At first I thought this was one of those Internet spoofs, like Jihawg ammunition (contains pork, for use on Muslim terrorists) — just a website, no actual product.
And "HawkShield," because raptors are waiting for Max the Llasa Apso to go out on the grass to "do his business."
After all, if livestock guardian dogs can wear spiked colors, why shouldn't little Max have a "vest is made from ballistic nylon reinforced with a
special stab-resistant Kevlar® that was originally developed by the U.S.
Government for prison guard uniforms."
The photo on the banner of this blog was taken at the Wolf Springs Ranch in northwest Huerfano County.
From the Wet Mountain Tribune:
The acquisition extends the Nation’s presence in the county by another
12,505 acres for an approximate total of 28,855 acres straddling both
Huerfano and Custer counties. The land is significant for the Navajo, as
it is near the sacred mountain Tsisnaasjini’, also known as Blanca Peak.
In announcing the purchase, Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said ,
“It is a blessing for the Navajo Nation to once again have land in the
state of Colorado. When land was being designated by the federal
government they refused to include Colorado as part of Navajo. We now
own more of our ancestral land with the purchase of Boyer Ranch. It is a
beautiful place surrounded by mountain ranges in the shadows of
Tsisnaasjini’.
He went on to speak about the economic opportunities the new addition
brings to the Nation: “This is a place where we can develop the Navajo
Beef program and eventually provide more opportunities for our ranchers.
There is a good market for quality beef in restaurants and grocery
stores and Navajo can meet that demand.”
The Nation’s portion of the
Wolf Springs Ranch includes about 400 head of cattle, and over 900 head
of bison.
The importance of the Boyer Ranch to the Nation goes beyond ranching
however, as the ranch has early priority water rights, and the gravel
pit there could be used to develop Nation infrastructure.
Vice President Jonathan Nez also sees the potential to one day develop
an athletic program that takes advantage of the high-altitude of the
land.
“We have some remarkable athletes on the Navajo Nation,” he notes,
“and this would be a great opportunity to train our youth and celebrate
health and wellness. The land there is beautiful and it is not just for
us but also for future generations.”
In other news, restaurant workers in Westcliffe, Silver Cliff, and Walsenburg are learning how to say "Yah-ta-hey" with the correct intonation.
Wolf Springs Ranch had been involved in Colorado Parks and Wildlife's "Ranching for Wildlife" program, which is a money-maker for the landowner as well as opening up private land to a limited amount of big-game hunting. I wonder what will happen with that.
At the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory
near Crested Butte, billy barr (his choice of capitalization) has been
keeping track of snow and temperatures since 1974. This winter has been
surpassed by the lack of snow only by that of 1976-77. What is also
notable about barr’s weather records for this winter is the string of
highest temperatures, including the highest temperature in his data base
for New Year’s Day: 37 degrees. . . .
From Pagosa Springs, Colo., comes this memory from Rod Proffitt: “I
must be getting to be an old timer. I remember the 1976-77 winter very
well. I had just moved from Aspen to Cripple Creek to start a law
practice, but I had promised some friends I would come back for
Winterskol that year.
Believe it or not, I was able to drive
over Independence Pass mid-January that year. I had a cousin living in
Crested Butte that year. With no snow, the perma-frost went down below
the water lines and froze up the whole town. They had a miserable winter
that year.
Cripple Creek rarely had a snow cover so their wood pipes were
much deeper and survived that winter, but in the Spring a mountain goat
died and fell into one of the reservoirs on Pikes Peak. The whole town
of Cripple Creek got sick that year. Yes, it was a memorable year….”the
year of no snow” to us old timers.”
Best'sMountain Town News e-magazine is the kind of local journalism that we need more of. I'm just waiting for Foothills Town News.
Hawaii is one of the handful of states that maintain a gun registry.
They know every lawfully held firearm in the state and who has it. As a
result, it was easy for law enforcement to compare the two databases and
figure out who owned guns and was getting medical marijuana.
The problem remains, as the Honolulu police are happy to state, "Federal law prohibits firearm possession for unlawful users of
controlled substances. Pot is classified as a controlled substance under federal law." So just saying, "I'm a medical user, I'm not an addict fercrissakes" would go nowhere in a federal court.
