Natural History Notes

eggs ... and more eggs...

2012-01-25T20:26:00.002-06:00

I e-mailed pretty much all my close friends and family, but I guess I forgot to post it here.

On Tuesday 3 January 2012 about 4pm I found AN EGG in the wicker chair in the hay under the chicken roost. A beautiful pale brown, 1.7 ounce egg. There was another on Thursday, and every day till Sunday. Monday she took off.

Then on Tuesday 10 January, there were TWO eggs, as younger chicken joined in. Now I am getting two on most days, with occasionally a single.

I have tried to get them to lay in the nice dark sheltered box. I have put hay in there, and a fake egg, and even a real egg. No. They want to lay in the hay under the roost, and that's all there is to it. It's OK, as long as I remember to go up every afternoon and check, so that no eggs are there lying in the nest under the roost overnight.

Amy was here last week and got some nice pictures of the girls in the morning sun. She also got to watch big chicken lay an egg.
Of course, she couldn't see through the hen, but she could tell what must be happening, and gave me a play by play. Tail going up and down. Hen pulling around pieces of hay. And sure enough, when big chicken got up, where there had been one egg, there were two.

hello, 2012

2012-01-08T18:58:00.010-06:00

Sunday 1 January 2012

Last week CoServ came rolling across the garden and into the back yard with an ENORMOUS truck, and cut down my dead oak tree. BEFORE it fell on the electric drop from the transformer.

I'm happy about that. But the black vultures won't be. They will have to find somewhere else from which to survey the countryside.

There was a pretty good freeze last night -- the surface of the bird bath was pretty well iced, though Alabaster seemed to be able to drink from it around 8am. Cold tongue, brrrr! Agate declined to go out till after 10, when it had warmed up into tho 40°s.

There is unlikely to be another freeze for at least a week, and also little chance of precipitation. I will try to get both Eddie and Steve organized to cover up the playhouse roof next Saturday. Listening to Michael Pollan read his A Place of My Own audiobook has motivated me to try and save my “hut in the woods,” though I am unsure of its future. [update -- I spoke to Eddie about noon today as I post this, that is, Jan 8, and he got the tarp on]

Yestorday Eddie did a real nice job of replacing the short fence segment that CoServ rolled over (buried in briers as it was) at the sw corner of the garden. He made a wire-gate wide enough for a vehicle, if needed. There is a lightweight white plastic post in the center of the opening part that both makes the gate-span visible, and can be easily removed to allow a pickup through for access to the back of the house.

This shows the new section of fence, as well as my volunteer mustard greens in the garden. They came up after it started to rain this fall, and I have been nibbling away on them, picking 4-6 leaves at a time. The chickens like them, too ;-)

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T18:11:00.006-06:00

The wonders of technology --
We, Crispin (my brother) and I, as well as my SIL and nephew, just finished reading Ring Out, Wild Bells, as we have done at midnight this day almost every year of my life. This year we did it at midnight Oslo time, as that's where they are. Not on a horrendously expensive phone call. Skype, full video, free. Tom showed off with Christmas carols on the clarinet, which he just started learning.
I showed some pictures of the chickens and CoServ cutting the dead tree at the Ridge. And we read our poem, which seems just as topical and relevant, if not more so, than when I first remember it, fifty-something years ago.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow;
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring in the valiant one and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the of the land,
Ring in the light that is to be.

Happy New Year, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850, and me.

bugs in the water, again

2011-11-13T19:38:00.007-06:00

I made it back to the Benthic project collection for the first time in months last Friday. Of course the whole project was derailed in the late summer because there warn’t no water. But the water’s back, at least some, and the critters too.

We went to the Burning Tree, Woodrow, and Gay Street sites. Jackson is still barricaded by the property-owner’s barbed wire. It will be a fairly quick lab session next week, because we didn’t get a whole lot. There were, I heard, dragonfly larvae in the Woodrow riffle, but I wasn’t picking that sample, so I didn't see them. Gay had lots of tiny, barely visible swimming thingies - scuds?? that had to be picked with the pipette, because you could never have caught them with the forceps. And a good many very fast and wiggly mosquito larvae. New folk, Faith and a guy whose name I didn’t absorb, joined us. Also Raquel, Theresa, Marilyn, John and Adelaide, and Don. No Kay.

Dragonfly and mosquito larvae images from Chris@184 Chris Bradbury and NZ Alex on Flickr. The pictures of John and Don, Adelaide, and Kay are from the Jackson site last April.

bees in flowers, and a farewell

2011-11-05T21:03:00.006-05:00

Friday 4 Nov

It’s a quite lovely day today, pretty chilly but perfectly clear and pretty calm. Last night we were due for a freeze, which I guess we had, since the thermometer read 34° at 9 am, after an hour of sunshine already. But it was calm, after the extremely blustery cold front came in more than a day before, and it didn’t seem particularly cold. The almond verbena is still just fine. It’s almost head-high, though fairly slender, and the top part of it is almost all flower spikes. I have seen the bees working it this week, for the first time since I’ve had it.

The bees are also noisily busy in the yard-full of scarlet sage, and also at the turk’s-cap and ceniza, as well as the yellow wildflowers. Perhaps also in the slender vervain, which along with crow-poison has made a return in the fields, thinking it is spring. The winter honeysuckle is also blooming a bit out of season. However, though there are some surviving branches of the eleagnus, I have seen no sign of blooms there.

Goodbye to Whispering Oaks

Lat Saturday, the 29th, we had a very nice though bittersweet day out at Whispering Oaks, which is now closed. The weather was perfect. Chery, Kay, Rhonda, Julie Althouse, Mary, and I showed up for Troop 74 (and 86), and Laura was also there, as well as Mr. Cline, and Mrs. Kooker made an appearance too (can’t get my head around calling her Jean). They got us all together for a videotaped interview, which Mary has been sent for Special Collections in the library; she’s going to make a DVD.

We went down to the lake, which doesn’t look like it had the problems my pond had this summer. It’s obviously much deeper, in a steepish bit of terrain, and with a steeper dam, too. It looked very verdant, because solidly covered with duckweed.

--Ooh,there is a towhee outside the living-room terrace! Also the white-throats are here; I heard them calling on Halloween day.--

Julie, Chery, and I went prospecting down paths trying to find the campsite back at the back, where I remember my first Brownie day camp, and where they recall a Primitive Camp site (the once I went to Primitive, it was near the lake). By continuing on past the manicured beaten trail on a just-visible trace, we found it, and the back fenceline. Ran afoul of a few greenbriers.

The lake seemed the right size to me, and the camp territory as a whole. But the Big House was quite shrunken, and as for the filled-in fire pit!?! The gate arch at the entrance was barely wide enough for the shuttle bus, when I kind of remembered it as a broad opening. The parking lot seemed about right, but the long winding road up to the Big House was merely a brief stroll. That effect may partly have been because it is so highly cleared out now, no underbrush or passion flowers any where near the road.

Well, it was a nice day, It would be awfully nice if a non-profit bought it for a meeting-site, and kept the building, but I guess that’s unlikely. I could make a great house out of that building, but I suppose most people would find such an open plan a problem. And wintertime heat would probably be a problem, I guess. But Imagine a sleeping loft installed over maybe a third of the big room, and maybe the central fire restored -- well, maybe not, the current one works well.. Maybe removable partitions to enclose the low under-loft area, to keep just it warm in really cold weather, with a wood stove...

growing grass once again needs management

2011-10-24T17:51:00.004-05:00

We had an entirely unexpected 1/2" of hard rain with a thunderstorm about 2am yesterday. Last I had noticed, there was a 10% probability in the forecast. I, with a mindset fostered by months of drought, discounted this entirely. Thus my front driver's seat is a trifle damp, even now, a day and a half later. There was probably quite a bit of run-off, but I haven't been down to see the effects on the tank yet.

Here are notes from earlier this week (I see I am repeating myself about the thunderstorm.

Wednesday 19 October

A blustery day with cloudless sky, struggling to get up to 70°F. August just a horrible memory! My feet were cold last night regardless of the down.

Thursday 20 October

Pretty much a beautiful repeat of yesterday, with the wind calmed down. Even chillier last night; there might have been a very light frost, but I wasn’t up early enough to see. Probably not, though -- the portulaca in the front yard still looks just fine.

The yard was starting to look a bit shaggy, so I let Buddy in the last couple of days. There seems to be a lot more green regrowth in the yard than out on the hillside, probably because I watered it a few times so it was not in such really terrible shape. The horse-mowing is pretty good. He has neatly nibbled around the red sages and the yellow comps that he evidently doesn’t like. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to like Johnson Grass either, so I am going to have to deal with the edge of the herb bed.

Sunday 22 October, 4am

Another lovely day, and I paid no attention to the forecast, which the last time I checked had a 10% chance of precipitation. Woke up at 1:40 am to a thunderstorm and a downpour, already so heavy I decided there was no point in going out and getting soaked to close the car window. Second-guessed myself in the half hour following. It did taper off after that, and by 4 am was completely over. Remains to be seen in the morning the state of the car seat.

The ground is really getting quite green with the new-sprouting grass, and the clumps of bluestem have several inches of new growth.

I forgot to look when I was at the Community Market yesterday to see if there were any new yellow rain lilies so late. This might bring out a few more, even in October, since so many plants are coming out as if it’s spring. The old-fashioned pink-and-yellow lantana at the entrance to the vegetable garden space has all new leaves and several flower heads.Tough old plant. The beautiful red one I got at the Discovery Garden sale last fall didn’t survive the winter (still in the pot), and if it had, I suspect it wouldn’t have made it through the summer. But I might get another anyway, it was so nice.

In the front yard, the scarlet sage and the turk's-cap, both rejuvenated by the cool weather and rain, are making a nice red show.

oh, happy day!

2011-10-18T15:05:00.005-05:00

Over a week's worth of entries in one wodge:

Wednesday 12 October

I had almost given up hope for rain Saturday by 9:30 at night when a tap-tap-tap started on the roof. For an hour or so it was like when the popcorn is nearly finished -- there’s a pop, and then a long pause, and you think it’s all done. Then a pop-pop as a few more go. This rain was like this, I kept thinking it was stopping, then a few more drops. Then after an hour or so it settled into a steady drizzle that lasted almost all night.

That gave us about an inch. Didn’t do much for the tank, because there was almost no runoff, but increased it a bit. Then about 9am it started up again, somewhat harder, till early afternoon, and added another inch to the total. I took a fairly unremarkable picture of the front yard, and Buddy in the background, in the rain at noon.

Monday afternoon on the way to the bee meeting, Carolyn couldn’t get over how washed and sparkling everything was, and how lovely the day felt.

Back in the early spring, when I was getting the new hive stand ready for the split that didn’t happen, I grubbed several dozen extremely crowded bulbs out of the fencerow where they were going to be right under it. A patch of garlic, and about 80 of what I thought were the Schoolhouse Lilies or Oxblood Lilies, the red rain lilies of September. I evidently missed a few, because three Red Spider Lilies (Lycoris), to my surprise, squeezed themselves up out of the corner of the space to bloom. The bulbs that I dug up had been in a paper bag by the front door all summer. They were still plump and healthy, so I took seven bags of ten each to bee meeting, as well as the cut flowers.

Gave some to Carolyn and Kay, and Kurt raffled off the rest.

Yesterday, Tuesday, I didn’t even look at the forecast, so I was astonished to wake up about 3:30 this morning to more rain. For half an hour it was very gentle, though distant lightning was flickering. Then suddenly the lightning and thunder were on top of us, and the rain a downpour. Eventually I went back to sleep. This morning is sunny and cool, the broken clouds have all blown on off, and we got another 1-3/4 inches! Now the tank is quite noticeably bigger; ought to be good for another month of drought at least (not that I am hoping for any such thing).

The pond margin has come up to pretty much cover all of the flat cracked plain that I about lost my shoe in before.

At least one crawdad has survived and excavated a new chimney.

There are tiny little white flowers blooming on tho silt flats around the water.

The hillside of bare dirt and dead straw is covered with green dots of germinated seeds. Don’t know what KIND of seeds, but green, anyway.

Back before the rain, when the path to the pond was just dust, Alabaster could turn from a pretty white cat into a goblin in an instant. All it took was a quick wriggle in the dust on her back.

The younger red chicken has hurt her right leg and is limping very badly. Up around the middle of the leg there is a big clumpy scab. I can’t tell just what is wrong. I don’t see how it can possibly be a varmint bite. I wonder if she could have gotten herself caught behind a tie rod or something. She is eating scratch eagerly. Undecided what to do, if anything.

Tuesday 18 Oct

Chilly this morning, down near or below 50° - a cold front blew through energetically about nine last night, with wind and thunder and lots of lightning, and a fairly vigorous, if brief, rain. Less than a quarter of an inch, but a nice reinforcement. It comes to nearly four inches for October so far. It’s still pretty windy this morning. Still below 60° at noon. So odd to actually welcome the sunny spots on the floor for putting one’s feet into.

Now I am going to go into the library and FINALLY get these posts up.

Oh, and one more wildlife photo. This is the second scorpion that has shown up in the sink. This one was evidently killed by the hot water I was running to wash dishes before I got the sink cleared out and saw it. Some arthropods (roaches, for instance) are very sensitive to hot tap water.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was hastily rinsing out the dishes to give the cats "gushie-fud" before going off to Ikea with Mary, I felt a sharp pain in the side of my fingertip as I started scrubbing with the scratcher. Turned out to be an inch-long scorpion on it. I had a dish of soda right there, so I immediately plastered it with wet soda, shortly reinforced with aloe vera. It hurt for maybe ten minutes, not very badly, and then was virtually unnoticeable. Never made any mark to speak of. I'm sure a bigger one would be worse, but I was fairly relieved to discover that they are not nearly as dangerous as I had feared.

it's closer.. . . .

2011-10-08T17:07:00.002-05:00

Here's this afternoon's 4pm radar. The storms keep boiling up on the radar animation, and then sliding off north to Oklahoma almost as fast as they propagate. But the whole system is getting nearer.

Outside, there are tall clouds in the west, but it is still sunny here.

Even if this system doesn't manage to reach us, we may actually have another chance tomorrow:


The shortwave is eventually expected to kick out to
the northeast during the day on Sunday and move further east than
what was expected yesterday at this time. With this in mind think
that the heavy precipitation axis will set up further east and
actually has a good chance of setting up just west of Interstate
35 by Sunday afternoon. If this pans out this would spread
anywhere from 1 to 3 inches of much needed rainfall over at least
half of the County Warning Area by Monday morning. With the expected easterly
shift of the heavy precipitation axis...went ahead with 70 to 80
percent chance of storms from the metroplex and west Sunday
afternoon and Sunday night.

So still hoping ...

hoping harder

2011-10-06T19:55:00.004-05:00

They aren't taking the thunderstorm chances out of the forecast, they have actually increased them. The $64,000 question is just how far to the east the low-pressure trough will be able to push, because there is a big ridge of high pressure in the east. That precipitation forecast graphic has an awfully narrow line
separating nothing-much quarter-inch rains from substantial two to four-inchers. And just where that transition falls will make all the difference.

hope, hope, hope

2011-10-05T05:48:00.003-05:00

Says the NWS meteorologist at 3 this morning

With the increasing moisture over the next several
days...rain chances will be good for areas west of Interstate 35
where the best lift will be located. The GFS and Canadian models
are in decent agreement with the placement of the
trough...although some discrepancies can be noted with the
strength of the system. The European model (ecmwf) remains mostly dry for North
Texas with the bulk of the precipitation staying to the west. Will lean
more with the wetter solutions as the atmosphere should be primed
and ready for precipitation as the lift enters North Texas. The best
chances fore precipitation will be Saturday night into Sunday west of
Interstate 35. Rain chances will end Monday as the upper trough
exits to the north.

Will post this weekend to report any drops...

pond about to dry up

2011-10-04T20:26:00.007-05:00

The stocktank ("farm pond," for furriners) is MUCH smaller than it was a week or so ago. It is obviously down to where the bottom is almost level, so that I doubt it is more than a few inches deep. You can see the silt-flats a fraction of an inch underwater stretching out some feet from the margin.

