Snakes on Your Screen!

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. 

 Now I have my reasons for avoiding rattlesnakes, so maybe I could just be a tech-user and watch the Colorado RattleCam.

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. 

Antero Reservoir Closing; Fish Salvage Underway

Antero Reservoir (Colorado Parks & Wildlife

Antero Reservoir, one of the two "saucer" reservoirs in South Park, as I like to think of them, is being drained to save water in the current drought. (The other is Spinney Mountain Res.)

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. 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has announced a "no limits" fish-salvage operation.

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.

Two Buttes Res. in SE Colorado was recently drained too. Maybe the El Niño winter that is supposed to be coming will refill it.  

That's Cotton in the Blog Stew -- Don't Eat It

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. 

I may live in the foothills and love mountains, but the High Plains, mesas, and canyons call me too, Chad Love, who lives in Woodward, Oklahoma (touched by one of the big prairie fires this spring) says it well. He talks about autumn here, but early spring as upland seasons end is just the other side:

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.