Death looks so clean on Everest.
(Phurban Sherpa/New York Times)
My high- altitude mountaineering is limited to peaks in the Rockies and Cascades, but I have a couple of times seen . . . personality changes . . . at altitude.
In a new study of psychotic episodes at extreme altitudes, researchers have determined that high-altitude psychosis
is a stand-alone medical illness, rather than a condition stemming from
acute altitude sickness as had been previously believed.
High-altitude
psychosis is a fairly well-known illness and is frequently mentioned in
mountain literature. For example, a mountaineer may suddenly think he
is being chased, start talking nonsense or change his route without any
real reason.
No, I am not saying people who climb Mount Everest are crazy. Absolutely not. But some people die there. There are famous ones, like George Leigh Mallory (1886–1924), whose body was found — and deliberately left after study — in 1999. (Some people cherish the thought that he and climbing partner Andrew Irvine might have been the first to summit Everest, but it is unlikely.)
And there are others:
Nepal officials estimate that about 200 bodies remain scattered across
Everest. A few are so familiar, so well preserved by the subfreezing
temperatures, that they serve as macabre mileposts for the living,
including one corpse commonly called Green Boots.
Others are better-identified:
Not far from where they found Ghosh’s body that morning was another body
that Dawa Finjhok Sherpa estimated had been there for five or six
years. And somewhere nearby, they knew, was the body of a doctor from
Alabama who had died a few days before. There was no plan to bring it
down.
Yes, leaving the body means there is more money in the estate for the heirs, right? Bringing a body off Everest is expensive!
But some Bengali families were willing to pay, for their own cultural reasons, which makes a fascinating New York Times Magazine story, "Deliverance from 27,000 Feet." Excellent, unflinching photography too.
It's snowing this solstice morning here at Owl House, but judging from the radar, we are not going to get more than another little two-inch storm, enough to keep the fire danger down for a few days.
La Niña is predicted to persist through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2017-18 by nearly all models in the IRI/CPC plume [Fig. 6] and in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME; [Fig. 7]).
Based on the latest observations and forecast guidance, forecasters
favor the peak of a weak-to-moderate La Niña during the winter (3-month
Niño-3.4 values between -0.5°C and -1.5°C). In summary, La Niña is
likely (exceeding ~80%) through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2017-18,
with a transition to ENSO-neutral most likely during the mid-to-late
spring (click CPC/IRI consensus forecast for the chance of each outcome for each 3-month period).
La Niña is anticipated to affect temperature and precipitation across
the United States during the upcoming months (the 3-month seasonal
temperature and precipitation outlooks will be updated on Thursday
December 21st). The outlooks generally favor above-average temperatures
and below-median precipitation across the southern tier of the United
States, and below-average temperatures and above-median precipitation
across the northern tier of the United States.
M. has been fuming at the grocery store. Avocados, $2 apiece. It seems like a lot — and I know that many are just thrown away or, sometimes, end up in the donations for the bears at the wildlife rehab center. (We watch the cartons unloaded with undisguised envy, but those furry guys need the calories!)
There is drought. And there is organized crime. (I am surprised no one is talking about "blood avocados.")
"Police" is a bit of a misnomer: These are local growers' militia, or autodefensa as they say. Some apparently receive official support on the municipal level, so I suppose that makes them "police."
Mexico produces about 45% of the world's avocados and Michoacán is Mexico's largest avocado-producing state.
From here alone, nearly two billion avocados are shipped to the US every year.
And because the industry is a lucrative one, it has been the target of organised crime.
As you enter Tancítaro, there are a series of checkpoints. They are known as filtros, or filters, by people here.
Some are more informal than others. One has a few sandbags and some elderly men sitting on a broken car seat outside a hut.
We
pass another one with several pickup trucks standing outside. I notice a
man with a rifle across his back. This is a well-armed town. . . . .
The police force is part-funded by avocado producers, who pay a
percentage of their earnings depending on how many hectares they own (emphasis added).
The autodefensas have
been returning houses and farms to the original owners or their
families, because in many cases they were murdered after signing a deed
at gunpoint, leaving the farms to the criminal bands' leaders, who
assaulted the properties bringing a public lawyer, who many times also
by gunpoint validated such operations.