If we fail to get enough rain to create some runoff, I think it will not last more than another week. And rain remains unlikely. There are 10% and 20% chances of thunderstorms listed in the weekend forecast, but the meteorologist's discussions indicates that he thinks he will be taking them out as the week progresses, if the models continue to run as he expects. West of us it may rain. To the north, in Oklahoma and the plains states, it is quite likely to. Here -- not so much.

I saw the heron circling over me, crying out a deep "cro-o-o-oak," but I was unable to catch a picture of it, only of tracks in the mud.

I attempted to stride across the end of the pond to get a measure, assuming that where the large cracks were was dry mud. Wrong.

The pond is surrounded by a pattern of deep fissures. The clay of this lower level of the bed is obviously extremely sensitive to drying, and begins to shrink, opening huge cracks, while still pretty soft.

goodbye to a tree

2011-10-01T14:44:00.003-05:00

Last April, the oak tree that has framed the view on the back deck at 711 for forty years fell down. Remarkably, it damaged nothing vital. The railing next to it was smashed, and the corner of the deck bench broken. It brought down the remaining bit of the fiberglass awning, and the clothesline was pulled off the wall, without damaging the wall.

Chuck, who worked for an outfit that contracted with powerlines to cut trees, agreed to cut it up and get it off the deck. He and Eddie got the upper branches cut and freed the oak tree to the east that they were resting on. And he made a few little tentative cuts in the trunk, but never did any more. Then he and Kristin moved out without notice. And the tree lay there, all summer in the 100° heat, drying out.

This morning, with just the little 16" chainsaw, all by himself, Eddie cut it into sections and rolled them off the deck. Here he poses in well-deserved triumph.

There's a good deal of winter heat there, before I finally say goodbye to the tree completely. And considerable work still to split the sections into burnable pieces. But that was a really fine morning's work!

scorched on purpose

2011-09-30T18:33:00.006-05:00

The plumber’s torch may be too imprecise for fine-scale jewelry work, but it works just fine at scorching grassburs.

I’ve been being careful not to walk in one part of the front yard for some time now. At first I had only noticed one grassbur rosette, some of the developing heads of which I picked and threw away. But I watered the front yard, and that has let a bunch more come up.

So today I took the torch and spent 15-20 minutes scorching the centers of the rosettes and the green seed heads. I hope I gave them enough flame to kill the cells. I’ll wait a few days and see what they look like.

This horrible summer has mostly been too dry for the grassburs to survive. Well, I'll take my silver linings where I can find them.

dry

2011-09-30T00:57:00.008-05:00

About ten days ago in the evening I walked down to check on the pond, and was lucky enough in my inconspicuous approach to see three ducks floating around on it, and a great blue heron. The heron was standing about halfway out from the edge to the middle, and looked about shin-deep; obviously the water's pretty shallow.

I went carefully sneaking down the next evening with the camera, but no birds were in evidence. Just the poor shrunken little puddle, with a dead young pine on the dam. I guess I am lucky that the big pine on the dam top has survived (so far).

The clouds in the west were quite dramatic, but not of course to the point of producing any actual, you know, water.

This little bitterweed is growing in the rocks on the east side that are normally underwater. It is probably only flowering because of the one 5/8" rain we got back early in the month.

Weathermen changed their minds

2011-09-27T13:15:00.004-05:00

Or maybe the weather changed IT'S mind. Today's discussion says,

"Looking ahead to the the second half of next week...the nation
could be in for a significant pattern shift as upper level high
pressure builds to the east and a deep trough develops across the
west. If this solution verifies it could bring increasing rain
chances to North Texas before the end of next week. "

Sure hope they are right about that rain. One afternoon of drizzle isn't going to make it.

The last rain of any really significant quantity was three months ago, on June 21st about 3 am. It was a nice 2-inch rain. The only problem was that it was accompanied by the worst hail I have ever seen, practically covering the ground here in the dark outside the back kitchen door.

So much hail accumulated in a pile where it slid off the roof in the valley by the rain-barrel, that the pile of ice did not melt till the sun hit it at noon, even though the morning temps were in the nineties, Here it is around 9am, along with all the oak twigs it brought down. Vegetation was just flattened. My thyme never recovered, and gave up before the heat broke, even though it was watered.

The hailstones were large enough, and blown hard enough by the very strong west winds of the storm, that the gallery glass wall now has three holes in it, after surviving 60 years. And the screen on the west end of the upstairs porch was all pulled out of its staples.

The frostweeds were pretty severely impacted by the hail; those big leaves of theirs were fairly well shredded. There are not nearly as many around the premises as last year, but a few ragged ones have survived the drought so far and are about to bloom. I have seen fields of snow-on-the-prairie in bloom, on the way over to McKinney. Don't know how it manages it. A few other fall flowers are showing up in the wake of that little drizzle we had last week. But mostly the ground is pretty bare.

auction!!!

2011-09-26T15:46:00.002-05:00

Robin McKinley does lots more than just write some of the best fantasy around. She gardens, cares for sighthounds, protects bats in her eaves, writes a daily blog without fail (unlike me), takes singing and piano lessons, composes, AND RINGS CHANGES ON BELLS. See Sayers' The Nine Tailors re the last.

The problem - her home ring, the "New Arcadia Bels," are badly in need of expensive restoration. In aid of the fundraising effort, she is selling and auctioning all sorts of goodies -- first editions, out-of-print books (often the same thing), doodles, an original musical composition.

The auction runs through Sunday 9 October. http://robinmckinleysblog.com/bells/

And to read all about the goodies, check various back posts on the blog. http://robinmckinleysblog.com

2011-09-26T15:36:00.005-05:00

Sunday 25 September 2011

It’s coming ba-a-a-ack!

The high pressure ridge that made our lives a misery this summer is going to make a return, just when we thought it was safe to enjoy the weather. Not as bad as before, though, after all it IS late September. (Of course, it was 104°F on September 29 once, too.) Well, anyway, we had a two-week break of what the weatherman called “seasonal” temperatures. I called it downright cold, a few mornings ago when it was 52°. There wasn’t anything handy that was warm enough to wear!

Says Cavanaugh of the FW weather office: “Western continental US upper ridge should expand back east over Texas Friday into next weekend ... This turn of events will likely shut down any rain chances by next weekend with above normal temperatures continuing.” Bah!

It’s depressing that we continue to get no rain - one nice slow 0.6” drizzle last week, and a few drops a couple of days ago, is not enough to pull anything through, and lots of the vegetation is either outright dead or on its last legs.

It does make good weather for the solar oven, though. I used it quite a lot this summer. It’s not surprising it can hit 250° on a sunny 106° day. Today was just about 90° though, and it did that well. Nice clear atmosphere. Yummy supper. Not quite the supper illustrated, which was some weeks ago, and included eggplant.

Tonight was farmers’ market squash, pepper, potatoes, and a piece of chicken, plus some oregano from my tiny herb patch (that has been watered enough to get a big patch of Johnson grass next to it -- better do some weeding before the herbs get overwhelmed).

:from the phone

2011-03-27T18:26:00.002-05:00

cold and warm

2011-02-21T18:16:00.005-06:00

Saturday 19 February
3:30 pm, 75°, breezy, mostly overcast

Let’s see. Saturday 29 January, three weeks ago, was about 77°. I went into the bees that day, and they were very un-aggressive and no trouble at all, unlike the day early in the month, when it was about ten degrees cooler, and they were all over me and one stung me through my sleeve.

Saturday 5 February was a lovely sunny day in the fifties. This was notable because the previous four days had not reached freezing (from below), and a couple of nights went down to about 10°. Snow and sleet which had been in place since Tuesday just vanished at last. The powder room cold water line froze and burst the copper tubing on Thursday. The birds at the Ridge just mobbed the feeder, which I moved to right up against the craft-loom window, hanging from the trellis, high. I had to get it out of Buddy’s reach, as I cleared out the garage for him for a refuge, and therefore he has been free of the house-yard.

Saturday 12 February was another nice warm day, after a second blast of sub-twenties weather from Wednesday to Friday. We had postponed Benthic Collection from the 4th to the 11th, then we canceled February collection altogether. All this week now has been above average temperature and mostly dry after the sleet and snow. Two or three days, including yesterday, got up in the 80s. I spent Wednesday morning out at LLELA at the trail-guide workshop. We met comfortably in the outside pavilion.

Others have noticed their bees bringing in orange pollen, and we decided it must be cedar. I had thought of this, but had looked at some cedars and seen no pollen. Was reminded at the CCHBA mtg. that the trees are dioecious. Today I went for a walk around the west forty and found several trees that are indeed covered with cones of pollen. I doesn’t really look as orange as what I have seen being brought in, but must be the answer. Today, I saw a few bees coming in with orange loads, but most had very contrasty and visible pale yellow pollen, from the winter honeysuckle, which is covered with working bees.
Last week, no, because even its flowers can’t take the kind of cold we had, and it was covered with sad little brown blobs. But the small buds have all come out now, and it is fragrant and buzzing. Bare of leaves, though, they froze also, and it will have to put on a new crop.

While exploring for pollen-bearing cedars, I went over to examine closely the one that is right on the big corner post at the se corner of Holmans’ 8 acres, just sw of the tank. It is indeed full of pollen cones, More notably, however, next to it in the fence-line to the north is a possum-haw. I didn’t think I had any. This one is orange-berried, not the real luscious red, but it’s a sizable shrub/little tree. Hurray! Possum-haw, Carolina buckthorn, female persimmons -- wonder what I’ll find next?

New to the land today are 5 pinyon pines (species unknown) and 6 bur oaks, plus a vitex. I got them at the soil conservation service sale yesterday, and Eddie plated them today. The larger (sorta) bur oak in the nw corner of the yard to replace the big hackberry, which seems to be senescent. One little oak near the center of the rock wall, behind the beehive. Two pinyons north of the yard between me and the big house. One oak down the hill by the irises and the toothache tree where I tried one before. A set of three pinyons south across the grass from the shop, and a set of three oaks down in the north pasture below the tank, the closest I have to a bottomland. Well, I could have put them in the drainage near the lane culvert. But if that’s going to get sold, I’d lose them.

I learned at LLELA about a “weed wrench” and I’m going to get one, or maybe two, privets for the pulling out of which. Maybe it will actually be possible to permanently clear some of the area by the drainage-stream, and put in redbuds, French mulberry, Eve’s necklace, buckbrush, etc. Wonder if it can usefully pull Japanese honeysuckle, or if the vine just breaks off and regrows.

As I finish writing this (after a nap), a big full moon shines in the window. So next month it will be full probably on the 20th of March, the day before the equinox. That will make the next full one I guess on Monday April 18, with Easter the following Sunday, the 24th. The vagaries of the ecclesiastical calendar! If the equinox should happen to be on a Friday, with a full moon on the Saturday, Easter could be a full month earlier, on March 23. There were women my age in the Thursday craft meeting, where this discussion came up, who had never learned how the date of Easter is set.

winter, birdfeeder, bees, etc.

2011-01-24T15:05:00.005-06:00

Saturday January 22 -- Two nights ago it was in the teens after a bitter, windy day. Today, with almost no wind and no clouds at all it got up to sixty! The bees were out in same force. They continue to show up with frequent loads of the mystery orange pollen, as well as the yellow that I suppose is dandelion, and pale yellow/dirty white -- winter honeysuckle? Perhaps the orange is cedar, though those trees i have looked at are not flowering. Hmm, the Illustrated Flora doesn’t give a bloom season for junipers.

Cats went out today for three or four hours and seem to have tired themselves out. I got home an hour and a half ago, and they didn’t move from their napping spot together on the wicker chair; they’re still there.

Sunday morning -- goldfinches dave discovered the feeder! Must refill today. Also the suet cake, nasty-freezer-tasting as it may be, is mostly gone. Carolina wren has a lot to do with that. I bought a couple of new fresh ones.

Chilly cloudy gray day today, unlike yesterday. 2pm and it is barely up to 47°. (Forty-seven! Degrees! Rah! --Pomona College in-joke) That may be why there is much more activity at the feeder today.

Agate had another run-in with the black-and-white tuxie cat that lives around here somewhere. I felt all over him and couldn’t find any sore places. Sure hope there is no hidden bite that will abscess; I feel we have been there, done that.

I didn't even see this cardinal in my viewfinder -- he showed up in the annoying interval between button-push and shutter-click. I put it up on Facebook captioned
Cardinal one: "Outa my way!" Cardinal two: "I'm gone, man."

winter weather!

2011-01-10T19:25:00.007-06:00

Saturday was a splendid, cloudless, windless day in the fifties. Eddie and Stephen refilled my woodshed.

I took a walk in the west forty and photographed grasses and tracks by the pond.

Overnight it started raining. Sunday morning was a steady cold drizzle. Feline disgust.

About 11am or so it changed to heavy sleet and then snow, which came pouring down in thick huge flakes. Within half an hour the ground was covered. I refilled the bird-feeder and enjoyed watching much activity.

I think I counted nine male cardinals at once, certainly eight. The two towhees are here, and white-throats and Harris sparrows.

Early Monday morning I saw a kinglet sitting on the top of the fan housing outside the upstairs landing window, fluffed out round. What do they EAT? I put out a suet-cake, but it has been in the freezer for a very long time, and I haven’t seen anyone interested in at.

I have burned up a good deal of the guys’ work.

mystery tree (solved)

2011-01-10T19:12:00.005-06:00

Last May, when I was taking pictures of the wonderful vine(s) of dewberries I found under the oak halfway to the gate, I discovered a little tree that I didn’t recognize, next to and among the dewberries, with small white flowers in clusters. Of course I tried to make it out to be a persimmon tree, but it wouldn’t go there. Then I more or less forgot about it.

Last Sunday (January2), as I set off for a walk, I thought of it, and went to see what sort of fruit it had made, if any remained on the branches. There were a few last hangers-on of black berries. I photographed the twigs and berries, and tried to key the tree out in the Key to Families in the Flora of North Central Texas. No luck. In frustration I wrote to Becky Bender and Mike Mizell.

Becky replied that it was probably a Carolina Buckthorn, Frangula caroliniana . Sure enough, it fits that description to a T, as well as matching the photos produced by Google image. So there is a nice new species for the Ridge. But I STILL can’t get it to the Rhamnaceae in the family key!

winter, but sunny

2010-12-01T17:30:00.006-06:00

I had a nice fire last night as temps went down into the thirties. 8 smallish logs (most 3-4”, one 6” or more) lasted about 4 hours. Agate was happy in my lap for much of the time; Alabaster was off somewhere else. I missed Tut, curled up sleepily watchful on the futon couch.

This morning, clear and sunny, it was just under freezing at 7:30, so I didn’t bother to go look for frost-flower sculptures. The forecast was 27°, and I had the herb bed all covered up again. The rest of the week is just supposed to be in the low to middle thirties, so I will uncover it and water and let it get acclimated to winter.

With the sun shining it’s up to 40° by just after 9:00am.

10:30 - 50° - went on walk. First down to persimmons to nail down ID of second one. Got a twig off it and the one I found with fruit, and the leaf-scars and buds are identical. Need to bring binoculars to see if that is a last persimmon up high in the larger one.

Walked from tank down through path in woods and then back on the lane. Tried to go through the old broken white gate, but it has shifted so that its chain is too tight to open.

Something is happening at the gas-well site. Couldn’t make out if they had a folded-up crane, ar if maybe they have brought back a derrick that’s still on the truck. Later - looks like they are putting up a derrick again. Hmmmm.

Found several persimmon seeds in the lane sand near the house, where I have evidently driven over a seed-laden scat.

Bee notes: By 10:30 it was fifty; by noon a bit over sixty. Bees coming and going, bringing in a good bit of orange and dirty-white pollen. I assume this is from the eleagnus, still perfuming the air and buzzing with bees, and the remnant of scarlet sage in the corner of the yard under the hackberry, which seem to have been protected from outer-space cold so far and still have quite a few scattered blooms. A few days ago these pollens were in the minority as about five out of six loads seemed to be golden yellow, the last of the broomweed and maybe other comps. They are about all gone now.

persimmon trees and briar patches

2010-11-30T15:03:00.014-06:00

I was questioned about how I could walk into a briar patch dense enough to hide a persimmon tree. The answer is, it depends on the briars, and the way in which the tree is hidden. In the north pasture at the Ridge there has always been a central patch of woods, referred to by Isabel as the persimmon grove. I have known for some time of a group of persimmon trees on the east (upper) side of the trees, though in the main, the grove is hackberry, ash, oak, plum, etc. But these known 'simmon trees are all male, and thus non-bearing.

