Bill Hayden's Blog - March 2010

Tree Squirrel and Deer

webcam capture

It's Almost Ground Squirrel Time
March 20, 2010
Almost but not quite, at least here on the west side. There have bee reports of ground squirrels up and about on the east side around East Glacier, but I didn't see any last weekend when I went over there.

Just so we can be ready for them I've got one of the cams temporarily pointed at the holes here in the lawn at Headquarters. Last year we had a contest for the first sighting. Let's do that again. The first submission of a ground squirrel sighting from the webcam will win. It might just be bragging rights, but maybe we can come up with a small prize as well. To save an image right click on it and chose "Save Picture As..." then send it to me via email. (our website management software will automatically convert my email address into a link that does not allow attachments, so try this: to email me send them to bill_hayden (at) nps.gov. Replace the (at) with an @ sign and it should work.)

So far I've had two people send in webcam captures from the ground squirrel cam. I've included the images here. The first one, while it was a squirrel, was a tree squirrel who for some reason decided that hanging out in the hole was a good place to nibble on something. The second was one of our resident deer. They don't usually hang out right in the HQ lawn. I guess being Saturday and no one around this morning, they felt comfortable coming in close. Usually they are over lurking around at my house waiting for my garden to start growing. Other than my daffodils I haven't found much that they will leave alone.

Speaking of daffodils, just so you can compare, some of mine are about 3 inches high right now. The others are still under a small lump of snow, but that should be gone within a few days. Things are early this year.

 

Snow, What Snow
March 3, 2010
Well it’s March already and so far winter has been a non-event, at least at my house here at Headquarters. I’ve got parts of my lawn that are visible when there should be several feet of snow accumulated. We haven’t really had a decent snowfall since around New Years. Even poor Snowball couldn’t be repaired and has melted away. That all worked out well for me, because I was gone a lot in January and wasn’t looking forward to coming home to a driveway filled with snow, but how are things in the high country? There is a graph on the U.S.G.S. site http://www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/research/ftm_snow.htm that shows the current status of snow at Flattop Mountain. I have to warn you the graphs are a kind of confusing and it’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Don’t confuse the amount of snow depth with the water content. The important information is the Snow Water Equivalent (basically how much water is stored in the snow). What you will notice on the “Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) at Flattop Mtn.” graph is that the red line indicating this year is only at about 75% of the average (based on information from 1970 through 2009). It’s also just a tad higher than last summer, although the trend looks like it will drop below in the next few days. I’ll be keeping an eye on this graph over the next month to see what the trend is. While you are at that site you might want to browse around a bit. The U.S. G.S. have a ton of cool stuff on their website.

In other news:
You’ve probably noticed that Snowball is gone. The poor guy only had one or two good make-overs early on and then with no new snow kind of melted into something that looked like a Salvador Dali painting. We finally took the cam off him and all that remains is one round ball of ice. Maybe next year he will fare better.

Long range we are testing a new camera that will replace the old one at Goat Haunt. I think I mentioned that before. It’s now going to have the same size and quality as all the rest of them. That should go in, in late April or early May.

I’ve updated the Webcam Gallery and you should start noticing some of your submissions from last summer showing up. Thanks again for all the nice webcam captures. Just today I got a nice one from Apgar Mountain that had a bald eagle in it. Sweet!

Oh yeah, this morning walking through the headquarters area I heard a varied thrush, chickadees, and a pack of coyotes yipping and yapping. I bet they found a carcass of something and were feasting away. Do coyotes have fun? It sounded like it.

Bill