Category: Naturalist’s Notebook
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A Simple Question
I had a lovely conversation a couple of weeks ago where a simple question stopped me in my tracks: “What do you think your 7-year-old self would think of your life now?” It didn’t take me long to answer. I think that kid would be amazed. “Whoa, wait! You go out and look at flowers, rocks,…
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Equinox Effort- 2025
Spring Awakening: A Birding Blitz Around Central MontanaThe vernal equinox arrived, heralding the official start of spring, and we celebrated in the best way we know how: with a whirlwind birding adventure! Our goal? To identify 55 bird species across two days of exploration in a month not known for a lot of species depth.…
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Cross Quarter Days
Today, Feb 2, 2025, is a cross-quarter day. That is, today is a day that sits about half way between a solstice and an equinox. There are four cross-quarter days of old, Samhain (Nov), Imbolc (Feb), Beltaine (May), and Lughnasa (Sep). The Library of Congress does a nice job of describing how old ways became…
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Wing Marks
The Helena valley has been seeing temps dropping into the single digits overnight and struggling to rise to much more than mid-20’s (around -6c) during the day. That’s not overly cold, but we’ve also been seeing dips into the single digits below zero (around -20c) every 7-10 days as well. When the cold goes below…
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Warming Thoughts
As the morning light slowly builds at the eastern edge of the Helena valley on this frigid January morning, I am inspired by these two quotes: In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world…
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Pinyon Jays; Number 48 on the 2025 Year List
Poor quality image, but high-quality experience. At the end of a 2 mile (3.2k) morning walk in the Scratchgravels, I heard a few Pinyon Jays in the distance to the west of the parking area. Since I was certain they were Pinyon Jays, I could count them for the year list by sound only, but…
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First Day Birding 2025
Jan 1, 2025 What a wonderful 1/1 birding day. We had a couple of simply magical moments and ended the day with 43 species positively ID’ed- by far our best First Day. All told, we walked six miles in several different locations. Before I go into the magical, I want to share the oddities. We…
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May 2023 Naturalist’s Notebook
May has come to a close. It’s been an amazing Wildflower Month. The Lab and I have walked on Mt Helena (or the other South Hills trails) a minimum of three times every day since May 1- literally morning, noon, and night, well evening. After six months of snow on the ground and the winter…
Nature, every day. 