In the last three decades or so, the pasture was invaded by blackberries, to where the western half got to be almost solid with them. In the nineties, Nolan fought his little old tractor through and made a path near the west fence, which I kept open for several seasons, but of late it became solid briarpatch again. Between the central grove and the west fence, scattered among the brambles, are a good many smallish trees that like damper conditions, as this is where the drainage runs. Besides the other species mentioned, there are willow, cottonwood, pecan -- none very large except for the huge pecan in the northwest corner, Pines from the Holmans’ property are moving in at the southwest corner.

In the spring of 2009, Eddie and Stephen performed herculean labors and mowed down almost all of the blackberries on the west side, leaving a crunchy, spiky “mulch” some inches thick of chopped up half-inch canes. That was a very dry year, and there was very little regrowth except in the southwest corner, nearest the tank. This spring, they fairly easily re-mowed it, except in that same corner, where standing water (it was a VERY wet spring) defeated them.

I would never have tried to walk into the remnants of the original head-high thicket! I’m not sure even rabbits can fit into that. But the regrowth area looks deceptively possible to move through. NOT. Sunday afternoon I mowed a section by the female persimmon tree, and the contrast between the mowed part and the remainder makes it more clear how much of a thicket it really is.

Besides the scrawny little persimmon tree in the center of this picture, I also found a few more, based on the bark appearance. One of them appeared to have a single little round fruit hanging on a branch, way up where I couldn’t really see for sure what it was. It was a tree about twice the size of the one that I’m certain of.

So. Persimmons of both sexes now definitely go on the species list. Also Bidens frondosa, seeds of which I picked up LIBERAL-
LY in my socks.

Thanksgiving arctic front

2010-11-25T18:03:00.003-06:00

So there I was at 5:30 this Thanksgiving morning, putting the (huge!) turkey in the oven, wearing thin shorts and a skimpy t-shirt, barefoot; the temperature outside the same 70° it had been all night. Then WHOOSH, the expected front came by, right on time. The oven kept the house warm for a bit, but then it was cooling fast. At 8:00, chilled, I got in bed to warm up for a bit, and woke up two hours later! Went and turned the furnace on then, and it has been working all day to keep the house up to the sixties. Of course it would help if I would get the ladder in from the Ridge so I could get up on the office roof and close that north louver vent. Maybe I'll ask if I can go out Joy's window.

The sun just set, and the temp is supposed to plummet to around 25°. Still a few potted plants on the terrace here and in the front yard at the Ridge. Guess I better get out there and rescue them, and feed the horse. I chopped back the almond verbena and lemon verbena last night, covered the herbs with a big pile of leaves and a tarp. Almond verbena is supposed to need some winter protection, but I don't know how much. Maybe I can get some cuttings to root from what I cut off.

Brer Rabbit I'm not

2010-11-22T11:55:00.008-06:00

Third week in November (I know, I know, I haven't posted in forever!) and the temperature is in the high seventies! But there's an Arctic front a-comin', and Thursday night is predicted to be a hard freeze in the low twenties. Appropriate for Thanksgiving. Guess the scarlet sage might finally give up.

I had something of a low-key adventure yesterday at the Ridge. I went for a walk at 4:20 and got back in the dusk at 5:50. More than an hour, I think, of that hour and a half was spent moving step by careful step, working my way out of the briar-patch (that is, mostly blackberry briars, though of course, greenbriers were mixed in there) that I got myself into. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to pick up my feet high enough to step down on one or another thorny stem, without losing my balance while teetering on one foot. I was absolutely DETERMINED that I was NOT going to lose my balance and fall into the stuff, and I didn't, partly I think by pure willpower.

The really cool thing was the tree I found midway through. I found it because of the snake. As I stepped down on one tangle and caused it to shift, I realized there was a pale green 18-inch stripe moving along the stems, not very fast. I reached down and caught the rear part of it and looked at it for a bit -- a lovely snake with a grass-green back and yellow belly, maybe 3/8" thick (probably a Rough Green Snake, Opheodrys aestivus).
After I put it back down on the stems and it started slithering away, I kept an eye on it. It disappeared after a bit into some denser leaves, and there seemed to be something in the clump of leaves that was sort of solid and blackish, with maybe a little reddish tinge. Eventually I realized it was a couple of persimmons! For years and years I have been looking for the female persimmon tree that has to be here, because I find lots of scat full of the seeds, but I have never found any but male flowering trees. But now I know where it is. Next year I'll get a path mowed to it and get there when there are more fruits on the tree.

So I finally escaped, though my shins are a bit perforated even through my jeans. I was rewarded by a quietly spectacular walk through the orange-tinted tall seed-stems of the grass south of the pond, in one of those gold-salmon-mauve sunsets that makes everything ruddy, especially if the oak leaves and grass stems are tending that way already. No camera to hand, and it probably wouldn't have looked real anyway.

This is my persimmon harvest.

thundershower!

2010-08-06T17:19:00.003-05:00

Twenty-plus degree drop in temperature in the last 15 minutes, from around 106° or 107° down to about 85°, as a thunderstorm moved in. It was blowing mist through the back screen door or a south wind,now it is sprinklng me through the window over the antique bed on northwest gusts. I don't care, as long as it keeps raining.

It has been well over a hundred now every day for a week, and the forecast calls for more. Yesterday we got a very brief but hard rain, and now the second is so welcome. Too late, probably, for my elbow-bush that was still in its pot at the Ridge. I didn't get out there from Sunday to Wednesday, and it was crispy. Maybe there is some life in the roots; I will hope so. The herb bed was all droopy, but perked right up with water. If these two thunderstorms have hit there, it should be fine.

more on bees

2010-08-01T13:22:00.007-05:00

This is my guest blog post graciously run by Robin McKinley on her blog last week:

I have been interested in the idea of keeping bees for a while. Fifteen years ago I took a course, but for several reasons didn’t get bees. I had another chance this spring, and this time I was really ready to take them on.

The class was taught by two professional beekeepers. John was a beekeeping hobbyist before he retired from his engineering job, and since then he has increased his operation until he has several hundred colonies and a pretty full-time job again. His partner Blake was one of the local beekeeping club’s youth scholarship students as a thirteen-year-old. He took to the bees so successfully that now he owns about three hundred colonies, and is president this year of the club. He’s nineteen!

Their main beeyards are many miles south, where there is a better honeyflow.* Their honey house**, site of the class, is about 60 miles from me, at John’s home. In general, they don’t keep bees there at their home site, because it would be a serious nuisance when they were processing honey to have thousands of local bees battering at the door of the honey house to get the sticky sweet as they were bottling it. But they have a sideline of supplying a couple hundred new “nucs,” or nucleus hives, each spring to hobbyists in the Collin County area.

So in the early spring they accept hive boxes, put three or four frames of bees and brood from their strongest hives into each one, plus a new queen***, set them out behind the honey house, and feed them for six weeks to get them to start building up their numbers. Then the students, beginners, and other customers come back on the designated evenings and get their new hives.

Here is John’s driveway (John is on the right) with all the hives he is going to fill with bees. One of my frames had a tiny bit of extra protein, in addition to the glue and the nails, from an incautious hammer blow on the side of my finger. But the red spot doesn’t show in this photo. The red arrow points to MY hive.

I brought home my bees about 10pm on April 29. They look very small in my backyard (and as I look back at this picture, it’s so green! The yard is all dry and crunchy and straw-colored now). At this time there were probably around eight thousand bees in the hive. My first hive inspection is on Youtube.

Although John showed me my queen when I got the hive, I could never spot her myself. A couple of weeks later, I was upset to see queen cells built on the surface of the comb. These are extensions put over normal cells when the workers realize, by the diminished pheromones, that their queen is ailing or missing. If they have worker larvae less than three days old, they can enlarge their cells and keep feeding them royal jelly and thereby produce new queens, a process called supersedure.

This is a fairly normal occurrence, but beekeepers don’t like to see it, because there is a three-week gap in the hive’s springtime growth, while the new queen grows up, gets mated, and starts to lay eggs. But anyway, my bees managed it, and on June 17th I saw the queen, and lots of sealed cells of pupating young bees.

I’ll talk about some divergent philosophies of beekeeping, describe an inspection, and also let you know how much harvest I was able to get in this first year, in a couple of subsequent posts. Meanwhile, my cousin Kieren Ladner visited a few weeks ago. He is a professional photographer, and kindly agreed to document a hive inspection, so I have a supply of nice detailed photos of the bees in the hive, as of June 17. He took the three above.

I spend a lot of time sitting out in front of the hive with binoculars, watching the coming and going, and wishing I had x-ray vision. Also I WISH I had Elizabeth Moon’s (emoontx’s) camera, AND her skill at photographing bugs.

* Honeyflow is beekeeper jargon for the annual period(s) when a great many flowers are blooming and offering nectar, and bees can rapidly build up lots of surplus honey.

** The Honey House is the beekeeper’s production facility for extracting and bottling honey. State regulations cover such requirements as stainless steel fixtures and washable walls and floor. You can NOT use your kitchen and legally sell your honey.

*** The queen is the only fully-developed fertile female in the hive. She lays up to 1000 eggs per day in the spring when the colony is building up its strength for the honeyflow. The workers hatch from fertilized eggs, but their diet causes them to develop wax glands and mandibular glands (for making food for baby bees) but not functional ovaries. Their ovipositor becomes modified to the stinger.°

° And yes, I have been stung. Three times so far, and all of them avoidable if I had been paying attention to the bees’ behavior, and had not been stubborn. Two were relatively benign, the third must have had much more venom in her, cause it HURT and kept hurting for a couple of days. So now I pay more attention, and I try not to be stubborn. If they look or sound cranky, be flexible in your plans. GO AWAY.

muggy ugh

2010-07-26T20:13:00.006-05:00

Oh, ugh. Sunset, overcast, 85°, and 63% humidity. The AC is not on because it isn't hot enough,and the room fan is just circulating the fug. I think I'll go adjust the thermostat, and electric bill and global warming be hanged! Weather says that areas that had rain are in the 70s, but we didn't. Weather, weather every where, and not a drop to fall.

Actually today it seemed fairly cool, in the afternoon. I believe it must have been raining up on Mingo Road, or Aubrey, or somewhere. I walked to Point Bank, and there were noticeable northeasterly cool breezes.

Walking that mile and a quarter was no problem. The second one, on the way BACK, did wear me out, especially that hill at the end. Stopping when you are only half way to tired is always the problem. Besides, I needed to go to Point Bank to put in a check for Crispin.

Yesterday Eddie and Stephen put in 4-1/2 hours clearing the sides of the lane at the Ridge -- the lower half is looking quite inviting. They were able to cut the dead tree at the kink in the road. Meanwhile, I excavated the herb bed from the Johnson grass that was threatening to overwhelm it.

I took some more pictures of the progress on the honey frames. Or make that non-progress. They don't look any more capped than last week, and they almost look as though the bees have been eating all the honey out of some spots. Sigh. Won't be a harvest at this rate. John tell me the rule of thumb is that you can harvest when they are three-quarters capped. I sent him this picture, and he said it was a beautiful frame of honey. Now all they have to do is FINISH it!

They continue to bring in lots of pollen. I got some video of that that I hope to get on Youtube or Fileden soon.

Ugh. Wrists are sweating all over the laptop. Off to set the AC lower.

hot ...

2010-07-13T23:19:00.004-05:00

11 pm and AC going, hot and muggy outside. Remind me again why I wanted the rain to stop ...
Not near as hot as it might be. I walked probably 2-1/2 miles this afternoon between 6pm and 8pm, to the bank and City Hall (utility bill) and the Cupboard and home, and it was pretty much OK. Mid-nineties. But still 84° after 11pm.
Going to be sore tomorrow, probably.
Just put in my order for medium frames, small cell foundation, extra veil (for Tom or whoever) at Walter Kelley.

Kay's honey!

2010-07-13T12:43:00.002-05:00

Kay brought me a present yesterday. She extracted 20-30 pounds of honey Sunday; she also almost accidentally got several combs of foundationless comb honey. Wax moths got in some of her foundation, and at the time, Dadant was OUT of foundation(!?) So, since she really needed to give her bees space, she interleaved empty frames between the ones with foundation. No comb guides or anything. And it worked!

The honey is very good. It's very light, and fragrant and flowery. Hope mine is as good.

summer's b-a-a-ack

2010-07-12T05:56:00.003-05:00

End of the rains, and days near 100°, nights upper seventies for the foreseeable future. The last rains were Friday and Saturday, as a stalled-out front at the Red River stirred up some instability to dump a few more thunderstorms out of the soaked atmosphere. Kieren was hammered as he came north from Dallas Friday afternoon, then we had a mild drizzle most of Friday night, and two heavy thunderstorms on Saturday. Sunday however was clear and sunny; the cooler cloudy days gone.

The Ridge rain gauge had 0.6" Friday afternoon, and then over Saturday it collected 2.3" more, for a total of something like nine inches over the two weeks. Sycamore Street's gauge Friday night was 1.8", but I brought it inside to read Friday night and didn't get it back out, so Saturday's storms were unmeasured. While there was more rain in town in several storms the last few days, overall there was less, maybe 6".

Yesterday Eddie and Steven worked around the house and yard at the Ridge. Both screen porches are now largely cleared of the enveloping jungle of creeper, hackberry, and mimosa, and the screen fixed.

I went through the hive (with video). The queen is continuing to lay; there is some uncapped brood and quite a bit of capped on several of the brood frames. But there doesn't seem to be much for all those bees to bring in, even with the rains. The newer super has just maybe three lightly-drawn-out frames, and there is no further progress in the upper super. I saw no pollen arriving, but maybe they gather some earlier in the day. I gave them a pint of syrup with a couple drops of lemon-grass oil to see what would happen.

As I was watching the bees in the late afternoon, I heard a mockingbird do a chuck-will's-widow call, very well too, it fooled me for a moment. He also rendered cardinal calls and song, carolina wren, house wren, and I don't know what else.

A tiny clicky noise made me look up. On a bare peach twig 3-4 feet over my head was a dragonfly. He perched there, then made little circuits, just a 4' circle or maybe figure-eight, and back to the perch, for a long time. I looked him up; he's a Widow Skimmer. This picture is very close to his appearance, though the species seems variable in wing pattern and body color.

more wet

2010-07-08T16:25:00.005-05:00

Sure enough, the forecasters were right. A measly little drizzle this morning wasn't much, but about 4pm we got a substantial thunderstorm, the red spot over Denton on the radar. And it looks like there is another one over Dallas that might hit us in a while, too.

Agate and Tut were happy to come in out of the wet. Alabaster must have found a dry spot somewhere. Often she comes bounding up from under the deck, but not this time.

5 minutes later - I passed the back door and called again, and there she was; came in and headed for the food bowl, and then for her spot on the south windowsill. Tut wanted out; Agate remains asleep. A lockable cat door would be handy ...

camera envy

2010-07-08T12:50:00.002-05:00

Oooh, I've got the camera-buying itch. I've been happy with my Olympus C-740 for years now; I believe I got it in 2002. 3.2MP was plenty, and the 10X optical zoom was awesome.

But it's showing its age. I didn't think the difference in pixels up to 4MP, or even 8, was worth worrying about. But 12MP! That's 3000 by 4000 dots in the photo, twice as many as mine. And I really want something with less shutter lag. And now I see that Olympus has come out with the SP 590 UZ, with an impossible 26X optical zoom. Gets pretty good reviews. Could be had for not much over $300 (less than mine 8 years ago.) Heavier, of course, it weighs about a pound, and sure won't fit in a shirt pocket. But ... WANT!

rain again, yay

2010-07-07T05:07:00.005-05:00

Another thunderstorm, courtesy apparently of a tropical low meandering north along the Louisiana border, broke noisily and wetly over us this afternoon. Later I read 0.3" on the gauge at the Ridge, but I believe there was more in town. Wunderground says 0.47" -- I haven't read my gauge yet. And more coming! Thursday, and then maybe next week too. The ground will be wet to the middle of the month, anyway. It looks all green again at the Ridge, though a lot of it is not grass but little opportunistic weeds, and lots of ragweed. As soon as it gets dry again, I need to mow that ragweed down, before it seeds.

