Backyard Wildflowers

These huge cumulous clouds caught my attention this evening, so I decided to get out to take some photos of them. My apartment complex is backed up against some bluffs where lots of scrub oak grow and create great habitat for birds, mule deer, rabbits, and other wildlife. We are approaching the part of the year where the Front Range will experience thunderstorms and rain most afternoons. These usually begin with dramatic cloudscapes such as this, with anvil shaped thunder heads. Then the sky gets very dark, there is typically a lot of lightening and thunder, and if it ends before sunset, the sunset will be very dramatic with the residual clouds leftover from the storm.

Now that we have been getting some rain, the area is greening up: leaves are sprouting out on the scrub oak, the grass is getting taller, and wildflowers are sprouting out. Prairie pasqueflowers seem to be some of the first wildflowers to show themselves in the springtime, although I haven't actually seen any myself this year so far (although I've noticed plenty of sightings of these flowers from others on iNaturalist this spring).

One of the things I enjoy about iNaturalist is that I've been able to use it to slowly learn the different types of wildflowers around the state. And although I think that the photo recognition software that iNaturalist uses is very cool, I think it's still an important skill to learn how to identify without an algorithm. One way I like to learn the flowers is by taking photos of the wildflowers on iNaturalist, then going back with a guidebook to identify them. Doing this - actively looking images up in a physical guidebook, seems to help me remember the different species better. Wildflowers of Colorado Field Guide by Don Mammoser with Stan Tekiela is the guidebook that I like to use because it organizes by color, which is what I notice first about these wildflowers.

When you start to learn the different types of plants in an area, you suddenly see differences in plants everywhere, even if you don't know the names of the species you are looking at. You begin to notice things like leaf shape and arrangement, color, flower type, etc. These photos are living proof of the sheer diversity of angiosperms, and this is only in a small area of central Colorado.

And then you get flowers like this (below): members of the genus Erigeron. There are so many of them, and they all look so similar, that I don't usually bother trying to differentiate. When I was a field tech, identifying Erigeron flowers was the bane of our existence because it was sometimes near impossible to differentiate between species. They all just look like daisies.