Summit daily follow up on dust and early snow melt

The Summit daily has a detailed article about the effects of dust blowing in from Utah, and coating the snow in the Rockies. This causes the snow to melt faster, by as much as 18 days, which creates problems for water users in Colorado. The dust is from soil that is disturbed by cows and ORVs that crush bacteria, called cryptograms, that hold the soil in deserts together.

Denver City Park geese rounded up for avian flu tests

CDOW officials rounded up the geese of city park in an effort to head off calls from city residents anxious about avian bird flu. Notice that it hasn't been found, and there are no indications that bird flu is anywhere close to Colorado, or that it would cause an epidemic in humans.

CU Museum exhibit "Hatching the Past"

The CU Museum has a new exhibit selected from its extensive dinosaur egg collection. Interesting to note that the collection was made primarily by two amateur paleontologists, like Charlie Magovern and wife, Florence. It's tough to get grants to dig for dinosaurs, so having enthusiastic volunteers is a great gain for science.

Mary Taylor Young on Raton Mesa

Mary Taylor Young, author of Land of Grass and Sky gives a write up on a recent trip to Raton Mesa, which is more south central Colorado. I know people use southeastern Colorado, but I think they do so too liberally. I've heard Colorado Springs referred to as southeastern Colorado, and it's about as central as you can get.

CO Rare Bird alert

Always good finds here.

Season starts for noctilucent clouds

Some of the first sightings came in last night from Ireland of these electric-blue clouds that float on the edge of the atmosphere. These are sometimes seen as far south as Colorado.

If you see some, you can report them.

This photo is from the spaceweather.com, taken by Paul Evans from Larne, in Antrim County.

Unplug your clothes dryer, courtesy of the weather

If some scientists' predictions that the West will get drier due to global warming are true, this year is shaping up to be one that affirms those slippery causal connections.

Various statistics and comparisons with previous years are showing this year to be really dry and hot, like the warmest combined April and May on record. Fortunately, reservoirs in some parts of the state are in good condition.

Meanwhile, dry farmed wheat production this year will be half of average, at about 50 million bushels. The average is 100 million. One farmer speculates that Colorado is in a 23 year drought cycle. No quote on when it started and when it will end.

The Rocky covers a new forecast from the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center that ups the fire danger ante. Some reasons for the heat and dry conditions:

•“Weak” to “Moderate” La Niña conditions were declared in the eastern tropical pacific by late fall/early winter. The fall/winter precipitation patterns of 2005/2006 in the Rocky Mountain Area were similar to past La Niña events. Though there are some lingering atmospheric features from this year’s La Niña, current El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions and forecasted indices suggest neutral conditions through the end of 2006. Therefore, ENSO is expected to have little if any impact on the RMA climate during the summer of 2006.

• The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) (defined by the difference between high pressure from the eastern sea board into south-central Europe versus low pressure over Iceland) was negative during the winter months of 2006. Composite anomalies of spring and summer temperature, RH, and precipitation rates during past negative NAO events paint a very bleak (hot and dry) picture for portions of the Rocky Mountain Area this summer, especially over Colorado, Wyoming and the Black Hills.

Steve Jones, well known Boulder naturalist combined these figures, as posted on the Boulder County Nature Association Listserv nature-net

This was the 12th driest spring (March-May) in Boulder since 1895, and the
driest spring since 1974. Significantly, it was the driest spring recorded
since the weather station was moved to the new location (NIST), slightly
closer to the foothills, in 1989. I moved to Boulder in 1970, so I remember
springs like this one (see 1972 and 1974) when the grass turned brown before
the end of May, but it's been a long time since that happened, so it's
somewhat of a shock. Steve

Year March April May Total

1925 0.35 0.25 1.61 2.21

1966 0.31 1.21 0.80 2.32

1954 1.16 0.83 1.33 3.32

1963 1.81 0.15 1.37 3.33

1972 0.68 1.52 1.22 3.42

1962 0.48 0.99 1.99 3.46

1919 1.49 1.65 0.88 4.02

1930 0.88 0.99 2.17 4.04

1913 0.71 1.58 1.85 4.14

1911 0.64 2.68 0.90 4.22

1974 1.22 3.07 trace 4.29

2006 2.08 1.04 1.18 4.30

Notice we're not at dust bowl levels yet.