Later -- sure enough, Sycamore Street got 1.5" of water while the Ridge was getting .03".

It's a good thing we had had a good deal of rain before the 4th, given what some neighborhood vandals did on the lane. Seems to have been a fairly impressive fireworks show, judging from the size of some of the remains. And then they just LEFT all the trash!

But watching the bees always calms me down. Caught in flight with a relatively fast shutter speed (late afternoon, with flash) they look distinctly un-aerodynamic, and not nearly as graceful as birds. They seem to hang at any angle in the air.

food chains

2010-07-06T00:32:00.003-05:00

Real ones and hopeful. Light is on where I sit in the corner of the living room. Gecko on outside of glass makes a lunge, snaps up a little moth. (How he sticks to vertical surface of glass remains a mystery to me, no matter how much I read about the mechanisms.) Cat sits inside window and ... watches. Intently.

berries in the rain

2010-07-05T00:31:00.008-05:00

What a welcome break in the weather! All week it has been relatively cool, if a bit muggy, and it looks to continue for a few more days. The rain Friday evening and Saturday morning at the Ridge was another two and a quarter inches, as a gentle drizzle for hours in the evening and early morning.

Mary and her friend Rebecca and I got started berrying around 8:30, an hour later than our original expecting-heat plan. Mary had to go in a bit after ten after running to fire ants that stung her numerous times, but she was feeling OK in the evening. Rebecca and I put in another half hour or more. I froze three small ziploc bags of berries and kept a bowlful in the fridge. (This picture is from July 2007, but the same cycles come around every year - I ate both berries and lambs-quarter this week.)

I told Rebecca about the violent thunderstorms, sometimes with hail, that we had had at past berrypicking/ice cream parties (Cassie's pockets full of hailstones). She is from Florida, where apparently hail is uncommon. Then after a partly sunny afternoon that got up to the high eighties, and felt hotter in the full sun while I was watching the bees, it suddenly got very dark and commenced a sockdologer of a right and proper 4th-of-July-berrypicking thunderstorm! Extremely heavy rain and lashing wind for a half hour, drizzle for a half hour, then the sun came out again. Another inch and a quarter, for a total on the week of nearly six inches!

Since the rain Tuesday morning, some flowers have picked up. I don't know about nectar, but at least the bees are bringing in pollen again. I took numerous photos of the entrance, and caught one pollen-laden worker as she disappeared into the shadow of the interior. Photoshop made her visible.

raining!

2010-07-02T14:07:00.002-05:00

At least a brief drizzle, 2pm, with a totally delightful temperature of 86°F. And I didn't even have to hang out laundry; I only THOUGHT about it. Got as far as putting some things in the washing machine, and it started.

Well, Alex is moderating the temperature this week

2010-06-29T13:23:00.005-05:00

Hurray! Last week was at or near 100°F every day. Yesterday was nice and cloudy; we got a lovely slow rain for much of the evening and night, and the rest of the week promises to be cloudy and low nineties, or even lower, with possibly more rain if Alex slings it our way.

Lots has been happening at the Ridge, that I haven't gotten around to writing about. The spring flowers have been and gone. The horsemint is blooming now, and deerpea. The black-eyed susans made a good show, but have totally dried up now. The last rain before last night was a thunderstorm in the early morning of the 15th, two weeks ago, and 3/4" of rain doesn't last for two weeks.

The bees, after a slow start, got going with a new queen, who is laying lots, Unfortunately the nectar has apparently dried up, so all those new bees don't have enough to do. Unemployment leads to too many security guards, and I got stung a second time Saturday, because I didn't heed the extra buzzing and flying around, and go right away to get more protection on.
In the first couple of weeks of this month, they made about 2/3 of a super of honey, but almost nothing since then. I am really hoping that this rain and, with luck, more this week will restart the honeyflow for a few more weeks.

Later -- the rain gauge in the herb garden by the front gate says 2.3 inches! A good "rescue rain," as Elizabeth Moon says. It will last a week or so, and we might possibly get some more later in the week, hope, hope.

The horsemint is done, however. The handsome upright stems with the white whorls of bracts still look lovely, but the bracts shelter globose clusters of maturing seeds, with very few flowers left. The snail-seed vine is starting to bloom, for whatever it may be worth to the bees, and the mesquite on the tank dam is blooming. The mimosas continue to bloom, but I have seen very few honeybees working it -- there was a bumblebee on the old one in the corner of the yard today.

(note — these two pictures of bees by my cousin Kieren Ladner)

firsts

2010-04-21T22:50:00.004-05:00

First scissortail, and also pink evening primrose, back on April 11. What's more, now some primroses have come up in the front yard! not that far from where I just planted two more I got from the native plant society.

Indian paintbrush showed up a couple of weeks ago, and is getting widespread. There's quite a bit of slender vervain near the blue gate, also paintbrush and crow-poison, making a modest red-white-blue display. The first spiderwort has appeared, just before you get to the gate coming up the drive. The white violets are done blooming. They're kind of buried in a sea of bedstraw.

Hummingbirds - I heard at Redbud Day that they had been seen at feeders, so I put up my little 3-ounce one the next day. This Monday, the 19th, I saw a male several times. The feeder looks very small until compared to the bird; then it is big!

planted my new natives promptly, yay, me

2010-04-13T09:42:00.001-05:00

11 April Sunday
Very pleasant day at RbR. mostly cloudy most of the day. Pleasantly cool morning, warmer (low 70s) in midday and humid, cooler and nice at evening.
Eddie and Stephen mowed almost all of north pasture. SW was too wet, and they missed the lane in the NE; rest is pretty good, especially for just 4 hours.
17 of the 18 potatoes are up, and onions are several inches tall.
I planted the standing-cypresses, the pink evening primroses, and the Missouri primrose (sundrop) in the fencerow just north of the ceniza. Hope they all take hold and reproduce. a propos of reproduction, I found a volunteer bluebonnet outside the fence. Don’t know from whence it springs,but it’s welcome.
Cardinals have been bathing in the birdbath, two of each sex, or maybe one each twice. Third female sat on the edge and thought about it, but flew away.
Both the sages, lyreleaf and cedar, that I got yesterday, seem to want some shade, as does the columbine. So they will go in the eave bed with the mints.
After the guys left, I fired up the string trimmer-mower and went around the veg patch and outside the kitchen back door. Harder than it looks. Used small 0.65 string -- tied 3 lengths together in the middle and inserted them as one. Seemed to work.

festive Saturday, buggy Friday

2010-04-10T13:42:00.005-05:00

I've just been to Redbud Day and the first Community Market. The market will be every second Saturday, in the area behind the farmers' market. Got Amy a knitting-needle holder for works in progress (though I think she's using a circular needle now, come to think of it). Talked to a Flower Mound alpaca-raiser and a glass artist.

At Redbud Day I spent $30 with the Native Plant Society on 8 plants - missouri primrose, evening primrose (2), standing cypress (2), columbine, Texas germander, and a cedar sage. Also $5 on funnel cake. Many freebies - shopping bags, drain cleaner, pen, mosquito dunks, etc.

Before I went I got my order in to Wilhite Seeds for green soybeans. I have that vacant tilled row, and three hils for pumpkin, winter squash, and luffah gourd. Aside from those, the garden is pretty full. I have got 4 pole teepees up for the pole beans so far, not planted yet. I swapped my bush blue lake beans for the pole variety, and got bush limas which I planted alternate with the okras.

Last night I "harvested" about 50 radish sprouts to put in a sandwich. Mustard greens still badly need thinning. About ten of my potatoes are up, and a dozen or so onions. Also the peas are going to town, at least 4" high.

Yesterday the benthic group went out -- sampled all four sites, picking the samples thoroughly on site, also breaking for lunch. 5 hours total. Some odonates and mayflies, many many mosquito larvae and a fat-bottomed critter-- Simuliid? ID in lab next week.

2 more April days in the garden

2010-04-08T14:19:00.004-05:00

planted so far (4 April)
tendergreen mustard, radish, lettuce oak leaf
white onions, red norland potatoes
sugar snap peas
peppermint, chocolate mint, candy mint (?), orange mint
bouquet dill (split in two)
ruffled basil, Italian flat parsley, stevia
mammoth dill
elfin thyme, golden thyme, lemon thyme
sweet alyssum (2), bluebonnets (2)
Fairy Tale eggplant, Brandywine tomato, yellow plum (pear)
Celebrity tomato, Sweet 100, Mr. Stripey, Green Zebra, Old German, Jubilee
Lilac pepper, sweet banana pepper
Classic eggplanto, Ichiban eggplant

still waiting
cucumber
yellow squash, zucchini, cantaloupe
winter squash
pole beans
sweet almond verbena, lemon verbena, lemon balm
purple sage, purple small-lvd basil, compact oregano
oregano, rosemary
zinnia
morning glory
nasturtium

April 5 - finished herb bed w/8 herbs above plus 3 portulaca and expensive gallon Mexican mint marigold from Meador’s ($6.95). While preparing the last part of the bed, I succeeded in digging out a quite sizeable brier root. Proud of myself.

Discovered that the Blue Lake beans I got at Meador’s were bush, not pole. Oh, well. Have to squeeze out a row for them, and get limas for the poles in the squash hills. MUST get seeds in ground tomorrow.
The little Ichiban eggplant is looking much better. Something had unearthed one onion set; stuck it back in again.

Cloudy this morning, clear afternoon, still (or again) very windy. 80°F. Spring will be very short at this rate.

Birdfeeder -- cardinals, 2 towhees, dove, Harris sparrows, chickadee, titmouse. I hear a bird that sounds like the last three notes of whitethroat - just three long whistles - maybe it’s Harris.
Photographed black vulture on transformer pole, and movie. Turned off camera JUST before it took off. Drat!

11pm and still 72°F!

6 April Tuesday

mostly cloudy, still windy, 66°, 70s by midmorning
Buddy’s hair coming out in huge mats. Seems to be almost no hair on his shoulder and back of thigh, I can see dandruffy skin. Flies getting bad. Will ask at D&L.
Bacon, onions, and poke sallet on toast for breakfast.
One potato is up! and an onion.
I’m procrastinating. Must go out and till okra and squash space.

Later -- all tilled, 10 squash hills, rows for okra and beans, spots for cukes. Planted 3 hills, cantaloupe, 2 each yellow squash and zucchini.
S'posed to be way cooler tomorrow, sixties instead of eighties, and near 40 overnight. Protect eggplants?

more mostly garden, 1 April - Easter

2010-04-08T14:17:00.004-05:00

1 April
morning check showed scores of mustard and radish sprouts, and possibly minute green specks of lettuce
Dry south gale all day. Almond verbena dried out, also oregano from Meadors. Hopeful of recovery. Later -- all perked up aain
Calloways $44. 2 mints and Stevia, 6 tomatoes - 4 heirloom, plus celebrity and sweet 100. 3 assorted eggplant, 1 banana, 1 bell pepper. 4 portulaca, 2 bluebonnets, 2 alyssum.
Tilled space for mints, and 3’ of herb rock bed. Added a little manure, 1/3 bag mushroom compost, 40# “topsoil” and 2 cubic ft. “landscape mix.” Constructed first section, planted bluebonnet, 2 alyssums, 2 thymes.

All plums over except two small brier-buried ones in pasture by gate that just started. Maybe they’re pears; they are greenish-white.

Lots and lots of white violets, kind of buried in chickweed. Lots of stagnant water slowly draining - culvert is running but algae pools are backed up under the trees.

Tried to call Jeff Dowler again to cut tree - left another message.

2 April
light rain before dawn. Sounded like quite a lot on the tin roof, but actually very little in Buddy’s bucket.
Let the cats out at 9, with trepidation, then worked more on herb bed. Planted the other bluebonnet and the elfin thyme, one dill. Probably will put oregano in top spot. Basil in this bed or elsewhere? Need summer tarragon (Mex. mint marigold) and more parsley, and I guess a spearmint. Rosemary will go over a yard further, beyond iris, I think.

Need to see if workerguys can roll BIG rocks over from under plums. Put some just outside fence as outer side of rock bed, others as seats.

The heavens opened about 10:30, and I was able to get the cats in.
Brief but VERY heavy rain. Need to take loppers and shears down and clear more around cookstove in creek, take pics.
Winter honeysuckle is done blooming. New deep green leaves, only a few blossoms here and there. Not sure where bees are now -- seen a few on redbud. Getting pollen from oaks, maybe.
Calloways again, Brandywine and yellow plum, also tomatoes for Sycamore St and bluebonnets, lemon verbena and purple sage

3 April
cold (!) last night s 40s ;-) Littlest eggplant in pot looks sad. Planted 2 peppers 2 eggpl in rest of tomato row
Peas are up!
Got to Oxide in time to pioto neckpiece. Helped Mary brainstorm rearraonging.
Back after midnight, Agate must have slipped out as I came in dark kitchen door. Called and called, stayed up 2 mr hours, no Agate.

4 April Easter
Walked around calling 7am, Aggie appeared at end of garden perfectly happy. Let all out. Went to town to get tiller. When I came back all were willing to come in to breakfast.
Soft moist morning, 70°. Removed first section of rocks from eave bed by kitchen door. Will place them flat as a border further out.
Tilled space for yellow plum, Brandywine, and Fairy Tale eggplant, basil, parsley, dill, stevia by fence north of mimosa. Took out BIG rock.
Napped all afternoon w Alabaster.
At dusk, tilled eave bed, in the dark planted 4 mints.

late March notes, more garden than wild nature

2010-04-08T14:15:00.002-05:00

3-13, 3-19 --iris dug at 610 (Stephen)
3-14, 3-28 - planted at Ridge
3-13, 3-19,3-20 - replanted at 610
3-28 - still 2 boxes (15%) in garage

3-27 - planted peas,lettuce, mustard, radish

3-28 - began remaking rock-garden herb bed

going to plant potatos 6 hills, onions 80 sets, zucchini, pellow squash, tomatoes 5, eggplant 3, cucumber, cantaloupe. okra. pole beans?
Also basil, mint, parsley, oregano, rosemary, dill,thyme,sage, sweet almond verbena from bee mtg
Morning glories on trellis
nosturtium & zinnia somewhere

almost all bush plum flowers gone. most Mex fading - not the one buried in grapevines; it’s flowering spectacularly

bluets Houstonia pusilla tiny bluet Qaaker Ladies is a Tx native. Not henbit L amplexicaule or L purpurea. Crowpoison? native - nothoscordum bivalve

4-ft bushy cedars in 15-gal tubs at Meador’s are $90 Nope.

Towhees still here. Residents? Whitethroats & Harris here 2 days ago, didn’t notice today

31 March - used new Troy-bilt electric tiller, works well to 4”-6” deep, occasionally gets stuck with rocks just the wrong size. Housing needs to be arched over tines, not flat.

Planted potatoes and onion sets, watered some - handspraying with hose. Need to fix hose coupling that leaks when there’s pressure on it. Also a longer hose, with a male end instead of cut hose, on front faucet. And a 50’ 12-gauge or 10-gauge extension for first section to tiller.

yep, fifth snow

2010-03-25T22:52:00.010-05:00

From around six until perhaps midnight last Saturday, it snowed. There was a moderate northwest wind in the early evening, picking up to a real gale overnight, so the snow was tightly plastered to the north sides of trunks. A few trees, like these, ended up looking like birches.

The fruit trees were all in pretty full bloom, peach and Chickasaw plum, with the Mexican plum getting started. I was quite worried for the crop, as the temperature got down to at least 28°. These Mexican plum flowers, like many, have a hood of snow.

These are the little plum-thicket bush plums (these on the tank dam). The flowers are about half as big as those on the Mexican plum trees. The stamens are fewer, with colorful orange pollen.

