into butterflies and moths, I thought the caterpillars could have a few plants.
See those three pairs of front legs? They eventually become butterfly or moth legs, six legs total. The back legs that look like little suction pads will drop off during metamorphosis. And that hair? It’s designed to give you contact dermatitis.
The caterpillar has a surprising number of tricks. It eats very efficiently.
Here it has its mandibles spread and out of the way as it uses the spinneret in its mouth to make silk.
and here it has made a nice pile of frass. Which is a very polite and precise word for caterpillar poop.
frass /fræs/ –noun
insect excrement
[Origin: 1850–55; orig., the refuse and excrement of boring or leaf-eating insects < G Frass insect damage, corrosion, n. from base of fressen to eat (of animals); see fress, fret1
]
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006. |
If you aren’t impressed by their eating, spinning silk or pooping, consider this: Humans have 629 muscles and a skeleton.
A caterpillar has 4,000 muscles
and is far more coordinated than I could ever dream of.
Published on June 10, 2008
in water.
This is a parade of five rafts heading towards the rapids. A friend who runs a raft company says that it’s been a very slow season. She thinks the RVers who usually raft with them didn’t come this year because of high gas prices. This healthy flotilla of paying guests was a flash from the past.
We may have passed high water this year.
The red line is this year’s hydrograph, and you’d think those high flow days would come as a surprise, but they don’t. For two days this year the river flow doubled… and I got kayaking pictures from both days. Those peak flows are ecstatic. A lot of the reshaping of a river occurs in those few days when the flow is two and three times higher than the mean.
High water is a thrill but I don’t mind the lower flows of summer. My personal favorite is tubing season, but for that you have to wait until July, when the flow is below 600 cubic feet per second. Drinks and snacks are optional.
Published on June 9, 2008
in birds.
Bob built a door for the chicken palace, which caused great excitement.
They’re still not fully feathered, but they are the most adorable.
They are heavy bellied and loose feathered, with giant feet. Right now, their first tufts of tailfeathers are appearing.
They have a whole program during the day: they’ll all stream out the door and run to the grass next to the ditch. They eat bugs, scratch the ground and have dirt baths, and then they all go back into the chicken palace for a nap.
All 23, all together, about four or five times a day. Their best trick is the dust bath. When they were penned in the hoop house and moved daily, they used to try to build a dust bath in a day. Now that they’re going outside, they’ve been working on the same dust bath for nearly a week.
This round section fits up to four chickens, and this strip bath
fits five. They carefully layer their feathers with dirt. I think it must itch to grow new feathers, because they are very careful about fluffing dirt over their entire body.
We’re talking chicken bliss, working some dust through his feet feathers.
Life is good.
Published on June 8, 2008
in horses.
You may recall the little horse that was caught in deep snow and starving. Suzy snowshoed miles a day to bring hay to this animal, saving its life. In the last installment, the Indian who owned Thankful was sort of mean about the fact that someone else fed his horse all winter. I thought Suzy should have been given the horse, so I called the guy a big poop. But I’m wrong.
All winter, I wanted something from that creature. I wanted pictures. I wanted her to come to me when I brought food. I wanted to touch her. And I wanted the story to end with the horse on Suzy’s land, helping her with the farm. I was led astray by desire.
Here’s Thankful, looking happy as can be.
She’s still technically alone, but there are horses across the fence and here she’s hanging around with a pair of birds. The rest of the herd will be dropped off soon, and come fall she won’t be left behind.
She’s a pretty little Indian pony saved by kindness.
Which is its own reward.
Suzy still comes and visits her, and Thankful follows her around like a dog.
Published on June 6, 2008
in birds.
This was a new bird to me, so I looked it up: it’s a Western Tanager.
He’s in full mating plumage with a bright red head. “In non-breeding plumage, the head has no more than a reddish cast and the body has an olive tinge.” He doesn’t synthesize that red color; it comes from his diet. “The red pigment in the face of the Western Tanager is rhodoxanthin, a pigment rare in birds. It is not manufactured by the bird, as are the pigments used by the other red tanagers. Instead, it must be acquired from the diet, presumably from insects that themselves acquire the pigment from plants.”
Meanwhile, the new directive for ADHD is to remove all additives and artificial colorants from the diet as a first step… so when I look at this bird who makes his head red in the spring by eating the right bugs, I can’t help but wonder what he could do with a box of strawberry jello.
I just wanted to make sure y’all knew that I use Photoshop all the time.
This beautiful shot is from
this badly exposed original. I routinely put trees in front of our neighbor’s roof. I remove fences, electrical lines and buildings… all the time. I use Photoshop to remove weeds.
And I enhance the colors just because I can. This vibrant (alright, lurid) shot
came from this tastefully muted original. I’m making cartoons: I have to use low resolution for the internet, so I increase the contrast and pop the colors, simplify the image and make them into little posters.
I know that some photos represent an existing reality, but mine don’t. I have never posted a photo that wasn’t manipulated, and you can see from these pairs of photos that I’m better with the computer than the camera.
I just wanted to get this off my chest. I will never mention it again.
One of the best things about living in your own house at 95 (Miss Roberta had a birthday in May) is having a 65 year old flower garden.
She is very particular about her garden. I call it an everything garden, because it has flowers blooming in every season.
This season it’s lupines, daisies and iris. She’s an old-fashioned gardener, so instead of mulch and weeding, she uses bare ground and Round-Up. With all that Round-Up, the insect populations are askew and she’ll sometimes lose the whole bed to insect infestations. Which requires massive applications of insecticides.
I don’t say a thing about her chemical dependencies. Sometimes she wonders to me why the populations of pollinators are so sparse, but I don’t explain to her that Round-Up kills the native bumblebees in their underground burrows. She can’t hear well enough to catch it, and at 95 her gardening habits are set.
And it is a beautiful stand of lupines.
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