More flowers from summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains to lighten up your winter.
More summer mountain flowers
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Tag Archives: mountains
Summer mountain flowers
For those of you beginning to tire of winter, here is a flashback to last summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Flowers seem like they ought to be sensitive, but they grow on bare rock and in tiny crevices, flaunting their hardiness with their petals.
Scouting: snow, fog, and little red spiders
I’m switching up my field sites a bit this year, using some from 2012 but also adding new ones. I’ve known the general area where they would go, but this week I went scouting the area to figure out exactly where I’ll be observing juncos this summer. Here are the highlights, in photograph form. (The quality of the animal photos isn’t great because I brought my taking-pictures-of-mountains camera instead of my taking-pictures-of-birds camera.)
Climate change in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Climate change will affect every corner of the globe in some way, from rising average temperatures to ocean acidification to increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather. It may eventually lead to coastal habitat becoming submerged and the desertification of once-green areas. Currently, however, one of the areas in which climate change exhibits its most dramatic effects is on mountains.
Sierra Nevada mountains
On mountains, the variation in elevation causes habitats to change over relatively small areas. Species may be adapted to just a small strip of habitat within a certain elevational range. With changing climatic conditions, those strips of habitat may move on the mountain, and species then have to follow that strip – track their climatic niche – or stay put and adapt rapidly to the new conditions there.
Tough Little Birds 