At the tank gate, the wet soil had melted most of the snow as it landed. Larger white areas are snow; the little white dots are fallen plum and pear petals. The petals are often referred to poetically as covering the ground like snow, but not usually beside snow.

In the backyard the peaches were pink mists within the snow in the cloudy dawn. But to my pleased surprise, in the early afternoon when the temperature had gotten up to nearly 40° and the snow was about gone, the peach flowers were still just as pink, with no brown edges. Seems like all the pistils made it through just fine. Peach pies and plum jelly after all!

And it's been extremely interesting to experience all these different varieties of snowfall, in one weird winter. But really, enough is enough. These pictures were taken on March 21, "the first day of spring," and we had better not have a sixth snow.

Just sayin'.

yipes! more snow?

2010-03-20T04:20:00.002-05:00

Forecast:
Tonight
Cloudy with a 50 percent chance of snow. Windy. Snow accumulation up to 1 inch. Lows in the lower 30s. Northwest winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts to around 40 mph. Wind chill readings as low as 18 to 23.
Sunday
Cloudy. A 30 percent chance of snow in the morning. Windy. Snow accumulation up to 1 inch. Total snow accumulation up to 2 inches. Highs in the mid 40s. Northwest winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts to around 40 mph. Wind chill readings as low as 19 to 24.

Just when the plums and the peaches are all in bloom. Bah, humbug!

Can only hope it will be a degree or two warmer than they say.

pictures of little plants

2010-03-10T18:53:00.015-06:00

This is a very image-heavy post, already out-of-date, because I took the photos a week ago, and spring is springing apace! Click on any photo for an enlarged view.

This Jackson Pollack-like closeup of the budding plum thicket shows only buds; now it's in bloom. In this photo it is still a complex mass of gray twigs, bearing pale green blobs of buds.

Walking down the lane, I observed that the sporophyte generation of the local bryophytes is about mature.
The mosses and liverworts have to do their genetic recombination at a time when the sperm can swim through the surface moisture on the plant to get to the archegonia structures where the egg cells are -- no bees to carry pollen for them! So this cycle definitely cannot happen in July -- late winter is their time.

Now the gametes have met and fused, the diploid spore-producing part of the life cycle has grown, and the spores are about to be released to drift to a new potential home.

Water on the plant surfaces has actually not been a problem this season. The greenish spot in the left center of this view of the wet, privet/greenbriery thicket by the pot-holey lane, when examined closely, is a puddle full of filamentous algae. This shows that it has beet continuously wet for a long time. Where'd the algae come from? Beats me. I'm not an expert on the drought-survival strategies of the local algae.

A few days after this picture was taken, this submerged green patch of algae had multiplied its mass and floated up to make a bubbly mat on the surface.

Poking up through the dry oak leaves by the lane in the low woods are the first leaves of the white violets. Amy tells me today that the plants I sent to her in Houston are beginning to bloom, and are sturdy plants with a dozen leaves or more. This one has a ways to go — I believe it has five little leaves so far. Isabel always looked for them by her birthday, March 27, in Cooke County; here they are usually in bloom by mid-March. Not this year, though, I don't think.
[edit — 25 March — three or four plants have flowers]

Here is the runoff water merrily trickling around, over, and through the old cookstove "erosion control." More non-vascular plants are evident, though I haven't worked my way through the privet and briers to get a close look.

I have noticed several of these bright orange fungi on dead twigs on the woods floor recently. Several lichens are also evident here.

And finally I saw some actual flowers on the walk, these tiny bluets. I need to look them up; I think they are an introduced "weed," not a native. But anyway they have flowers, which I was longing to see.

spring more off than on, so far

2010-03-01T16:13:00.003-06:00

For the last ten days, I have been staying mostly out at Red-bird Ridge, so I have saved up several days worth of notes till I had time on the internet:

20 Feb
winter honeysuckle full bloom
quince has fat buds, a couple open
Mahonia is as pretty as it ever is, in ‘full flower’
elms in fl but probably hurt by freeze
chickasaw plum buds size of ball pin heads

no henbit or veronica; but there are dandelions, some peppergrass, and a comp with little closed yellow cylindrical fls - rosettes with 9” stems

7pm, frogs singing

21 Feb
thunderstorm 8:30 am
50°s or 60°, very humid
norther 4pm, lower 30°s overnight
The ephemeral drainage stream is chuckling & gurgling over its waterfalls around the old cookstove erosion control
Matt’s corner up to the corral is all marshy; from corner south to Oakridge Lane it’s dry except that a culvert and a little earthwork are needed by the roughleaved dogwoods.

There are two dozen bees in the winter honeysuckle.

23 Feb
36°, cloudy at noon just like yesterday. ready for SPRING!

24 Feb - ditto

26 Feb
Cloudy and chilly all week -it FELT chilly even if maybe it got up to 50. Friday morning a tiny bit of sun around 8 am. But then cold front came in, misty drizzle mixed with a bit of snow and getting colder all through benthic collection -- miserable. There was a mockingbird singing away in the shrubbery by the EESAT doors when I went in, but he changed his mind.

Alabaster got out into garage and under door and gone, about 8pm, but showed up on DR windowsill a while later and condescended to come in. Fire in kitchen is not nearly as warm as in living room. The beautiful cantilevered masonry construction just SUCKS up heat. The living room shallow firebox, the convection tubes, and the wood floor all contribute to a much warmer experience.

27 Feb, Saturday
Cloudless sky, up in 50s well before noon, as if yesterday had never been!

Monday March 1
So much for that little tiny hint of spring. Sunday was cloudy all day though not cold, but certainly not the 70° it got to on Saturday! Then in the wee hours this morning it set in to rain, and it has been cloudy, 40°, and raining unceasingly today (3pm now). Chilly and miserable. Marmalade cooking inside; that smells sunny at least.

Aside from the elms, that seem to have survived getting snow on their flowers, there seems to be nothing native in bloom yet. The chickasaw plums are getting closer. The appearance of the plum thickets, seen at a distance, is altered by all the fat little light-colored buds clustered along the stems.

In the grass yesterday or Saturday I have seen henbit, peppergrass and a little long-podded white-flowered crucifer, chickweed, dandelions of course and another little yellow composite. Out in the pasture in the very short-nibbled areas are tiny bluets. The japonicas are coming out, and the winter honeysuckle is in very full bloom with a good number of bees, at least in the sun on Saturday. The last one went home about 6pm. I didn’t see any in the cloudy weather yesterday, but I didn’t look till after 5pm.

Oh, yes, and there are daffodils! One of the February Golds in the yard has come out, triumphing over overcrowding and yaupon shade. And there are three spiky-petaled pale ones Kristi Heckman must have planted, around the young oak outside the shop.

Yesterday afternoon the puddles in the road and the marshy area in the woods where we are clearing, north of Matt Moazami’s corner, were about dry. That was then; now they’ll be awash again.

waiting impatiently for spring

2010-02-22T21:47:00.002-06:00

Sunday -- We opened the day with a noisy thunderstorm, very heavy rain at 8:30 this morning. Some hail too. Springtime sort of storm. And it’s been spring weather the last few days, sixties, upper forties at night. Cold front coming tonight to chill it down. Lower than freezing? I don’t remember. I picked up the electric saw in town yesterday, but dallied on the ‘net, and got out here in the late dusk. I could still have sawed some wood, but I was tired and put it off; now it’s all soaked. Drat.

Buds are starting to push for spring. Very little is actually in flower yet save the elms, that were caught by the snow. The quince is full of fat buds, with a few somewhat open. Some dandelions and peppergrass, and a little yellow dandelion-tribe composite with narrow cylindrical non-spreading flowers, 8-inch tall stems over a rosette. In town at 610 yesterday I saw henbit, but none here at the Ridge yet. The chickasaw plum bushes have little round buds a couple of mm in diameter. Oak buds are noticeably swelling at the tips of the twigs. I am not the only one ready for spring to get here! Still, the average last frost is three weeks yet, so better not get overconfident.

the fourth snow!

2010-02-18T00:48:00.011-06:00

Many years we have no particular wintry precipitation - maybe a couple hours of sleet, or more damaging, freezing rain that coats branches and wires with a beautiful crystal coat that they can't support. But this winter it has been snow, more snow than in decades.

The Christmas Eve blizzard was mean. Fierce north wind and temperatures rapidly dropping through the twenties. But last Thursday it snowed from before dawn till after dark with very little wind, and a steady temperature of about 33°, dropping to 30° or so through the night. You could tramp in it for hours with soaked feet and not feel particularly cold.

I happened to spend it at the Ridge. I went out to feed Buddy, and managed to get the car halfway down the hill when all I meant to do was turn around. So, since I had food and fuel, and the cats were all safely inside back in town, I settled in to enjoy it. Took lots of pictures!

The lack of wind and the wetness of the snow meant that huge globs of it clung to the tiniest supports. A branched twig would accumulate a fist-sized clump, until one last flake too many would send it plunging.

The birds were really mobbing the sunflower seeds. Cardinals, towhees, Harris' sparrows, white-throats, a brown thrasher, and even a mockingbird.

Snow days can be great.

More pictures in my Facebook album.

Robins

2010-02-08T13:17:00.003-06:00

I thought I posted about these a week or so ago, but I guess not. Well, they're here in force in the yard again! Enough to be hazardous to laundry, but it's cold and rainy out there, so it's good.

I always remember Mammaw's story about the observant little Alabama schoolgirl, who got in trouble for "contradicting" her teacher. Their textbook (written and published undoubtedly in New York), said the robins were a sign of spring. She said, quite correctly, "But Ma'am, the robins come in the fall." Teacher had no ability to take into account local knowledge, and punished her. Bah!

warming some

2010-01-09T12:24:00.002-06:00

It did get down to 9° or close to it. Now at noon it is almost 30° and sunny. Agate and Tut went out eagerly but returned fairly promptly. Alabaster is off wherever she goes; I may not see her till night. Me? I'm still cold!

b-r-r-r-r !

2010-01-08T12:49:00.003-06:00

A picture (or graph) for the proverbial thousand words.

I totally missed the "first snow." It was back in early December, early morning, all gone by 11:00 am, which was when I poked my nose out that morning.

NOBODY could miss the Christmas Eve blizzard. Pictures two posts back.

The "third snow" was beautiful but short-lived, as the snow changed to light rain before it ended, and the temperature stayed just above freezing that night.

And then there's THIS. Clear dry weather, but oh, my! The forecast for last night was about 12°F. It was actually "only" 14° or 15°. Tonight they say 9°.

cats meet snow

2009-12-28T04:24:00.001-06:00

Lets see if youtube embed codes work on Blogger.

Yes!!

To make the captions legible, click the full-screen button. Now I know that the font-sizes on iMovie refer to the movie as seen full-screen, and need to be doubled for youtube.

Christmas eve "blizzard"

2009-12-27T12:56:00.008-06:00

This is NOT normal Christmas Eve weather! The forecasters, up until almost when it happened, thought we might get a few flurries. It snowed from around 1 pm (after a gradual transition from cold rain) till about 10 pm, all the while with 30-mph winds, gusting to 40 mph, and the temperature gradually dropping from 35° to 25°. B-r-r-r-r!

Another view of those two plum trees. Visibility is actually fairly good here. I took these as I was leaving the Ridge about 3pm; by the time I got to Denton visibility was about a block.

I am eager for March, when I can see these "hung with snow" in the poetical sense, like Housman's cherries, rather than this all too literal version (not that any of it was hanging about, with that wind)!

I took some video of the birds, which I will try to get edited and on youtube. I had gotten the feeder hung from a wire between the living room eave and the shrubbery, out of reach of the coons. But I didn't allow for the effect of 40-mph gusts on the shrubbery; the nail holding the wire pulled out of the eave rafter. I rehung the feeder directly from the eave, just 18 inches from the windows. The birds didn't seem to care.

Here's a cardinal outside the kitchen window on the big rock, chowing down on sunflower seeds. Generally, I seem to have cardinals (at least six males seen simultaneously), chickadees, titmice, Harris sparrows, a fox sparrow, whitethroats (more heard than seen), and two towhees.

Christmas was lovely and sunny, up to nearly 40°, so it melted fast. This brushy area down by the lane that we hadn't gotten around to mowing was transformed on Christmas morning. By the afternoon it was back to just being brush.

This is a big plum tree (I think) in the field above the gate. The guys timed themselves clearing it -- it took about an hour to free the trunk. They simply cut the briers off and left the strands up in the canopy. Picture every gray line in the canopy continued down to the ground, and you will have a "before" picture. I think it's worth doing with all the trees in that field. There should still be plenty of briery thickets nearby to provide wildlife cover!

So that was our white Christmas -- the first I can remember here. All melted now except in the very shadiest spots.

is it a haystack?

2009-12-06T15:05:00.012-06:00

No, it's a plum tree! Eddie and Stephen did a thorough haircut, shave, manicure, and pedicure on the two Mexican Plums near the house, transforming them back into trees, mulching up a quantity of greenbrier.

Here Stephen takes the high road, pulling out briers with a cultivating fork for a rake.
Eddie takes the low with the DR mower, making it possible to actually walk under the tree. I understand that Stephen was precariously up a ladder at one time, so determined they became to eradicate the upper crown of briers. I missed that.

The plums were sort of pretty last March. They are going to be MUCH NICER this spring. And! I'm going to be able to pick the plums without groveling for the fallen ones among the brier stems.

Wild Plum

2009-03-10T23:23:00.007-05:00

They are unholy who are born
To love wild plum at night,
Who once have passed it on a road
Glimmering and white.

It is as though the darkness had
Speech of silver words,
Or as though a cloud of stars
Perched like ghostly birds.

They are unpitied from their birth
And homeless in men's sight,
Who love, better than the earth,
Wild plum at night.

Orrick Johns, in The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Verse in English. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923

(OK, truthful admission here, the photo was taken last Saturday in the daytime; the night-time effect is compliments of Adobe. But my admiration for the poem, and for the effect of wild plum in the moonlight, is unchanged. And the scent! the poet didn't mention the scent!
If any flowers remain tomorrow after the winds of tonight's cold front blow through, and if it isn't cloudy and rainy, I may try for a night-time photograph. Too bad I didn't think of it sooner, during the last few balmy clear full-moon nights.)

rain coming???

2009-03-08T11:46:00.002-05:00

Sunday morning — another clear, breezy day, heading for almost 80°. But the weather-guy now says we might get showers tomorrow or the next day, and Wednesday when the cold front comes in, he has upped the chances to 50%. Also lowered the forecast temperature to 50° or even the forties for daytime, with a couple of nights in the mid-thirties. Maybe I won't take the plants back out yet after all. Crossing fingers for rain! So far we have had a grand total of an inch and a half for the whole year.

more chiefs than indians

2009-03-07T14:24:00.007-06:00

Wearing my hat as one of the publicity committee photographers, I accompanied a city Parks/Rec-sponsored walk at Cross Timbers park. For the city, the staffer for such activities (I forget her name). For the public, four Brownies and their troop leader. For the naturalists, Dorothy Thetford, Dave Rowley, Marilyn Blanton, Joe Bain, Joanna Fellows and her husband, me, and I think a couple more I have forgotten. [edit - Sharon Barr, Tracy Durmick from city, and the woman who joined us midway.]

We saw several redbuds, just starting to bloom. The mexican plums are glorious! And the scent — aaaaahh! Also a real infestation of privet, which we pointed out and explained too. For herbaceous wildflowers, there were Antennaria (pussytoes) up near the lake.

Since I was last at the park, they have added a wonderful steep, dirt section up to the Lake Forest lake. You can hike one-way now from Hickory Creek Road to Lake Forest Park and the dog park, off of Ryan Road. I especially am glad they have a section of one-person-wide dirt trail, as opposed to the gravel "road" of the main trail.

We all got pretty good exercise; the total distance was something between 1.5 and 1.7 miles. Just about the longest the little girls were up to. Me, too. Really got to get in better shape!

So, a nice morning. Cloudy, temperature in the 70s, pretty breezy. Good company, and! two more hours for my service record. (Plus another hour, conservatively figured, for labelling, exporting, getting disc to Dorothy, etc. Dorothy called to say how much she liked the one I managed to send her online.)

in like a lion ...

