http://besidethestream.com Country life at 7,000 feet Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:21:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The nights are around 50F now, and the birds are packing on fat for migration.  There have been a lot of hummingbirds in the garden, but they like to feed at dusk. I took dozens of low light hummingbird shots last week, and they're all blurry.  Each of these birds are speedy fast, ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=3415 Gracie (the Bernese mountain dog) started mountain climbing.  She likes it very much.  This is a shot of Gracie at 12,000 feet with the westernmost part of the continental divide behind her.   We've paused in a meadow below the last steep climb to the top.  We admired the tiny people on top of the ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=3409 A true bonsai, a triple pine, and this log is for Bob, who loves wood.  http://besidethestream.com/?p=3405 After I saw a flicker regurgitate food into a grown chick's beak, I started to see lots of birds doing it.   This evening grosbeak is giving its chick a second meal: the parent filled up at the birdfeeder, regurgitated the food into a chick perched on an aspen, and flew back to the birdfeeder to stock up again.  ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=3403 In the high mountains, most of the wildflowers have passed their peak.  The red Indian paintbrush are gone,  but the smaller hot pink paintbrush is also striking.  The fleabane, fleshier than at lower elevations, is a little tattered, and the fields of wild delphinium are mostly past but still splendid in patches.  For a while, ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=3395 Three days ago, Gracie found a heavy set of bones near a trail we often hike.   She collects bones, and these were very fresh.   She'd heft them into her mouth like you'd slung on a backpack, and run fast until she had to drop them.  She'd catch her breath, nuzzle the bones a bit, ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=3384 The neighbor's apricots are nearly ripe, and a yearling bear has been hanging around hoping to harvest them.  They're using lights, radios, air horns, and electricity to try and keep the bear away from the apricots.  I heard the air horn go off, and saw this little cutie sitting under a ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=3375 Durango is a little farther south than Washington, DC., but at 7,000 feet we're much closer to the freezing temperatures of outer space.  Cosmic!  This far south the temperature doesn't drop much below zero in the winter, and the summer is hot by day but drops to 60F at night.  Most of the annual moisture in the southern Rockies comes ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=2539 Here's the greenhouse as it looks today.  Bob filled in the trench and seeded it more than a month ago, but it'll take a year for the grass to fill in.  Bob built the greenhouse for tomatoes and lettuce.  The nights are usually too cold for tomatoes to ripen, and at the end of ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=3368 We had almost no rain until recently: 0.02 inches in May, 0.04 inches in June, and no more than a few drops until two days ago.   The bear and deer are normally up in the high country now, but without rain there's no food.  They started trickling down to the valley (and the river-fed ... http://besidethestream.com/?p=3364