Rim Country Land Blog

After a winter of chickadees, magpies, crows, and pinyon jays, the abundance of birds in the Springtime comes as almost a shock.  I have never been a “bird person” in the sense of a life-list or an ever-ready set of binoculars  (though I did just pick up a nice new pair of them). But if the songs and colors of the prairie sky in Spring don’t inspire a sense of wonder, I don’t know what would.  Over a few weeks, I’ve practiced copying the word-phrases of house wrens and song sparrows, watched the hovering behavior of kestrels over the grasses and bluebirds over the prairie dog town (lots of bugs there!), and learned the patches of rust color on a chipping sparrow and a spotted towhee. In an impossible crack of sandstone I discovered a bluebird nest, six small eggs (blue, of course) hidden from every angle but one with enough space for single adult to move in. A very unconcerned crossbill let me take several photos, almost as if it were posing.

The other excitement has been with a few pronghorn fawns discovered in the grass. I learned a lesson in camouflage from a prairie Easter Egg hunt this Spring, having been unable to find even brightly colored plastic eggs after I hid them out in a field just an hour earlier. This lesson was well confirmed by these fawns, looking exactly like chunks of ruddy brown sandstone and so impossibly still that it would be easy to step right next to them and not know it. Not even their fur was moving in the wind, hunkered down as they were below the tops of the grasses. I took a few photos and avoided the area for the rest of the day. This was a bit early in the season, but each fawn has only two weeks between birth and running with the rest of the herd.

If I could draw you a bell curve, skewed to the left, it would approximate the arrival frequency of wildflowers. Starting out in March and early April there are a few–chickweed, white milkvetch, sand lilies. Then, after a few days of the kind of glorious Spring weather that makes everyone want to get outside, the flowers explode. From April until early June, every walk has more color and every square yard more blooms. There’s a threshold of elevation and aspect for each individual plant, and you can watch seeds of Springtime spread across the landscape like watching the snowline move up the side of a mountain or the shadows of morning melt into the day. Yellow violets start on canyon-sheltered, south-facing slopes two weeks before they move to the open plateau. Orange globemallow start at the top of the ridge and move down. Tiny yellow flowers and dark oak-shaped leaves trade places on each sumac bush on a slightly different schedule. Even the sand lilies show the change in reverse, blooming longer in the cool and shadows when no longer able to stand the heat of the open prairie. And as the weather in late June sets in to a three-month pattern of dry heat, the flowers give way to grasses and the burst of color slows down, gradually, to a few holdouts of curlycup gumweed and spotted gayfeather, visible even toward October.

The photos here are from April and May.

[caption id="attachment_73" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Sand Lilies, April"][/caption][caption id="attachment_75" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Gumbo Evening Primrose, May"][/caption][caption id="attachment_79" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Prairie Chickweed, May"][/caption]