Yesterday, I was walking the ridge above Bear Canyon in the Turtle Canyon Wilderness. On a small rocky outcrop at 9090 feet, I encountered a colony of hedgehog cactus. (I'm assuming it is from the genus Echinocereus, though I don't really know my cacti.) I found it beautiful, but odd. Why grow here, on a dry ridge above 9000 feet? Wikipedia has the answer: "In the wild, several of the species are cold hardy, tolerating temperatures as low as -23 C, but only in dry conditions." So there you go. The other living creature that caught my attention was the Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana). Flocks of this busy, noisy corvid circled and followed along the ridge, probably there to feed on (and cache) limber and pinyon cones. I finally found one sitting still long enough to capture it on film.
No comments:
Post a Comment