Think of all this when you're in the vegetable aisle at Megafoods.
The camera performed a little better — it has a real zoom and more shooting modes — while the iPhone (or any smartphone) is quicker to bring into action — just wake it, swipe the screen, and shoot.
In recent years [...] due to the rise of smartphones, the compact
digital camera market has been shrinking rapidly, leading to a
significant decrease in operating rate at NIC and creating a difficult
business environment.
But look on eBay. You can find digital pocket cameras for pocket change. A like-new Nikon Coolpix, with case and cord, probably made about 2010, cost under $30, shipping included. If I had wanted an earlier model, I could have paid much less.
Why buy it? The biggest reason is peace of mind. That little Nikon will be in my pocket on next weekend's mountain camp-out. It will go on hunting trips, hikes, etc.
Which is worse, to drop your smartphone in the river while trying to photograph that cute muskrat while you're fly-fishing, or to splash a $15 camera you got on eBay?
Smartphones do have their strengths. My fingers were almost touching mine one evening last week in Boston, when I saw the driver of an immaculate white Range Rover — she looked like an oligarch's mistress in it — deliberately ram the rear bumper of a taxi that was not clearing the intersection fast enough to suit her. Never mind that he had nowhere to go forward.
I could have put it on Facebook or Instagram, maybe made a looping GIF ("Ram! Ram! Ram!"). But I didn't.
Cast-off exoskeletons of the pleasing fungus beetle pupae (Gibbifer californicus),
Imagine them hanging straight down — I turned them up to catch the light.
They are not quite an inch long.
I had my eye on one large dead tree as a firewood source, mainly because it was next to the little dirt road that goes up in back. The woodpile was shrinking early last spring (the snowiest time of the year in this area), so I felled it. Just its top and thick limbs were enough to get us through — the rest I cut into rounds and stacked by the road.
Pleasing fungus beetle (Jeff Mitton)
Then warm weather came, and I procrastinated on bringing the rest down until last month.
Whereupon I found these cases on one of the split pieces — but what were they? I turned to What's That Bug, linked in the right-hand sidebar under "Resources."
Very soon I learned that they were the cast-off exoskeletons of the larvae of the pleasing fungus beetle, Gibbifer californicus, of the family Erotylidae, Pleasing Fungus Beetles. (Don't ask me, "pleasing to whom?")
The pleasing fungus beetle develops on soft conk fungi on aspen, ponderosa pine and other logs in forested areas. The biology of the insect is largely unknown; some apparently spend the winter in the adult stage laying eggs in spring; others survive as larvae within the fungus.
The larvae feed on the fungus during late spring and early summer, consuming large quantities. When full grown the larvae hang from the underside of the logs and transform to a pupa, often in groups of several dozen. With this habit, a grouping of pupae may appear some what like a miniature bat roost.
As adults, they "feed on nectar, pollen and the bracket fungi growing on
rotting logs. Larvae feed exclusively on the bracket fungi, so if you
want to see adult and larval pleasing fungus beetles, search rotting
logs with bracket fungi," writes University of Colorado biology professor Jeff Mitton.
• Keep your feeder out of the “splash zone” of any nearby birdbaths or drinking stations
• Consider bringing your feeder in before a heavy rain if temperatures are very warm.
• Change your seed out regularly if you are in hot and wet weather conditions.
• Choose seed types that contain little to no organic material
(buckwheat, peas, and sorghum), e.g. nyjer seed or black-oil sunflower
seed.
Scientists have the ability to peer more deeply into the DNA of birds
today than ever before. But in some ways the resulting picture for
species classification isn’t getting clearer—rather, it’s getting
blurrier. It seems that the more closely evolutionary biologists look
into the genome, the more arbitrary the boundaries between some species
appear to be. It’s a bit like stepping too close to a pointillist
painting: instead of revealing tiny details on the picnickers’ faces,
the whole thing dissolves into dots.
In a corridor of the conference hotel, we encountered a man with a half-grown mountain lion on his shoulders. It slithered up and down his arms like a viscous liquid.
The lion was no pet — we quickly discovered that its owner was promoting a captive-wildlife photography operation.
