Field Notes · Gothic, Colorado · 9,500 ft
How a Meadow Matches Itself
Every summer, a natural marketplace forms in the mountains outside Gothic, Colorado. Millions of pollinators and wildflowers find each other in an intricate, ever-shifting dance — bees, flies, butterflies, and one species of hummingbird, pairing with blooms as they open and close. RMBL has recorded it in painstaking, week-by-week detail. This is what they've mapped.
A season of visits, rewired week by week
Each line is a visit recorded in the field — a pollinator on the right landing on a flower on the left, its thickness the number of visits that week. Drag the slider or press play to watch the whole market re-form across the summer. Click any species to draw every partner it meets across the whole season at once.
The columbine, lupine, and bouquet above are watercolor emblems of the Colorado high country. Aquilegia and Lupinus weren't among the species recorded in these particular plots — but they bloom the same slopes, in the same brief, crowded summer.