I read once about this Appalachian doctor who told a patient to take a certain medicine in the winter and to keep taking it "until snakes crawl" -- in other words, until warm spring weather. Tying the directions to the natural world was simpler and easier to remember than setting a calendar date.
You are watching a livestream of a Prairie Rattlesnake rookery (MegaDen) at an undisclosed location in Colorado. At this rookery, hundreds of snakes overwinter, shed their skins, and bask in the sun. Dozens of pregnant snakes spend the summer here preparing to give birth and care for their babies.
ProjectRattleCam also has a camera in California and in some zoos and museums.
Denver Water announced Monday it will drain and
close South Park’s Antero Reservoir fishing and camping spot to avoid
critical evaporation losses in a tinder-dry season.
The agency serving 1.5 million Front Range customers will send
Antero’s reserve down the South Platte River to Cheesman Reservoir and
close the recreation area to the public for the first time since the
severe 2002 drought.
The move will keep 5,000 acre-feet of water from evaporating in
summer heat about one-quarter of the reservoir’s capacity. In a normal
runoff year, that 5,000 acre-feet would easily be made up by snowmelt,
but Denver has declared this year’s snowpack the lowest in recorded
history in its resource areas.
All . . . regulations, including a valid Colorado fishing license and
legal methods of take, will be enforced. Motorized boating and
commercialized fishing will not be allowed. Hand-launched vessels and
shoreline angling are permitted.
After May 13, no public access for camping or anything.
Marco checks out a muddy arroyo in Huerfano County.
I let March go by without posting. That's bad. I was deep into the most annoying book-edit of my life. Kind of like "Who's on first?" but with different drafts and different sets of corrections from different proof-readers.
That said, I did get out in the weirdly warm and dry weather to investigate some public hunting lands-mostly Colorado state trust lands that are also grazed, but opened during hunting seasons.
If you really want to hear the world creak and groan and slip from
one epoch into the next, walk out into the prairie in early September.
Find a hill to sit on, turn your face up to the sky, let that ancient
celestial light strike your eyes, and listen to the ancient gods
whispering in your soul’s ear; old thoughts, old yearnings, old fears,
old hopes, all welling back up from within on the tendrils of that first
softly keening fall breeze that marks the trembling of the seasons and
the dimming of the summer light.
And it's dry, so dry. What can farmers do? Some people suggest that the future is less corn and more cotton, even here in Colorado.
For decades, the Wertz family focused on corn and alfalfa in the Arkansas
Valley. But in recent years, the economics became harder to ignore.
Water supplies dwindled, and production costs climbed. They needed a
crop that used less water but still offered a solid return.
Even though cotton had never been grown successfully in Colorado, Wertz believed it could be the right fit for their operation.
“Finding
a crop that cash flowed better and something that conserved water, we
decided cotton was the way to go,” he said. “Cotton does all of those
things. It just fit a niche that we were looking for.” Cotton brings
in similar revenue per acre as corn, but requires far less fertilizer
and water. That makes it a natural choice for hot, dry areas and more
sustainable in drought conditions.
Maybe parts of Eastern Colorado will start resembling West Texas—wisps of cotton blowing in the wind.
Something there is that does not like a yellowjacket -- but loves to tear up the nests and eat fat larvae.
* * *
This was a rough autumn in Wasp World. The tenant
in our rental cabin, about 150 yards from the main house, reported being
attacked by yellowjackets when stepping out on the back stoop. And he is
sensitive to them, although not full anaphylactic-shock-death-sensitive.
The wasps got me too when I went over there. They were coming out of a warp in the cedar siding. Time for action! There I went, gloved and jacketed, wearing a loose head-net over a plastic hard hat, climbing a ladder with wasp spray in hand.
After chemical warfare came expanding foam and calking compound. Eventually the buzzing stopped.
Wasp traps lure with scent
But there were still some around, so we hung conical wasp traps (they fly in but can't fly out) front and rear. The number of yellowjackets in the air was considerably reduced, although not totally down to zero.
At the main house, we had paper wasps in the greenhouse, but they are not nearly as aggressive as yellowjackets , though they will sting -- particularly dogs, for some reason. I found their nest and dropped it in a bucket of water. They'll be back though, I'm sure
Someone else was hunting wasps too. I found the scene at the top about fifty yards from the cabin. Something had torn into an underground yellowjacket nest, torn out the chambers with tasty larvae in them, and departed.
Then M. went walking and found another similar pillaged nest a quarter mile up the county road, as shown below. My first thought was "bear," but the damage was rather . . . dainty compared to what bears do. So maybe a skunk? They are always around.
If you want to see how a bear approaches yellow jacket nests, watch this video from the Wilson Forest Lands YouTube channel
And it's the Colorado Otero County, not the New Mexican Otero. But both counties are named for the same man, Miguel Antonio Otero (1829–1882). Now you know.
A couple of days ago, I checked the trail camera nearest the house, located about 80 yards up the ridge in back. With apologies for the infrared flash on the ten-year-old camera, this is one photo of a sequence.
Photo taken about 9:30 p.m. on December 13, 2025.
M. was out for a walk as I was checking the photos on my laptop. "Guess what I got," I said when she same in. "A mountain lion," she answered. "Steve [our neighbor] showed me a video from his camera."
And here it is, five nights after the photo above.
Not the same cat thought. This one is wearing a collar and tracking device. I checked with the district wildlife manager, who said a study was underway in western Pueblo County and adjacent areas involving a number of collared cats.
Gary Messina said he was running along the same trail on a dark
November morning when his headlamp caught the gleam of two eyes in the
nearby brush. Messina pulled out his phone and snapped a quick photo
before a mountain lion rushed him.
Messina said he threw his phone at the animal, kicked dirt and yelled
as the lion kept trying to circle behind him. After a couple of
harrowing minutes he broke a bat-sized stick off a downed log, hit the
lion in the head with it and it ran off, he said.
“I had to fight it off because it was basically trying to maul me,”
Messina told The Associated Press. “I was scared for my life and I
wasn’t able to escape. I tried backing up and it would try to lunge at
me.
Both reports say the last known mountain lion killing of a human happened in 1999. That refers to the death of Jaryd Atadero, 3, in the Poudre River canyon west of Fort Collins.
To me from a couple hundred miles away, his unwitnessed death like a lion attack. Some people, including his father, at least initially, wanted to believe it was an abduction and murder. His parents wrote a book about the experience.