2009-03-06T09:37:00.004-06:00

Well, the first couple of nights of March were fairly lion-ish, and since then we have also had some fairly ferocious winds, but the temperature has become positively lamb-ly. Although it is rapidly growing up to a full-sized sheep, all hot and smelly. 87° yesterday was more spring than most people wanted. We are promised a cold front next week, and I sincerely hope it is a 40° front, and not a 20° arctic special.

The daffodils have mostly done their thing. The early ones got frost-nipped, and the later ones were fairly rapidly shriveled up by the hot dry wind. No rain to speak of for weeks, sigh. The redbuds are beginning, and the Chickasaw plum thicket at the Ridge is a billow of off-white specks.

olives olives olives (Texas var.)

2009-02-22T09:38:00.006-06:00

Went down to the Fort Worth Nature Center yesterday for a winter woody plants ID walk yesterday, led by Suzanne Tuttle. I almost didn't; I've been in bed for a week or more, miserable and sick or depressed or both, but it had been scheduled for months, and I kicked myself into going. Glad I did. Only problem was I was pretty unfit, but it was a slow amble with stops to look at stuff, so no real problem. Betty Zajac, of the Denton naturalists, was there, and she did fall from an unexpected root under her foot. I was afraid I might, but made out OK. And her tumble did her no harm.

I saw one plant I had totally never heard of, Elbow Bush, Forestiera pubescens. Sprawly little deciduous gray thing that was already blooming, little puffs of quarter-inch yellow-green anthers here and there. It's in the olive family, which was actually fairly well represented -— Texas ash, green ash, privet, Japanese ligustrum (both being eliminated, maybe). Also turns out that lilac and forsythia are Oleaceae.

Another new one, that I had heard of before but not seen to know it, was Eve's Necklace, a tree in the Leguminosae, excuse me, Fabaceae. Also in the family, mesquite and honey locust, Gleditsia triacanthos – three-branched spines. Boy, it's a well-armed tree! I don't know if I will recognize Eve's Necklace if I see it again or not; it didn't make a huge distinct impression.

There was a very early Mexican plum blooming; also a pear (non-native) down by the waterside. Today I'll have to get out to feed poor Buddy (made it back to D&L in the nick of time to get him some food, but I was tired and came on home with it). Maybe the big pear's blooming there. I hope Bud's OK after last night's hard freeze; the weather underground site says it was 21! That's way, way colder than I thought it would be. I should have really taken him his food yesterday evening.

So, nice sunny afternoon, sort of sore muscles (muscles? what muscles?) and three hours AT for my master naturalist log.

Red-bird Ridge clearing

2009-01-29T02:19:00.007-06:00

I'll take an entry or two to summarize what we have done recently here at the Ridge. We're making it look a little more civilized, but I don't believe we have done anything much to degrade the habitat, more the contrary. Of course, the ultimate aim, of building a few houses and selling their lots, will do so to some extent. But three one- or two-acre lots, with the structures we envision, and rules protecting natives and prohibiting transformation of prairie into lawn, should be able to fit in OK. Certainly the wildlife, at least the birds and occasionally the foxes, come right up to this house.

Friday 16 Jan was the first time we used the new little 14" Husqvarna saw. Eddie cut half a dozen little trees, some dead, to open out the clearing at site SC. Then he tackled the largest of his targets, a 7-8" oak, and it fell wrong. He tried to cut the little twisted strip of remaining wood, and the trunk shifted and trapped the chain. Though he turned it off immediately, the drive sprocket damaged some of the drive teeth. I filed them so they would fit in the groove again, but it didn't serve.

So I found a place with knowledgeable Husky servicepeople at Ed's Lawn Equipment in Addison, and trekked down there next day. They sold me a new chain and got the chain brake loose where we did it wrong. Sunday I put the chain on, but I couldn't get it to start.

Last Friday I had Eddie and Virgil and Scott. Scott and I went to the dump with the trash from the shop last summer, and E and V tried "about a hundred times" to start the saw, then gave up and used the handsaw and the axe. Eventually though the SC clearing was pretty open, and the NC also, though I have less sense what needs to be done there. The house is getting a good wood supply (I used a LOT yesterday and today!), and we made a nice shelter-pile with the trimmings. Virgil mowed most of the half of the south field I had started,and the dry gray dead broomweed between the house and NC.

I think mowing fields of weeds and briers is good practice, as a support for the grasses that get more sun. There are still several "hammocks" of trees overgrown with briers in that south field. They are probably more sheltering than the field-ful of thin brier growth. I want to clear out some of them, but I guess not all.

Saturday I went back to Ed's. They diagnosed a flooded engine, removed the spark plug, pulled the starter several times, replaced the plug, and it started right up. Smokily. I brought it home again (via Books-a-Million, where I GOBBLED up Bujold's new Horizon.) Even I could start it Sunday afternoon.

Monday the three guys, with my participation, much more energetically than last Friday, when I was barely over my bad cold, cleared privet at the gate and made a pedestrian gate into the panhandle woods. I surveyed into the woods and located a possible site where clearing a 20' mound of privet, several small dead trees, and one live one would make a nice site, without impacting the ravine/sometime creek. V finished mowing the S field, E and S made another gate/stile from the center woods into the west half, and then we came up to the north field.

Turns out there is more land west of the bulldozed seismic track than I had realized, at the s end of it. The guys made an effort at clearing a path along the west fence, but did no more than half of it. Then E asd I inspected from the back side of the tank dam where Jorge mowed last year. We found that two of the dead pines have smashed the fence. Buddy could have been long out and gone if he wanted to slither down the dam. The seismic-study bulldozer seems to have taken out part of the cross-fence. And as far as the first surveyor's claim of an "iron rod set" in that corner, well! We really need to get our money back from him!

sleet and cardinals

2009-01-27T22:00:00.008-06:00

It sounds like perhaps the sleet is about over. It was quite noisy earlier, but there is only a faint high-pitched clatter now. This is a widespread storm covering almost all of north Texas, with possible accumulations of a half inch forecast; this on top of a glaze of ice. I am out at the Ridge writing this; I called Joy and told her where to find the ash can if they needed to get more traction.

January has had a roller-coaster of temperature. Three times this month the mercury has reached around 80°; each time it then abruptly dives for the thirties or even twenties.

The bird-feeder-watching was really excellent today as the freezing drizzle came down. Alabaster particularly seemed to think so!

My camera is not really built for wildlife photography, especially on a dim day through glass with reflections of the sky through the windows behind me. A long lens, some very fast film or CCD, and a polarized filter might be of help. Still I captured something of the feeling of the excitement of having so many birds coming, including so many of our eponymous red-birds. Several times I counted eight males at once. They are much in evidence in these snapshots, along with the chickadee I caught coming in for a landing, the wren, several goldfinches, and more.
Bluejays, mockingbirds nibbling the yaupon berries, Harris', white-crowned, and white-throated sparrows, a brown thrasher, and a towhee are also around.

Nope, the sleet's not over. The faint background noise just crescendoed back into a dominant motif. In spite of using a good deal of my new firewood (courtesy of Eddie's efforts with the new baby Husqvarna), I am also using up propane. I called today to get the tank refilled tomorrow. Hope that will last till late spring, though I guess it depends on how many cold days I spend out here. But I believe heating this house is more efficient than at 711.

great birdfeeder

2009-01-17T20:52:00.009-06:00

Here are actual photos of my birds on the new feeder, somewhat fuzzy, and taken through glass with some reflections from within the room. On the upper left and on the bottom tray are goldfinches, upper right is a titmouse, and at the lower right is a confusing superposition of a Harris' sparrow and a cardinal. They eat up the supply pretty rapidly; it looks like I may need to refill weekly or even more often. A 25-lb. sack of sunflower seeds every month won't break me. But it sure will leave a pile of seed-coats on the ground underneath!

The cardinals often pose in the late afternoon sunlight. I may do some thinning of the yaupon, privet, hackberry, plum thicket, but I will certainly leave plenty of perches.

I have heard the s-s-see, s-s-see of waxwings, though I haven't looked the right direction to see them yet. These are the yaupon berries that draw them. (These are last year's, but there is a good crop this year also, somewhat unusually; often a poor crop alternates with a good crop.) A flock of waxwings will descend in a flurry onto the yaupons and stuff themselves madly with berries, then on some signal they will swirl up into the bare oak, where they will sit motionless, all facing the same direction, for 20 minutes, digesting. Any lawn furniture below will be liberally purple-spotted.

just about perfect

2009-01-10T15:14:00.004-06:00

Sitting in the Ridge living room, nice fire in the fireplace, Agate purring in my lap (Tut curled asleep with her nose under her paw in another chair, Alabaster on the futon-sofa), watching the birds at the splendid new feeder. Chickadees, titmice, goldfinches, Carolina wren, white-crowned sparrow, Harris' sparrows, brown thrasher, cardinals, blue jay, mockingbird. Down by the tank I saw a great blue heron.

It is a real major pain that, when a flicker of motion draws my attention from the computer to the window, I have to push my reading glasses out of the way to be able to see. And it's hard to type with a lapful of cat noodging the laptop off the lap. And I'm SUPPOSED to be making jewelry. Well, I'm about to, I guess.

yuletide weather

2008-12-23T02:07:00.003-06:00

Here's a kind of cute entry in a blog on weather underground, a worldwide summary of tomorrow's weather with particular emphasis on whether snow-covered rooftops will make things easy for the reindeer. flying reindeer forecast

A week or so ago things were topsy-turvy; it was 28° here and 58° in Lincoln. This early morning however it is 31° here and 7° there.

I am sitting in front of the remains of my evening's fire, which is pretty much gone, so I will soon head for bed.

Eddie and I worked at the Ridge today, and cleaned almost all the windows, which made a HUGE difference. I have been putting out sunflower seed for about three days now, and there are many birds in evidence. Eddie was pretty impressed by four male cardinals at once in the back yard. I told him that's why it's called Red-bird Ridge, a name he had never really paid attention to before. People have become so used to meaningless street-names and subdivision names, that it doesn't even occur to them to look for real meaning in a placename any more.

Benthic update

2008-12-09T14:08:00.003-06:00

Haven't been keeping records too well, but I can add in 4-1/2 hours of ID time this morning, and 5 hours collecting last Tuesday. Gay St. last week was very disappointing, though there was plenty of water. But Jackson, oh my! Blackflies, dragonflies, dayflies, damselflies, flatworms, scuds -- I didn't even finish sorting, much less ID everything this morning. There were 308 blackfly larvae.

The last two days were balmy. A cold front arrived last night. THe temp was 65 at midnight and going down steadily since then. It's forty now and predicted in the 20s tonight.

waiting for Ike

2008-09-13T07:28:00.006-05:00

There really is a "calm before the storm." 7:30 am, the sun is presumably just up behind the thick overcast, humidity 80%, all quiet and still. Going to be a few more hours till the storm reaches here with more than clouds.

I looked at the Houston area accumulated rain radar. I have never before seen the colors for 6, 8 10, or 12" on such a plot!

Virgil and I cleaned the roofs and downspouts yesterday, put a bit of acrylic patch compound in the presumed source of the leak in the office roof, and spread a hopeful layer of asphalt over Shanna and Larry's bay window. I meant to clean off the shelf behind the gray fence, and haven't, so things might blow there.

They have increased the forecast speed of the storm as it moves north, shortening the estimated time it will be dumping on us.

7:50 - A breeze is developing.

8:10 - According to the radar, the first little band of rain is about to manifest itself.

More later.

Later (much later, I write this in January 2009, since I never got back to the post) -- We never had any significant wind, nor even much rain, though areas further east did. As the weather bands came rotating around to the west side of the storm, they just evaporated and disappeared. Places in Arkansas lost power for days, and Kieren and Jon's beach house vanished completely off its foundation; Amy had no power for almost 6 days, but nothing happened here.

beep-beep!

2008-08-09T18:22:00.004-05:00

Unfortunatly no pics for an interesting episode.

I worked out at the Ridge with Virgil and his friend John today, cleaning out the west part of the shop. I came up to the house toward the end of the morning, after they had had a break in the shade of the living room and had left the front door fairly wide open. As I came up the walk, I heard a fairly loud, uncoordinated-sounding noise in the house. I called -- no answer. I went in and discovered a roadrunner in the plant window, skirmishing around from side to side, trying to get out!

John was in the yard, and I called him in to see if he could help, but he mostly just stood there, exclaiming over the size of the bird. Seen close up, it did look pretty big! I got the net from the dining room, but wasn't sure just what to do with it. The bird was brushing around between the glass and the plants, occasionally uttering a breathy "hoh!" As I poked carefully with the net, it got over to the left by the stones, facing the stairs, and caught sight of the wide-open doorway. Beep-beep-gone!

today, I'm in love with Edouard

2008-08-06T09:24:00.003-05:00

or at least his effects. He slid on past south of us, and the wings of rain just didn't quite reach out this far, but it's CLOUDY. And cool! 9:30 in the morning and still under 80°. AAaaaaahhhhh.

Yesterday I went out with the benthic invertebrate monitoring crew for the first time in months. I need to get to the notebook and chalk up 3.5 hours collecting, as well as 2.5 hours working on the poster last week.

John and Adelaide and I went to Burning Tree and Woodrow. Burning Tree had a skinny little groove of a channel between the pools but no actual flow. Woodrow had a modest flow and a real riffle. Also I saw SIX turtles.

We have returned to approximately our original, pre-Todd, collecting protocol. We make three 1-sq-ft sweeps of the benthos, in a pool, up the bank, and in a riffle. We mingle all three in a white pan and then pick on-site. An occasional pebble or seed may get tossed in, if we can't quite tell if it's an animal or not, but essentially it's a clean sample to take back to the lab. We're meeting next Tuesday at 9 to do the ID.

summer wins

2008-08-02T15:56:00.004-05:00

OK, after writing the last post, and while trying to get the pictures to upload properly, I got hot enough to officially abandon the dining room and living room. The thermostat is set up as high as it goes (90°), and I have closed the doors and retreated to the middle room and library, with the little wall unit AC turned on, and a fan.

I don't know what running this unit will do to the electricity bill. If it were one of the new high-efficiency ones, I would figure that it had to be cheaper, even if it runs more hours, than the whole-house unit. But it's old. I guess I could go down and read the meter and keep some records.

Anyway right now I am fairly comfortable. Walking out into the living room is a definite hot change. Maybe I should get more thermometers if I really want to know what is going on. The one by Isabel's closet door here reads 85°, the same as it did when I first turned this unit on. The main AC thermostat's thermometer is way inaccurate, I have known since it was installed. Also very vague, with marks every 5 or 10 degrees.

OK. 102° outside, still and hot but somwhat cooler in east part of house, thermostat says 87°, cooler in here and thermometer says 85°. But I don't know that I trust the accuracy of any of those numbers.

The electric meter at 4pm read 50177. All that's on are the small AC, a couple of fans, fridge, and computer setup.

Numbers:
Last month I used about 66 Kwh per day. This month I have cut it to around 50. That is STILL over 2000 watts being pulled all the time. How many watts does that AC use? The current electric rate appears to be about 12.1¢ per Kwh. At this rate my next bill should be more like $210, down from $279 (allowing the $19 garbage and recycling fee and the sales tax). I was hoping for more savings from my turning the thermostat up, but I guess I have forgotten to reset it after Ellen leaves several times. I'll check it tomorrow afternoon and see what's happening.

more summer

2008-08-02T14:22:00.006-05:00

The forecast just keeps inching up. Now they are saying 104° today and 106° tomorrow and Monday.

I had another swim in the lake yesterday evening. It was nice, and I got some good exercise (my shoulders and legs are sort of sore today). But it wasn't as nice as last week; the air was just too warm. My cool didn't last really even until I got home. The air was too hot along the freeway. Maybe I should see about a county-road route. I'm sure those six lanes of concrete are holding a lot more heat than 2 lanes between fields.

I have been thinking about going back to Zilly-boy (Isle du Bois Park, for you furriners) instead of Johnson Branch. There are a lot more people there, but the steep wooded ridge with the shaded tables is so nice, and catches breezes so well.