New fossils found near Maroon Bells

New fossil tracks of a very old dinosaur were found in the Permian Maroon Formation. From the article in the Aspen Times:

Research yielded evidence of four animal species
in the tracks around the Maroon Bells. About 90 percent of the tracks
came from Diadectes, a prehistoric creature that roamed the world 70
million years before the first dinosaurs, Small said. The species was a
tetrapod, which means it was four-legged, and a herbivore. It left
tracks about 5 inches long.

With a turtle head and a lizard
body, Diadectes had qualities of both amphibians and reptiles, Small
said. Rather than a missing link, it was an "odd mixture" remaining
after amphibians and reptiles split into two distinctive groups, he
said.

Diadectes was doomed, either through further evolution or
death of the species. It was extinct shortly after it left the tracks
near Aspen.

"They didn't leave any descendants," Small said. "They were a dead-end species."

Fossils of insects and conifer trees have also been
found in the Maroon formation since the discovery of the Diadectes
tracks. Those discoveries allowed scientists to determine that the land
that became the Maroon Bells was once much closer to the equator, when
it was part of the supercontinent called Pangea. The climate was more
like India and parts of Africa, with monsoonal rains and dry conditions.


The place near the Maroon Bells where the hundreds of tracks were found
probably wasn't a superhighway for Diadectes. Small's guess is that the
sliver of land just happened to be preserved. Tracks were likely
everywhere.

Since that discovery in 2001, Diadectes tracks have
been found in the Maroon formation near Glenwood Springs and State
Bridge. It appears the herbivore proliferated.


These dinosaurs were walking around when the Ancestral Rockies were still around.

Porcupines disappearing in the West?

Does anyone know how porcupines are doing in Colorado? This New West article suggests there might some sort of decline going on.

Drought and early peak flows from melt off

Northwest Colorado isn't having much of a mud season, since precipitation in May is much below normal.

And the view from Vail indicates melt-off has peaked, earlier than normal. Is this related to the dust from Utah darkening the snow and making it heat up faster?

Part 2: NPR on dusting the Rockies from Utah

Good interview with Joyce Belnap, leading specialist in desert soil microbes that hold the soil together. When these microbes or crytopograms are run over by Jeeps, ATV's, bikes, or smashed by hooves of cows, the soil breaks loose and blows away. The dust settles on snow pack in the Rockies and makes the snow melt faster, creating havoc with managing reservoirs and thus the water supply for the Front Range.

Glenwood PI on Ruedi release for CO river fish

The Glenwood paper gives an update of the planned release from Ruedi Reservoir to help the gang of four endangered fish in the upper Colorado Basin.

Boreal Toad breeding program release planned for Peak 8

A release of tadpoles is planned for Cucumber Gulch which sits at the base of Peak 8 near Breckenridge. CDOW hopes to get a population started where only two toads were found remaining. Best of luck!

Bald Eagle Update - Eastern Colorado

Post article on recovering Bald Eagles. Prairie dogs seem to be important for Bald Eagles in Eastern Colorado.

Dusting the snow on the Rockies

Two articles in High Country News and NPR recently on dust coming from Arizona and Utah, and even occasionally China that coats the snow in Rockies, making it darker, absorb more heat from the sun and melting faster. I suspect that the China link is a little overplayed, especially in the NPR story. There are large dust storms in China, and the NPR story offers a map to investigate it. But overgrazing and oil and gas exploration in dry deserts destroy where the fragile microbes that hold the soil together.

From the HCN story:

On desert grasslands that have never seen grazing, "there’s barely any
dust production, no matter what"; the dust traps she posts in those
areas collect perhaps a tablespoon every six months. Most years, traps
in formerly grazed grasslands collect about twice as much, and
currently grazed lands collect even more, about nine times as much.
But the most dramatic differences, says Belnap, emerge during severe
drought years. While the ungrazed grasslands stay more or less the
same, formerly grazed ground produces as much as 20 times the amount of
dust as in wetter years. Currently grazed lands "just go bonkers," with
the dust traps sometimes filling faster than Belnap and her coworkers
can empty them.

