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365: The 2015 Edition (250/365)
It was a first for me - a rainbow sitting to our west almost first thing in the morning. It was glorious!
Peaceable Encounter, Garden, Rocky Mountain Front Range, Colorado, Spring.
The bullsnake had been pecked without mercy near its right eye by a scrub jay. It was the jay's diving movements that made me think it was attacking a snake. When I went outside to investigate, my suspicions were confirmed and I saw a red puncture mark (likely non-lethal) on the bullsnake's head.
The bullsnake was trying to make a fast exit from the area and it moved at my walking pace. I moved alongside it as it appeared to return to its home area behind our home.
I first saw a Western garter snake under our deck, which was where it remained. Meanwhile, as I moved next to the bullsnake, another garter snake (of about the other garter snake's same size) appeared.
I had no idea what to expect as they were so close to each other! I can't say for sure if the two snakes touched each other, but they certainly passed parallel to each other.
They didn't slow down or appear to react to each other's presence. Instead they continued on each of their separate ways.
Macro, Rocky Mountain Front Range, Colorado, July Morning.
I was watching this flower as honey bees and sweat bees came and went. I was surprised to see this larger bee arrive and didn't know what is was. I took a look at bee charts trying to find out what it was. It had a powerful exoskeleton and some fur, but not like bumble bees.
I welcome any bee specialists' comments about this type of bee. If it is a cuckoo bee, such a bee is known to lay its eggs in other bees' dwellings, eat what they've collected, and possibly even kill those bees' larvae and queens.
"Located in narrow Queen’s Canyon just north of the geological formation known as the Garden of the Gods, Glen Eyrie is the estate of General William Jackson Palmer, the founder of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG) and the city of Colorado Springs. What began as a relatively modest clapboard home in 1871 had evolved into the sixty-five room "castle” by 1906, with multiple improvements in between.
Both Frederick J. Sterner and Thomas MacLaren, each a prominent architect in Colorado, had a hand in the evolving design of the nearly 50-acre complex. In addition to the Tudor Revivial main house, the district includes a gatekeeper’s house, schoolhouse, large carriage house, two power-generating plants, gardener’s house, dairy, granary, and many surviving historic landscape features, such as bridges and a rose garden. First listed in the National Register in 1975, the historic district was expanded in 2016 to encompass additional buildings commissioned by Palmer to complete his self-sufficient estate." History Colorado
Compositionally Challenged Week 36 - Nature
From Wiki: Roxborough State Park is a designated Colorado Natural Area and National Natural Landmark for its 300-million-year-old red sandstone Fountain Formations that tilt at a 60-degree angle. The park includes great examples of exposed Precambrian to Late Mesozoic hogback, monolithic and spire formations from the Permian, Pennsylvanian and Cretaceous age. Carpenter Peak's exposed monzonite is from the Precambrian era.
"Katharine Lee Bates, inspired by what she saw when she arrived at the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado in 1893, immortalized the mountain in her beloved anthem “America the Beautiful.” It is an ageless sentinel that overlooks the peaks and plains of Colorado, an enduring symbol of mountain majesty and western spirit."
A lovely afternoon with a turbulent atmosphere.
Raw photo from iphone rendered in lightroom- tee tiny sensor does well sometimes!
Eurasian Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) with wet feathers, perched on an aspen tree, Rocky Mountain Front Range, Colorado