It does help a bit that I got about 2/3 of my hair chopped off Thursday evening.

I spent the time before I swam last night working on something for me, not for sale. I got five of the seven charms affixed to my Diet Diary bracelet, and they are fairly fun. I am lacking Kokopeli for exercise, because I haven't found the charms, and the grains assemblage, which will be a white rice pearl, a mauve one, and a 2mm tigereye (millet?). They are sort of long and jangly, and the buffalo's legs get hooked with other loops sometimes.

I have never been used to wearing a charm bracelet, and I probably won't wear this one most of the time, just keep it handy. It is being quite useful for fun record-keeping without the HOURS I used to spend working on my spreadsheet. And since starting to really pay attention, I have lost three pounds. Now if I can only get into exercise mode.

It's too damn hot!

more rain!

2008-08-01T08:36:00.004-05:00

Well, the forecast kinda missed this! Not only did we get a short, sharp thunderstorm Wednesday evening -- 1/2" or rain or more for some, though only about a quarter here -- but it started occasionally drizzling sometime after 1 am last night, which is still going on now at 8:30. It didn't cool things down much; it's barely under 80, but the cloud cover is SO welcome. The forecast for today is ONLY 99° . I note that while it is 78° here, it is 74° in Lincoln, 73° in midafternoon in Oslo, 85° in Houston, 75° in Boaz, and 56° (grrrr) at 6 am in Oakland. Oh, and Kieren has 73° in Chicago.

The photo is of the thunderstorm yesterday, pictured out the living-room window, with interesting distortions due to the sheets of water running irregularly down the glass.

ghost of Dolly, crying

2008-07-30T08:14:00.004-05:00

Well, hurray for the ghost of Hurricane Dolly. When she came ashore down in Brownsville, no moisture or even clouds to speak of made it up here. But over the last week she has drifted up the Rio Grande Valley, across the Panhandle, and along between Oklahoma and Kansas. There she joined up with some instability, and wonder of wonders, produced some off-and-on rain from 6 to 8 this morning. Not much, maybe an eighth of an inch, but it's something. And the clouds that kept the temperature to only 96 or 97 yesterday when another 103 was forecast, they were pretty welcome too.

It sure doesn't look like much on the radar. Going by usual occurrences, I would have expected the clouds to develop a hole that slid right over Denton. And last night the forecast only said 10% chance, though that's upped to 30% this morning, I see.

Well, anyway, we aren't going to get skunked entirely for the month of July, like I thought -- the last decent rain was a inch and a half the last weekend of June. I feel sort of like that old headline from July 20, 1969: "Man on the Moon! Besides, it rained"

ugh ... indubitably high summer

2008-07-26T11:29:00.003-05:00

301 am CDT.
Yesterday evening's 500 mb analysis shows the upper level ridge is now firmly situated right on top of North Texas. Unanimous agreement exists among the model forecasts - showing little change to the overall synoptic pattern for the next few days. The upper level ridge will remain stationary over the region...but gradually weaken as 500 mb heights fall about 6dm. As a result...the hottest temperatures will occur early in the forecast period...with a very slight cooling trend taking place during the work week. Needless to say...rain chances will be slim to none over the next seven days as upper level energy tracks up and over the ridge across the Central Plains and into the Midwest.

I went up to Ray Roberts last evening for a pleasant hour making part of a new little girl's size bracelet in yellow, orange, and red, and a half hour's paddle in the water at dusk. I felt wonderfully cool and clean up till about an hour ago, when I was out adjusting the soakerhose on the front sidewalk iris bed (unused for a year) and got all sweaty in the sun. I should have started watering the front bank before this; half the redbud leaves are brown.

We had a decent thunderstorm the last weekend of June, and essentially nothing in July - 4 one-hundredths. Looks like that will be it for the month. Hurricane Dolly was no help; she went too far south, and that dratted summertime "ridge of high pressure" just sits there and blocks any relief.

This of course is normal. It happens, more or less severely, every summer. But every summer it somehow catches me by surprise. We DO have summer thunderstorms. The actual normal rain for July and for August is I believe a couple of inches. But I don't know that we have ever gotten that much rain in both months in the same summer. (Wonder how I could research that, hmmm?)

Oh, well. It's July. It's hot.

one left, and mom

2008-07-06T15:44:00.004-05:00

Well, the spring of the kitties may almost be over. The two gray guys got adopted from Petco, and Tabby-spot and Ruffie have found homes from the Cupboard flyer. I put in another Craigslist ad last night and have four inquiries.
I'll be sad to see her go, she's SUCH a little cutie, and I have invested an awful lot of time and effort (and cash) in getting the little thing this big even. But truly I need to have just my two cats, And maybe if I get set up at the Ridge I can occasionally foster some upstairs. Put a screen door at the entrance to the big room, maybe, so they could have the room and porch, and I could see through the door before I opened it.

Mama Tut is NOISILY in heat, almost all the time. And she is licking and chewing her back so it is all covered with raw spots. I wonder if she could be allergic to Revolution? Anyway, I'm calling in the morning for appointments for her and Floof; hope I can get her maneuvered into the carrier. How long after spaying do the hormones die out?

a little "weather"

2008-06-17T11:32:00.005-05:00

in the sense of "rough weather." After a long string of hot muggy days (101° on Father's Day) we just got swiped by the tail end of a Red River storm. We had a very brief period of strong north gusts, and a not-much-longer rain. At least it has filled the rain barrel and cooled the air — it's 72° now, which is wonderful.

The radar looks like the tip end of the storm may have reached as far as Argyle. I hope so. The blackberries are coming on, but they really need a good soaking to fill out. They are pretty small now, even the few ripe ones at the ends of the clusters.

My new workers, John, Bill, and Hector, spent two days last week clearing out the prospective site downhill from Mark's studio. It was a lot of work because of the old fence buried in briars and blackberries. So far I only have one picture, 'cause my camera batteries went ker-flooey.

They also got the little freezer outside and dumped. So sad. It had, among other contents, a whole unopened turkey! And now it's getting rained on. At least, for the berries' sakes, I hope so.

Jess R. is coming at 2:30 to see about adopting Tabby-Spot. And Little Floof is going to the vet at 5 to see why she's not growing. Only 33 ounces at very nearly three months. And Tut seems to be in heat (AGAIN).

11:50 — the rain has stopped.

saving water (and gas)

2008-06-13T00:24:00.004-05:00

This post is not about the general subject of water conservation, though that is always a good thing. This is a very specific calendar reference for me of the dates the plumber came.

Monday he fixed the powder room toilet fill-valve and cutoff, so there is silence in the powder room, and replaced the lavatory faucet in the shower, ditto. Amy and I went to Lowe's and got a pretty decent faucet, not the cheapest, but at $42, far from the most expensive.

Tuesday he replaced Jeff's sink faucet upstairs. That had not been leaking, but Jeff had been having to turn it on and off with the cutoff valve.

Wednesday Ray came by to see about whether the exterior board under the bay window could be removed for Sawyer to get to the kitchen sink faucet, and ended up replacing the faucet himself, with a little help from me. Yay, Ray! Yay for hot water!!! Ellen will be ecstatic on Sunday.

So then today (well, yesterday by now) Sawyer came back and fixed Alex's lavatory and toilet and Stephen's sink that dripped under the drain at 610. I knew Alex's lav wouldn't shut off, but I didn't realize that what he actually meant was that the hot water ran in a strong stream continually. No WONDER the water and gas bills have been high at 610.

All fixed. Blessed silence, and still water meters. The whole thing came to about two months rent from one apartment. I think the lower bills at 610 will pay for it in three months.

flowering stinging-thorn

2008-06-02T10:56:00.007-05:00

I spent a few minutes at Red-bird Ridge this morning, taking pictures of some of the early summer wildflowers. I have missed the spiderworts completely; the solanum, horsemint, and pincushion daisy are getting started.

The bull-nettle has been blooming for some weeks. There are still lots of white fragrant flowers, but the central ones in every inflorescence have withered, or given rise to horrifically spined green capsules about 5 cm long. Cnidoscolus texanum is the scientific name. "Cnido" - stinging, and "scolus" - thorn, in Greek. And boy, do they sting!

I took some photos, but I think I want to go out again and make a real study of the plant — get some leaf photos and spiny close-ups, and then do a set of three small prints for Etsy. Probably a waste of time, but who knows?

Remarkably, a Latin American species of the genus, Cnidoscolus chayamansa, is widely used as a food plant, and is said to have higher nutritional values than chard or spinach.

It was pleasant at the Ridge at 8am. Sunny and clear, but still with lots of long shady shadows cast by the trees in the early sun, and only in the mid-70s. It's 84° now at 11am, and going up into the 90s all this week. The electric bill is gonna be a bugger this month. I don't ever want to think about the 610 water bill - gotta call Sawyer today.

KITTENS ready to be adopted TODAY

2008-05-26T18:11:00.008-05:00

I'm having a fun time (NOT) with Craigslist today; it "ghosted" my ad -- told me it was published, but it never appeared. I'm trying to fix it, but I may have to either wait two days, or slim it down to bare bones. If I do, I will direct people to the original copy of it here.

Five lively kittens are 8 weeks old and ready for new homes.

I would really like for them to be adopted in pairs, but all the bigger ones are certainly able now to go solo. They are the three males who are tabby-striped grey or charcoal on their backs. The littlest female has just made it to 22 ounces (big brothers are over two pounds each) and I believe she needs her mama for a few more weeks; if you want her and could temporarily give a home to her mom too, that would work.

I'm hoping to also find a quiet home for mom after she is spayed; she was feral but was handled and fed when she was a kitten two years ago, and she is becoming pretty accustomed to indoor care -- she will be a sweet pet in a gentle, peaceful home. She's a pretty little cat, white with her ears and the back of her head.Please don't make me put any ofthem back outside in the feral jungle!

Mom has had her shots; the kittens had their first set May 14, and will need to get the follow-ups mid-June and mid-July. (It's quite affordable at the clinic in Denton.) I will get the big guys neutered this week; the smaller females aren't big enough yet.

I need to know that they will be spayed; the whole reason for raising these kittens was to remove one line of ferals from my back woods (It's been a joy, but I would HATE to think that the job wasn't finished; I would rather keep them longer and get it done myself.) The Humane Society will reimburse $25 of the $35 spaying cost.

The illustrated genealogical history, sort of, of this line of cats for the last two years is on this blog; go to the entry named "feral-and-ex-feral-cats" and also to "growth."

growth

2008-05-19T13:25:00.004-05:00

Kittens are growing up. I had the whole basketful of them out on the couch a couple of weeks ago, when they were 5 weeks old. Agate and Alabaster inspected, and were NOT impressed.

They have all been to the clinic now for their first shots and a gulp of dewormer. The tech said, when I said they had been inside their whole lives, "Kittens are born with worms." Since her worm medicine, little miss teeny-cat, who was stuck at 15 ounces, has made it up to 19.

Mom doesn't offer to let them nurse very often any more, but every now and then they pile on. Here it looks like little tabby-spot is trying out nutrition by osmosis.

act now or pay more

2008-04-27T10:12:00.004-05:00

Peg just sent me a link to an Environmental Defense Fund article that indicates that if we jump on the "cap and trade" model for curbing carbon emissions SOON, the expense will be less than 1% of the GNP. The article is very short on actual numbers, but heartening, if (BIG if) we can get on the train.

Ah! read it more closely. The full report, with the numbers, is linked with a PDF download, about 40 pages.

feral, and ex-feral, cats

2008-04-26T10:43:00.015-05:00

A Natural History of the Sycamore Street Feline Herd (or Horde) —
Many of the ever-changing feline population I merely note the presence of: the black one with the collar, the kind of pretty white-fronted tabby, the long-haired ratty-looking one, the huge part-Siamese tom. But I have had a continuing relationship with one line.

Two years ago in early April, my three-year-old nephew went crawling under the back deck (NOT a salubrious environment) and discovered a litter of little kittens, eyes just open. We began feeding mom, and the kittens when they were a bit bigger. Mom was quickly named Zap, after Zap the cat in Lois Bujold's Memory (if you haven't read it, DO!) Zap would growl and hiss and scratch fingers and purr and dig into her food simultaneously, and so would our Zap.

We were able to pet and handle the kittens to some extent, especially the long-haired creamy one and the pretty little one with the Egyptian-kohl eyelines, that we called Tut. I considered trying to catch and socialize the lot of them, but with my bedfast mother and a house full of caregivers, hospice workers, etc., I couldn't quite see my way. And then one day Zap led them all off somewhere, and I didn't see them for months, and they were wild.

Last year I would see them occasionally. The big beautiful creamy long-haired male, who never got any name more dignified than Fluffytail, was around for a while, but I suspect he has succumbed to the perils of fighting for his status. All three white-with -spots ones turned out to be female, in spite of their optimistic names of Tut, Sam, and Pierre. (I had actually examined Tut, as a little kitten, and thought she was male. Oops.)

Last October my cousin found two scrawny little flea-bitten, anemic kittens in the sunshine just under the edge of the deck. We were on the point of leaving for Houston, but we took the time to take them to the vet. Turned out they were free of disease, and she got rid of the worms and fleas and fed them up, so when I got back to town I got two adorable healthy (expensive) kittens, Agate and Alabaster. Agate was the runt for weeks, Alabaster would just push in before him to gobble all the food. But his tom-cat genes eventually kicked in. She's a neat little 7.5 pound almost-grown-up white kitty now (with tabby leg-warmers on her back legs), and he's developing into a big, beautiful, hunky male (NOT an intact tom) at 9 pounds so far. I do my best to keep them inside, though if I get to move back out to the country, I'll let them be outside-in-the-day cats.

Meanwhile, back out in the back yard . . .
I have been feeding Lola, the muckledy-tortoise-shell spayed female abandoned by one of my tenants. The problem with feeding her is that she doesn't have the self-confidence or the standing in the pecking order to defend her food, and so I am really feeding the neighborhood. I don't want to do this; I can't feed ALL the feral cats in the UNT vicinity. But in March or so, when an obviously pregnant Tut showed up willing to get close to me for some food, I obliged. (She had been around, pregnant, before, though not coming so close. I think Agate and Alabaster are hers, but she might be their aunt.)

This spring she would let me scratch her ears as she ate, or even skritch all the way down her back. I began to envision catching her and confining her before she delivered, and getting her spayed after. But I still wasn't sure how to go about it, though Isabel is gone now and I have the whole house to myself.

Well, February and early March went by. She got fatter, and fatter, and fatter. Every now and then she wouldn't show up for a day or two, and I would think she had disappeared to have them, and I had lost my chance. Then she would be back, even more like a volley ball. I did get the unused plastic trash can washed out, and some wadded up newspaper in it. She disappeared again.

Then to my amazement she showed up again, STILL pregnant, on March 16. So I fed her, and as she was eating, I just picked her up under the front legs and popped her into the can. She didn't even wriggle, much less scratch. I brought her into the house, cleaned everything off the floor and shelves of the main bathroom, and installed her, with food and a nice box of rags, and later that day a litterbox. She was SO pregnant, she just settled down in that box and pretty well stayed there all the time. She did fortunately have no problem adapting to the litter box. I had the little bathroom hall blocked off, but she never even tried to leave the room when I'd bring in food. I think she knew a good thing when she found it. Warm, dry, no other cats to fight, food all the time . . .

Well, she got fatter, and fatter, and fatter, and FATTER. And she developed first one, then three, and four, and five bare spots in her fur, where she evidently just licked her aching back till all the fur came out. In her trip to the vet on March 19 she proved amazingly healthy. No FIV or leukemia, thank goodness, not even any worms. Just hungry and FAT.

13 days later she finally had a litter of five. I posted this to ICHC. One has been kind of a runt, and I have given her some extra feedings. She's doing OK.
They're all bouncing around now in their bathroom and the little hall. They are just four weeks old today. Pretty soon they'll be over the barricade in the doorway, and then I'm really going to be overrun. Explosion of cute! I think I better go take some more pictures and get them up on Craigslist. I really don't think I can have eight cats!

