Kevin Cook's weekly column explores the Colorado outdoors
While walking the corgi, I looked down and found growing next to the sidewalk the conclusion to a 30-year quest.
I found a filaree blooming in January.
The quest began in the late 1980s when I attended a birding conference and chatted with some enthusiastic birders about all the games they play that involve finding birds.
The foremost pursuit is the lifelist, a compilation of all the birds a person has found and identified alive in the wild. Everything elaborates from there.
How many birds can be found in a year or how many birds can be found just in a home state. How many birds can be seen on television or from a car.
Of the several dozen possibilities, one captured my thoughts and has never let go.
If this pursuit-based gaming applies to birds, why not apply it to all wildlife?
As I considered my own idea, discussion of yet another birding game brought me back to the group. And it was earnest discussion.
What about keeping track of all the birds seen in all 12 months of the year?
Five months later, I found three wildflowers blooming the week of Thanksgiving. Two weeks later, in early December, only two of them were still blooming; they both vanished before January arrived.
This rather minor event prompted me to consider the possibility of listing all the wildflowers I could find blooming in all 12 month of the same calendar year.
Last Tuesday I found my second one, the filaree.
It is a widespread plant that is generally ignored because it is so common. Filaree grows in sidewalk and driveway cracks, in gardens and flowerbeds, around gravel parking lots and along footpaths paved and unpaved. It grows along roads and around farm fields.
Though it is but one plant, it suffers the burden of many different names. Various wildflower books and websites name it as storksbill or stork’s bill, even storkbeak. Others name it as cranesbill or crane’s bill.
Considering it is a plant and not an animal, neither crane nor stork is appropriate.
Books that avoid such biologically illiterate names identify it as filaria or as filaree.
A member of the geranium family, filaree got me curious about wildlife from other continents because it originated in Asia. How, I wondered, did it come to North America and ultimately to Colorado?
To answer such questions, I devoted considerable time studying biogeography and the ecological concepts of something being exotic — from another land and geographically displaced by people — or being indigenous — occurring in an area by natural processes.
As the years passed, I pursued my own quest to find as many wildflowers in Colorado as I could. Filaree kept presenting itself by blooming in March and August and December. If I just tried diligently enough, I could probably find one blooming in January, which would make it my second species to be found blooming every month of the year.
And three decades later, I did!
The corgi expressed some concern about my enthusiasm, and he thoroughly sniffed the area I stared at while on my hands and knees. Though oblivious to the occasion, he shared the moment with me making it a warm though possibly weird bonding moment.
Oh, and that first wildflower found blooming all year? Dandelion!