Hunting season

Yesterday I enjoyed a great day with Women in the Outdoors.  It was an all day affair where you choose in advance what events you wanted to participate in.  I chose fly fishing in the morning, and archery in the afternoon.
The instructors for Fly Fishing were fantastic.  They provided all the gear, took us to [...]

Pine Beetles, Spruce Beetles, and what to do?

The County Fire Warden and the State Forester paid a visit to my neighbors last week.  There’s some money in the till to help homeowners clear dead and dying trees from their properties.  Since my area is full of beetle kill, and getting worse exponentially every year, we’re sitting ducks for a big forest fire.  [...]

Early fall?

Oh my God it’s the middle of August and it seems like fall already.  We did have summer…it was last week!  Apart from that, and a few hot days scattered here and there, its been a rainy pattern like the Pacific Northwest.  It is sunny till noon, then cloudy and rainy the rest of the [...]

New ideas for lawn Part 2: Carex pansa, Carex texensis

As promised, here is the second of the two part series on meadow making in California.
The first of the entries covered fescue as a lawn substitute.  But I have come to prefer Carex pansa.
Carex pansa is a native sedge.  Sedges have edges, so to speak, while grasses don’t.  It is a clumper, like all the [...]

Bats, bats, and more Wyoming bats

Last evening I took a short bike ride and noticed two WG&F biologists walking up the hill from the swampy area of the creek.  They said they were setting up a bat net and invited me to watch them capture between 9 and 11:30.
By 9pm it was getting dark.  I grabbed my headlamp and headed [...]

More Scats and Tracks

Yesterday I found a cougar track in the mud.  I know there’s a cougar on that side of the creek because a friend of mine saw one a few months ago driving from the Cody Pow Wow down Dead Indian highway.  It was around 9pm, he said, and the cougar was just standing along the [...]