Category: Uncategorized
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First Day Birding Blitz Prep
Our, now eight year old, annual New Year’s Day ritual is simple: grab the Labrador and head into the far-flung fringes of the Helena Valley. From Marysville to the Gates of the Mountains, and from Black Sandy to the Spokane Hills, and Mount Helena (of course) we spend the day hunting for a positive ID…
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The Value of Helena’s Wildland-Urban Interface as a Recreational and Economic Asset
I’ve been resting my partially torn Achilles tendon for the last few weeks, so my recent gentle trail walk on the Ambrose trail was a welcome return. I noticed that there has been a lot of new work mitigating fire risk from the middle to western terminus of the Ambrose; soon that work will include slash pile burning…
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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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February in the Rearview
February may be the shortest month, but holy cheese does it have some long weeks. Helena had nine days with winds above 20mph (33kph); and two of those days had gusts above 40mph (65kph). Sixteen days were below 0 (-17c). My home area received at least 20 inches (50cm) of snow. And we were cloudier…
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Winter Birding
Winter Birding It’s winter, and it’s been quite cold, but the birding has surprisingly good. The lack of leaves on the deciduous trees and bushes helps quite a bit. The warm fall allowed us to have open water will into January and that helped, too. Some birds are more visible in the Helena area in…
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A bit brutal, maybe?
February has been brutal. We are 17 days into the month and the average temp has been 4.8ºf. Let’s round it up and just say 5ºf (-15ºc). Last year’s average for Feb was 29ºf (-2ºc). Our low this year (so far) has been -18ºf (-28ºc). Eleven days left of Feb this year. If we’re going…
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February Freeze
Much of the country spent the last coupe of weeks working through a cold snap. Montana has been no exception. Last weeks’ wekdays hovered in the mid single digits above and below zero. We also received about a foot of snow in the valley. So trails have been off limits. The Lab has a very…
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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…
Nature, every day. 