Jet stream's moving toward poles, making for warmer temperate areas

Fascinating article on how the jet stream is moving towards the equator.

Reporting in today's issue of Science,
researchers at the universities of Washington and Utah examined
satellite data from the past 27 years and discovered that the jets have
been wandering. During this time, the subtropical jets have moved as
much as 1° of latitude, or 112 kilometers, away from the equator and
toward the poles. The researchers also found what they think might be
causing the migration: The troposphere--the layer of atmosphere
reaching from the surface to an altitude of about 12 kilometers--has
warmed faster than the rest of the atmosphere over the subtropics in
bands centering about 30° north and south of the equator.
Simultaneously, the stratosphere--which overlays the troposphere,
extending to 50 kilometers--has been cooling.

Is this the same as moving the entire state one degree southwards?



Abstract here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5777/1179

Enhanced Mid-Latitude Tropospheric Warming in Satellite Measurements

Qiang Fu,^1,2*
Celeste M. Johanson,¹
John M. Wallace,¹
Thomas Reichler³





The spatial distribution of tropospheric and stratospheric temperature trends for 1979 to 2005 was examined, based on radiances from satellite-borne microwave sounding units that were processed with state-of-the-art retrieval algorithms. We found that relative to the global-mean trends of the respective layers, both hemispheres have experienced enhanced tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling in the 15 to 45° latitude belt, which is a pattern indicative of a widening of the tropical circulation and a poleward shift of the tropospheric jet streams and their associated subtropical dry zones. This distinctive spatial pattern in the trends appears to be a robust feature of this 27-year record.






¹ Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.

² College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, 730000, China.

³ Department of Meteorology, University of Utah, 135 S 1460 E, Room 819 (WBB), Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0110, USA.

Fire season is on

Three small fires this week, a 478 acre fire near Durango, and two small ones in Larimer County and near Mt. Evans.

http://gazette.com/display.php?id=1317871

The GT has an article about the threat of wildlife to the west and southwest sides of the city. According to the article, wildfire that broke out on Tuesday were very close to exploding into infernos. The city has declared a fire ban much earlier than normal this year.

Interesting ecological quote from the CS Fire Marshall, Brett Lacey:

Fire moves along sloped land quickly, Lacey said, since flames tend to
burn upslope during the day, when warm air rises and air currents
travel upward.

The process is reversed at night, so fires would burn
downslope, creating a zig-zag burn pattern, igniting dry land 24 hours
a day.

New stegosaurus tracks found near Morrison

A new set of Stegosaurus tracks were found west of Denver, near Morrison, in the old Dinosaur Ridge fossil quarry. Scientists have reopened studies in this area, after closing them in 1879, when most of the fossils were shipped off to Yale. From the Post article:

Mossbrucker painted a picture of six or seven
species of dinosaurs - some as small as sparrows and others with the
combined bulk of eight elephants - making the imprints while walking in
wet river sand about 150 million years ago.

Aside from a system of shallow Platte-like rivers and shallow
ponds, the Morrison area's landscape in the Jurassic featured few
plants, a dry environment that served as an area to walk through to get
to someplace with more to eat.

An even rarer discovery is blocks of concretelike sandstone containing a combination of fossilized dinosaur bones and tracks.

Interesting too:

"You never, ever get footprints where you get
bones," said Robert Bakker, an internationally known paleontologist and
scientific adviser to the museum.

Mossbrucker is quoted in the Rocky:

"When I see these tracks, I half expect to look up and see a
stegosaurus walking away from me," he said. "That's how good they are."

Ruedi water helps fish that only a mother could love

The Aspen Times details a water release that hopefully will help the four endangered fish of Western Colorado, the pikeminnow, thed humpback chub, the razorback sucker and the bonytail. Extra snow pack has enabled water managers to release water from Ruedi Reservoir to boost flows on the Frying Pan. This is only the third year in a decade with enough upstream water to allow a release.

