Kim asked a question in her diary, and I'd figured I'd answer it here. Because it's a topic I like to talk about.

Millers.

No, not the guys who spend their lives grinding grain. The 2-3 centimeter, triangular moths that show up everywhere this time of year.

Except here. Yep, we got no millers. To speak of. Must be some grizz around.

Now they are inundated with millers in Central City. And somewhere to the north of us, a structural fire is being blamed on dead millers piling up on a halogen lamp. Colorado is also swamped with these dusty insects, but so far I haven't heard anybody blame their forest fires on 'em.

But I mentioned the grizz. One of the surprises that came out of all the grizzly monitoring done in the Yellowstone country the past couple decades is that grizzly bears like to eat millers. A lot.

Enough that the bears move up to 11-12,000 foot elevations late in the summer and do nothing but eat millers. Seems the female moths crawl into crevices in the talus slopes above treeline, and are soon swarmed over by male moths.

Thousands and thousands of male moths. The bears throw the rocks down the slope and then dive in, scooping out handfuls (pawfuls?) of dusty moths to eat. All day long.

Be interesting to know how much erosion of the Rockies has been accelerated by grizzlies digging for millers.

They've done protein and fat content measurements on the millers. Don't remember the percentages, but these little bugs are way up there in both categories. Basically the fattest, richest food available in the ecosytem. Ranking up there with salmon, if we had any.

Now, the alpine is not a great production zone for millers. They are just there late in summer because there are still flowers blooming at that elevation. You see, the millers are like elk and deer. They follow the greenup up the mountains.

So where do all of our millers come from?

The prairie states. That is where they hatch out and go through their cutworm larval stage. And then they begin their westward migration up into the mountains. Hundreds and hundreds of miles.

Jo, the cutworms that fatten up in your neck of the continent may very well feed grizzlies in Yellowstone. And all those fuzzy splatters on our windshields may be depriving some bear of needed sustenance (not really... as I understand it, we could feed a few more bears). But you get the point.

We are that interrelated. A significant portion of the few hundred grizzlies we have left in the Lower 48 depend upon a food source that is garnered from five or six different states. They really are our bears.

Oh, and a personal note to Kim: Regarding the concern in your second entry today... given his age and gender, I would be a lot more worried if he came to visit and wasn't that eager. Just a thought from the other side of the fence...