Gary
One of The Driest Places in North America
In southwestern U.S. there is a region that receives less than 13 inches of rainfall annually with arid mountains and parched soils. It is the 25,000-square mile Mojave Desert. This desert has extremes in temperatures ranging from over 100 degrees in the summer to sub-freezing temperatures in the winter. The soils are arid with poor […]
Keystone Thrust at Red Rock Canyon
As Anne and I traveled around Red Rock Canyon in Nevada, we saw immense gray carbonate mountains next to with the red sandstone hills. At about the same time as the dinosaurs became extinct, 65 million years ago, there was a shoving match between two tectonic plates. The Pacific plate pushed under the North America […]
Walking on the Ocean Floor in Nevada
During a recent visit to Las Vegas, my wife and I traveled a few miles west to the 196,000-acre Red Rock Canyon. Within the Mojave Desert, this area was once the ocean bottom 500 million years ago. This is before there were the current continents and at a time that the first fish appeared in […]
The Hummingbird Imposter
At first glance it appeared to be dozens of tiny hummingbirds getting nectar from a large flowering bush in my neighbor’s front yard. Excited, I darted in the house to grab my camera. Once I got closer to the shrub it became apparent that these were not hummingbirds, but hummingbird moths. These moths have plump […]
The Reclusive Green Heron
This small heron keeps to itself in the quiet areas of ponds and wetlands in North, Central and South America. It hunts by wading in shallow water (no more than 4 inches deep) for small fish, tadpoles and insects. It’s population is stable and seems to be spreading northward, possibly due to climate change.
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