Storms hit Ellicott

Storms tore up a few homes yesterday near Ellicott, where one tornado touched down. The Rocky covers it, and so does the GT.

Home on the Range: A Corridor for Wildlife

The New York Times gives an update of the Yellowstone to Yukon project, the idea of creating wildlife corridors from the Yukon to Yellowstone, so that animals can travel between the two distances without being hit by cars, trucks, and trains. The project was inspired by a wolf that travelled an enormous distance in the area around Banff. Good graphics here, and a good video, explaining that when people see gorgeous scenery, they don't realize that those few roads that cut through an area can drastically affect wildlife, especially the largest varieties.

Window into the world of bears

A better article on the habits of bears. This one has a map of one bear's wanderings around Snowmass.

Bear study in Aspen and Glenwood

A new study tracks black bears in the Roaring Fork Valley with GPS receivers. While it's interesting that we can know exactly where each bear is at anytime, it still doesn't change the fact that people are still the problem when they leave garbage out.

Snowmelt ahead of the game this year

No flooding yet, but people in the northern ranges are on alert.

Also, it's the season for wet snow slides.

Upcoming Zoology candidate lectures at DMNS

Dear Friends of the Zoology Dept, Volunteers, and CSS Participants:

Here are some upcoming Zoology candidate lectures. Please attend if you can! If you'd like to come to any of these talks, they are free and open to the public. Simply enter the museum through the door marked Staff and Volunteer Entrance to the left of the main entrance of the museum and tell the security guard that you are here for the afternoon lecture. S/he will direct you back to Ricketson Auditorium.

The lectures are as follows:

John Demboski, May 19th 12:15-1:30 entitled; "Chipmunks and Shrews in Western North America: Molecular Tapestries Woven from Field Work and Museum Collections"

Frank Krell, May 22nd 12:15-1:30 entitled; "Scarabs - sacred beetles as old as dinosaurs"

Aysha Prather, May 30th 12:15-1:30 entitled; "From genes to genitalia: Integrative approaches to caddisfly Systematics"

Boulder Creek Field Trip May 20

Center for Native Ecosystems Dedicated to recovering native and naturally functioning ecosystems in the Greater Southern Rockies. Center for Native Ecosystems Field Trip Reminder Saturday, May 20: Boulder Creek Field Trip - Mountains to Prairie Boulder Creek acts as a window into the Front Ranges environmental past, present, and future. Explore the riparian ecology of Boulder Creek, its unique history, and ecological management, with Center for Native Ecosystems and Spense Havlick, a limnologist, former Boulder city councilor, and a long-time advocate for progressive transportation planning and wise growth management. This is a fairly non-strenuous bike ride along the Boulder Creek path from the mouth of the canyon to its confluence with several rivers. Along the way we will study the plants and animals that make the Creek their home. We will then bike through the heart of Boulder to a nearby prairie dog colony where the high desert prairie begins and observe private and public land uses including a university research park. Highlights: -Study the riparian and water management ecology of Boulder Creek -Discuss Boulder Creeks unique and flood-prone history -Learn about Boulders sustainable storm water treatment Time: 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm Location: Meet at east entrance of Boulder Public Library, located at 1000 Canyon Blvd., Boulder, Colorado Parking: You can park your car for free at the Boulder Public Library for three hours If you don't have a bike: You can rent a bike a few blocks from the Library at the University Bike Shop at 839 Pearl St., Boulder; (303) 444-4196. More about Spense Havlick: A professor emeritus in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado, Spense served on the Boulder City Council from 1982-2003. His expertise spans numerous fields, including natural hazard mitigation, citizen participation in planning processes, and the impact of urbanization on the environment. Spense holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in environmental planning and water resource management. For more information or to sign up: Call CNE (303)546-0214, or email Debbie at debbie@nativeecosystems.org Center for Native Ecosystems 1536 Wynkoop, Suite 302 Denver, Colorado 80202 303.546.0214 email: cne@nativeecosystems.org online: http://www.nativeecosystems.org

Welcome and Introduction

The blog is all about the natural history of Colorado. I'll be adding posts that refer to bibligraphies, organizations and general information as time permits.