I learned a few things in my five years of OWAA membership, and one was that almost no one gets spectacular photos of predators in the wild. That lynx "chasing a snowshoe hare"? It's probably chasing a rubber ball thrown by its trainer.
And here I used to think that the photographer sat out in the snow. telephoto lens in hand, blowing a "rabbit distress" call. I honestly thought that was how it was done, but very few photogs do that. (Some do use game camera photos, since the quality has improved so much in recent years.)
Of course, movies and TV shows are no exception, not to mention magazines and wildlife calendars. Most of what you see is faked.
Inspired by Disney were Marlin Perkins, host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (premiering in 1963), and Marty Stouffer, host of the Public Broadcasting Service’s Wild America (premiering
in 1982). Like Disney they were pioneers working in a standards vacuum,
but they set a new bar for nature fakery. Perkins was forever having
his young assistants lasso and wrestle terrified tame animals to
“rescue” them. “They were totally ruthless,” Wyoming cinematographer
Wolfgang Bayer told the Denver Post. “They would throw a mountain lion into a river and film it going over a waterfall.”Wild Kingdom still airs on Animal Planet.
I developed a foot problem this summer, and it has me thinking more about gait than at anytime since my brief foray into track-and-field as a 14-year-old. (Working with a chiropractor-kinesthesiologist now too.)
It's been upsetting, since hiking through rough country was always something that I was good at, and now I am having to retrain one foot, which produces certain protests from the tendons.
Shoes and boots are part of the problem, that's the irony. It was probably wearing the wrong ones in younger years that created the problem, on top of some slightly malformed toes that I was born with. Over the past couple of years I have discarded about a third of the shoes and boots that I owned — getting to be pretty fussy about what I will put on my feet. I even consider shoelaces: would round or flat be better?
You have probably read old descriptions of American Indians "gliding" through the forest in their moccasins, but as medieval reenactor Cornelius Berthold — who apparently is also into Historic European Martial Arts, going by the broadsword on his hip and some remarks about fencing— points out in this video, that is how Europeans walked too, prior to about 1500 and the widespread development of harder-soled shoes with built-up heels. (Stiffer shoes maybe encouraged the toes-out gait.)
Not like this:
Quick Time . . . . At the command Forward, shift the weight of the body to the right leg without perceptible movements. At the command March, step off smartly with the left foot and continue the march with 30-inch steps taken straight forward without stiffness or exaggeration of movements.
United States Army, The New Infantry Drill Regulations, 1943.
So during this hunting season I sometimes pretend that I wearing moccasins — or medieval shoes like Cornelius Berthold. When the "new" pain starts — the tendons protesting their new stretching — I just slow down, stepping on the balls of my feet. That helps. One day, it will have to be better.
A friend was driving into the county a couple of months ago on a certain road, and I warned him to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n about about mile marker 55, because that road is the sheriff's favorite speed trap.
The sheriff actually said in a recent meeting that traffics fines pay for one deputy's salary, not that he has a lot of deputies.
And Texans hurrying up from the south to get to the ski areas pay a good share of that.
According to the county weekly, these Texas communities were recently represented in our revenue stream:
It had to happen. I opened the 2017 Hunting Guide from Colorado Parks and & Wildlife, and there was a long sidebar titled "Nonresidents' Guide to Marijuana Laws in Colorado."
It covered the basics. Watch out for edibles: "A retail marijuana clerk warned that it is easy to lose an entire weekend when you don't know how much to consume or how it will affect you." (And if you have a five-day season, that's 40 percent of it.)
And always this: "Don't even consider taking some home with you, whether flying or driving."
Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
Ba da da da da da da, feelin’ groovy
(Eventually I figured out what the song was about)
Good advice for the big-game hunter, right? Slow down. You move too fast. You've got to make the season last. Just kicking down the aspen grove. Looking for deer and . . .
Well, maybe not during the hunt. But can think of at least one well-respected Colorado wilderness hunting writer who always has his evening smoke. In fact, he introduced me once to the White Widow.
. . . . Where were we? Did you say something? Is this the path to my tent?
![[Fig. 6]](http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/figure06.gif){kind=link}
![[Fig. 7]](http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/figure07.gif){kind=link}