By Wendy Langhans It looked both ominous and somehow familiar – the pyrocumulus clouds that appeared over our Santa Clarita valley almost two weeks ago.  It certainly caught my attention, enough so that I went home and grabbed my camera. It was a pyrocumulus cloud, created by the Station fire.  Pyrocumulus clouds get their name from their shape (“cumulus” means “heap” in ...

By Wendy Langhans “It hasn’t burned in 60 years.”  My heart sank when I heard that on the news reports, because I knew fire requires fuel and a lot of fuel can accumulate over 60 years.  But as anyone who has ever built a campfire can tell you, not all fuel burns equally well.  Firefighters refer to three characteristics that ...

By Wendy Langhans Our bedtime ritual in Santa Clarita – opening the upstairs bedroom windows and allowing the cool, fresh night air to fill the rooms.  Of course, sometimes the rooms are also filled with night noises, like honking geese at 2:00 AM. Honking geese?  At 2:00 AM?  Yup.  It’s that time of year.  In the weeks leading up to ...

By Wendy Langhans Who among us hasn’t hit their head?  Whether it’s a cabinet door left open or a slippery banana peel, we all know what it feels like.  IT HURTS! But woodpeckers are constantly banging their heads against trees.  We often hear Acorn woodpeckers and Nuttall’s woodpeckers pounding on trees to get at the tasty insects lying beneath the ...

By Wendy Langhans One of the first signs of puberty is the growing collection of smelly grooming products – deodorants, perfumes and hair gels – that threaten to take over all the shelf space in the bathroom.  These products are designed with one purpose in mind:  to help the teenager blend in with the crowd by looking and smelling like ...

By Wendy Langhans Anyone who’s ever been on a picnic knows what a bee sounds like.  Or do they?  Watch this video and listen carefully – can you hear the two different buzzes – each with a different pitch? The lower pitched buzz occurs when a Bumblebee flies between blossoms.  The higher pitched buzz occurs when a Bumblebee lands on ...

By Wendy Langhans Last week we responded to a listener’s question, “what kinds of lizards live here“? This week we’ll take a closer look at his second question, “how do I get more into my yard”? I wish that “lizards would stay outside where they belong”. That’s what my friend posted last week on her Facebook status. Because we’re friends, ...

By: Wendy Langhans I got my first-up-close-and-personal look at a lizard many years ago, when my cat left a “present” for me on my bed pillow. My reaction? Let’s just say I wasn’t overjoyed. But over the years, as I’ve observed lizards in the field and learned more about them, my appreciation for them has grown.   For example, did ...

By Wendy Langhans   Sometimes we are stumped by the simplest of questions.  Like what happened earlier this week on our full moon hike at Towsley.  As we were talking about nocturnal hunters like bobcats and mountain lions, a teenager asked me this this question?  “Why do cats have slit pupils instead of round ones?”   Huh?  I was stumped.  ...

By Wendy Langhans It had been a dream of mine for so long that I had almost forgotten about it.  Fifty years ago, I was a moonstruck child, in awe of anything having to do with astronauts and space rockets and setting foot on the moon.  I pleaded with my mom to wake me up early to watch the Mercury ...