Search results for

In today's episode of Dakota Datebook, we'll laugh along with Spirit Lake Dakota elder Catherine Howard as she tells us about rabbit and turtle, and frog and turtle.

With the leaves off the trees, winter can be a good time of the year to do some woodpecker watching.

Snow is an interesting phenomenon: As a water droplet freezes, it forms a hexagonal lattice that resembles a stop sign, but of course with six sides instead of eight. The ice crystal may continue to grow if water vapor around it continues to condense and freeze on the surface. Eventually, it makes a snowflake.

If you feed the birds during the winter, you may notice some differences in the species visiting the feeders from year to year. Some species, such as chickadees, are consistent visitors. But other species, such as siskins, seem to vary considerably — and during some years they seem to show up en masse, indicating some sort of invasion or "irruption" — meaning a sudden change in the population density.

It might surprise you, but rodents are the largest group of mammals, constituting a little over 40% of all mammal species – more than 30 of which can be found in North Dakota. That includes mice, voles, rats, pocket gophers, prairie dogs, squirrels, ground squirrels, chipmunks, beavers, muskrats, and porcupines. It is an amazingly diverse group.

One of the more popular citizen science efforts is the Great Backyard Bird Count, and it is coming up on February 17-20. It is an effort between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society, and Birds Canada to help scientists better understand the bird population dynamics and movements. Last year, participants turned in over 350,000 checklists from 192 countries around the world. These observations are helping scientists identify population trends, range expansions or contractions, how birds are doing in urban or rural areas, and more.

The birds have been busy at our bird feeders this winter! The bulk of birds do not consume the seeds at the feeder -- Chickadees and nuthatches come in, get one sunflower seed, and quickly fly away. Blue jays fill up with several seeds before flying away. These birds are flying off to a safer place to open and/or consume the food, or perhaps cache it.

We don’t give it much thought these days, but grizzly bears historically ranged across most of North Dakota.

For the casual observer it can often be difficult to distinguish quaking aspen from paper birch. That topic came up in a conversation recently. A friend mentioned that he cannot comfortably differentiate the two species. Both species are medium sized trees with light bark, but once a person learns what to look for, differentiating the two can become quite easy.

On January 6, 1805, the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition trapped a fox that was apparently hanging around Fort Mandan. Russell Reid, in his book Lewis and Clark in North Dakota (1988) speculated it could have been a swift fox. Most North Dakotans are familiar with the red fox. But the swift fox, also known as kit fox or prairie fox? Not so much, if at all.