So that's the current state of the feline world here on Sycamore Street.
(I'll get back to this this evening to put in the rest of the pics, and to change out what I have for the screen-sized ones instead of these huge ones. oops)

where's the HTML gone?

2008-04-24T00:39:00.001-05:00

or not the HTML exactly, but the activeness of http:// links typed in my entries. I thought they would automatically be links, but it ain't so. Hmmmmm . . . must research. Wonder if they are working in the jewelry blog. Seems to me I have used them.

Later — huh. That's a pain. You can't just type in a URL and have it be active. You have to do by hand the whole [a href="URL"]visible text here[/a] deal. Surely there's a way to do it automatically.

April shower at last

2008-04-23T23:45:00.001-05:00

Well, it was about to feel kind of like a drought, almost a week since the last rain, and temps up in the 80s, drying things out. But the thunderstorm this evening took care of that for a while. Course, I would have preferred it NOT to be at its worst just when I was on the road from Lewisville. I was going 40 and unhappy about it. VERY heavy rain, occasional blinding lightning flashes, and in between the lightning I couldn't see the stripes except where they had white reflectors, which was not near often enough. But I got here, so I guess all's well that ends well. At least it will be cooler for a few days. It's already down in the mid-sixties now, a couple of hours after the storm, and it sounds windy outside, so I guess the front's coming through. Maybe my tenants will turn off their ACs again (though I have no great expectation of it). It's been in the upper 80s a few days recently, and I hear the AC cycle on even in the middle of the night. They pay lip service to the idea of cross-ventilation, but .... sigh. Thank goodness I don't pay their electricity. I will have one last gasp of a high gas bill, because ten days ago we just about had a frost. Oh well, THAT won't happen again.

The heavy rain may about beat down the last of the iris show. The ones at 610 have been extravagant this year. This picture was when they started, mostly purple and blue, and some apricot ones. The last week, the yellow and gold ones have been making the show. I hope Argyle Acres is still having open house this weekend. Yes, just checked. Through the 27th. Here's the link.

Here is a small plug for my jewelry blog. I made some of the irises into easel/backdrops for jewelry photography earlier this week. Quite successful. Between the nifty pictures, and my posts in the forums and AboutJewelrymaking, I got about 300 new views on my Etsy site for the day yesterday, and 50 more today without doing much at all. Now if some of those views would just turn into SALES. Oh, well, keep on plugging.

spring photos, April 2

2008-04-14T13:01:00.000-05:00

This tender green unfolding hackberry twig is all out of date now; the leaves are fully open. Spring has pretty fully sprung, in spite of a frost alert last night (no frost here, I don't think). These pictures were taken almost two weeks ago.

The hackberry is at the north end of the garden area at the Ridge. This flowering dewberry vine is in the woods, down the hill from the spot that I am calling "deckhouse site" (because that type of house would go so well there). I went prowling all through the woods there looking for Buddy, becaue I just moved him to the east pasture that Saturday, and then he hadn't come for his food Monday or Tueday. I printed up flyers and went all up David Fort Rd. and around Fincher, stuffing mailboxes.

Along the way I saw this flower in the roadside. I though it was O. missouriensis, or sundrop, but this Saturday at Redbud Day the Native Plant folks had it for sale as stemless primrose. They also had sundrops; the leaves are way different. I got some of both.

Well, Buddy turned up back in the west pasture. I have NO idea how he did it. It hasn't happened again. He did get out again this past Thursday because the insufficient latch-board on the garage gate came open. But he came back on his own. I have that gate tied firmly shut now.

Finally, for the cryptobotany enthusiasts, here is the thallose liverwort along the bank of the lane. (Click on any image for larger view.)

Father of Waters, alternate version

2008-04-10T17:42:00.000-05:00

OK this is not Natural History, strictly speaking. Although I have heaps of pictures and observations from this spring, about which I really should be posting. A few days ago I saw a TURKEY at the gate to Red-bird Ridge!

But this is an experiment to see if I can put in the widget that shows a preview to Lois Bujold's PASSSAGE that comes out in a couple weeks. Plenty of natural history observations in it, Lois is a wonderful writer, and this landscape is pretty much the Ohio she remembers from her childhood.

OK, here goes . . .

Bah, it worked for the preview but Blogger won't accept it to publish. Says one section tag is not closed, though it looks to me like it is. I'll go copy it again and see.

There.

test of new image host

2008-03-01T11:46:00.001-06:00

test of largeimagehost

[URL=http://s5.largeimagehost.com/img/untilted/UrcQQer/color+contours+compressed.jpg.html][IMG]http://s5.largeimagehost.com/TN/UrcQQeh/tn_color+contours+compressed.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

nope that dadn't work

put it in upload box

nor that

OK, This is more or less it, the topo contours of Red Bird Ridge, except this is putting the thumbnail in as the image and not linking to the full huge pic. Still, we're getting there. And it seems to have left out the soft porn ad banner, anyway, thank goodness!

another eclipse

2008-02-20T23:51:00.001-06:00

Wednesday, February 20, 9:45pm, sitting in the car in front of the house at Red Bird Ridge. Just glanced up to see the eclipse make a brief appearance out of the clouds and disappear again. I did already get several good photos, I think, but I’m hoping for a couple more. I got out here just a little before nine, had to feed Buddy first thing, since I’m sure he had been waiting since mid-afternoon. I took one handheld shot just at the beginning of totality, then fished a tripod I had noticed the other day out of the shop and set it up. It makes all the difference with my little camera. I can go to full zoom and then shoot a 6-second or 10-second exposure.

It’s a bit odd to feel the increasing breeze, getting much chillier while I have been here (though still not really cold, maybe 60 or a bit cooler) on my left shoulder, out of the north or a bit northwest, while watching the clouds aloft scud briskly from southwesst to northeast. At the beginning of the eclipse there were just scattered clouds, but they kept thickening up till the coverage was almost total about 9:30. It even seemed that they were down to ground level creating obscuring haze for a bit, but that may have just been the effect of loss of my dark vision after I went inside to retrieve the computer.

I was about to disassemble the tripod setup after taking a couple of time exposures of the house in the dark, when a hole drifted past and I got one more exposure of the eclipse. So then I decide to sit here in the car mostly out of the wind and write it up, in the hopes that I would get some more chances to see the end stages after totality is over. But according to the clock (9:59), that should already be beginning, and the cloud cover appears total.

10:06 — well, maybe not. A couple of holes just obligingly passed by. letting me see the reappearing bright crescent; when an actual clear area opens up, the red umbral-shadowed disc is still visible. There are more dark patches of holes in the clouds. I’ll give it another five or ten minutes and then try again.

10:27 — OK, I’ve done this eclipse. I did get some probably over-exposed images surrounded by illuminated cloud of the bright disc reappearing. Now it’s halfway out, covered by clouds more often than not, my shin is hurting, and I’m getting cold. Next time, 2010!

100% chance of rain (they SAY)

2008-02-15T23:28:00.000-06:00

It's been very dry so far this year. Several times probable showers have been predicted, but have come to naught. However, tomorrow the weather service has said 100% chance of thunderstorms, some heavy. We'll see. There were widespread light showers today in advance af the main event, but none in Denton. Sometimes I think we have a mystical force shield. I watch the weather underground animated radar, and the rainclouds approach Denton, split around us, and go on their way. There is now, at 11:35 pm, thunder and lightning to the southeast out my window, So maybe it will happen. Maybe I should go unplug the airport. All very well that I'm typing on an un-plugged-in laptop; there are electronics plugged in still.

11:50 — rain started a few minutes ago, tapered off, came again — light so far. Thunder has quit. I think I'll gamble that the airport base won't get fried if I keep using it.

This is not rain associated with the cold front like I learned in junior high — that was I guess the rain we didn't participate in earlier today (today was in the upper thirties and cloudy all day, while yesterday was sunny and 70°F.) According to the NWS forecaster, this is the source of the rain expected tomorrow:

" Believe the main threat for the
next few hours will remain south of the County Warning Area where the boundary
resides and instability is greater. Instability over North Texas
will really begin to increase Saturday morning into the afternoon
as the upper level low approaches and the warm sector surges
north. New model data so far is still showing the warm sector
surging as far north as I-20 by middle Saturday afternoon with a
tornado threat in the far southeastern counties of North Texas. "

Well, at least we'll get enough to get wet. It rains a bit, stops a bit, rains a bit. Some lightning continues to the SE. Maybe the liverworts on the road bank at the Ridge will get enough to green up before the Neimans visit on Monday.

Brrrrrrrr!

2007-11-22T05:12:00.000-06:00

Yesterday it was Indian Summer, 80° (well day before yesterday, it's 5 am now. Now it's 37°, and tonight it is pretty likely to freeze. And as usual, the plants are all still outside.

I've not been doing much outside, although I have still to write the posts and post pics of fall in Concord. Been enjoying the kittens (something ELSE I haven't posted on), cleaning out with Ellen, and running financial errands.

AND getting an Etsy shop going, and actually making a sale!! So if anybody reading this needs some nice joolery, go to http://www.piedras.etsy.com. Also I'm putting up there some of my photos for sale, like these two. (OK, that gets a kitten posted.)

And then here's a sort of "messin' with your perceptions" shot of two planets hanging in a tree, which is a pair of earrings.

I'm also linking to a blog which is composed of lots of pictures of goodies other Etsy sellers have for sale. Boycott the corporations, Buy Handmade! http://etsymini.blogspot.com/

summer over?

2007-09-06T03:33:00.000-05:00

The weatherman is calling for "a strong fall front" next Monday, night-time temperatures in the sixties Monday and the fifties (!?!) on Tuesday. Looks like those three 102°s and one 100° in the first half of August will be it for the triple-digits. Last year there were 25 days in August at or over 100°.

Of course, the year before that gave us a reading of 104° on September 28th! But a repeat of that really does seem unlikely. So the warmest year on record may be balanced by one of the cooler, and certainly wetter. Wetter through early July, that is. We had a grand total of 0.08" in August, and not much so far for September, though we got some last night. Only scattered, though. I talked to a woman at the pool today who lives west of town, and she didn't get any.

I do hope it stays warm enough to not discourage TWU from repeating its open-through-September pool policy. I am afraid that front we're supposed to get Monday may chill the water pretty drastically. Well, we shall see.

One picture I need to get is the blooming Snow-on-the-Mountain. Kay and I were remarking last week how pretty it was. It always seems to be beautiful in late summer, despite having practically no rain during its whole growing season. I wonder how it does it.

late summer in Massachusetts

2007-09-01T14:29:00.000-05:00

A not-quite-on-topic entry . . .

Turid has got herself an iPhone, and she LOVES it! Advanced tech that is intuitive and easy to use. She likes the sound quality of the phone, and she likes the way it synchronizes its pictures and notes with her Mac automatically when she docks it, and she is having a blast with the camera. She sends me another couple of pictures every day. And if Tom shows up in most of them, and the rest are buildings, well ... she's an architect with a 5-year-old.

The idyllic farmhouse is Flint Farm; I suppose it's near Concord. It might be one of the places that is still an active farm and sells produce. They have an extremely progressive tax structure in MA that somehow makes it work for these historic farms that are right in the Boston "suburbs" to continue to be actual farms.

The canoe trip is on the Concord River (see Thoreau for more description!)

just a tiny hint of fall

2007-09-01T13:15:00.000-05:00

We had a lovely, lovely cool front show up Thursday evening — I got to the pool at 5:30, and when I had to get out at 6:00 it was NOTICEABLY cooler. Not actually CHILLY, mind you, but ... cooler. Its effect was not at all evident yesterday afternoon, when it was still hot, but last night it went down to UNDER SEVENTY DEGREES. Open the door! Open the windows! Turn on the attic fan!

The Farmers' Market that is so conveniently located on my street-corner is, rather amazingly, still going strong in September, thanks to the odd weather this year. Last year it was so hot and dry the vendors were all gone by July. This year, with thirty-plus inches of rain by that time, the spring was very poor for most of them. Many of their squashes rotted in standing water. But now after a not-very-hot summer, the crops are still going.

The young man who has tomatoes (if you get there early enough) says the fall crop is coming on, and the summer vines are still producing, so there may be only a week or so that's tomato-less. The picture above shows the cantaloupe, peaches (in September?!), okra, squash, and peppers I spent $14 on, at about 10:30 this morning. I was hoping for tomatoes, but I would have had to get up earlier.

riffles and pools

2007-08-31T23:09:00.000-05:00

This not-particularly-exciting-looking bit of stream landscape is a riffle — a shallow spot between deeper quiet pools — where the water splishes along over gravel shallows and miniature waterfalls, soaking up oxygen at every splash. This particular riffle is in Hickory Creek, just below the Jackson Road culverts, a couple of miles northwest of Denton. Kay and I collected benthic macroinvertebrates here this morning as part of the city's Watershed Protection Department effort to monitor health of streams. This one seems pretty healthy; we got a fair diversity of critters. It's been too long since I identified the catch in the lab. I've been forgetting what I knew a few months ago, and I don't really know what exactly we got.

As we left I snapped these glimpses of a medium-sized orange flutterby, who then fluttered off.

While we were hard at work, we were imperiously summoned by the car-horn of Jan, the property owner. She had seen Kay's pick-up parked by the roadside, and thought she had kids trespassing again. We explained ourselves, and she was happy to have us.

We then headed over to Pecan Creek under the Woodrow Lane bridge in east Denton, just across from the pound. In this downstream shot it looks verdant and non-urban, but that is deceptive. The next picture, of Kay getting set up, is more representational of the setting. Despite being downstream of most of the city, we got a lot of wriggly specimens — several leeches, lots of Odonata and Ephemeroptera. There were many, many tiny spinning things, maybe Daphnia, that we hope were trapped as we poured off the tray through our little sieve and tapped it into the collection bottle. Hope they didn't all escape right through the sieve.

Altogether we put in four service hours. I will try to go in next week for some sorting and ID.

In a related note, this afternoon Ellen helped me deal with weeks worth of clean laundry piled on the couch. When we got to the bottom of the pile, there on the couch was the Merritt and Cummins Aquatic Insects manual for which I have been searching! Duh.

red moon

2007-08-29T20:46:00.001-05:00

So I planned to head out I-35 to the picnic area with the longhorn-silhouette shelters, south of the Justin road, about 4:30 am to see if I could compose some interesting photos of the lunar eclipse Tuesday morning. However, I stayed up late, and then I couldn't get to sleep and couldn't get to sleep, so then of course around 3am I fell sound asleep. I'd have missed it all, except Amy took a chance that I wouldn't be mad if she called me at ten after five!

I didn't go so far, turned off on the Ponder road and wound around on a couple of back roads to a dark farm driveway. There were a lot of vehicles that passed even on those dark roads; lots of Denton County country inhabitants having jobs in the Metroplex to which they commute at 6am.

Turned out the camera batteries were failing, so I would shoot a few quickly and then turn it off. Then I'd have to get it all set again next time - adjust ISO, set manual focus, zoom out, etc. Astronomical photography is not really the best use of a digital camera that's not much more than a point-and-shoot. I couldn't even see the dark moon in the viewfinder among the various bright symbols, till I had set the ISO up to a very noisy 400.

Still, I got a few half-decent images of the deep, dull orange totality. Then one side got very bright as it edged out of the shadow just before 6:30. Finally, about a quarter to seven, the partially illuminated moon was visible above the pre-dawn illuminated field. I think there are some sleepy cows under the trees. (Click on each image for a larger view.)

Half an hour later, after winding around exploring out around the municipal airport (if I'd had the camera ready earlier I could have caught an ascending small jet just above the dawn moon), I got back to the west side of town. The ghostly huge red sun rose in the haze, behind a low bank of clouds, appearing to come up through a slot, behind some clouds and in front of others.

Finally, going back nine days, here is the waxing moon trapped in the girders of the "MegaDrop" ride at the county fair.

rain yesterday, rain tomorrow ... and today too

2007-06-29T23:59:00.000-05:00

All those posts last year about drought ...

We're closing in on a foot of rain for June, and over 32" so far for the year. This week, there has been a low-pressure area sitting over central Texas and southern Oklahoma, just sucking in Gulf moisture and then dumping it. Marble Falls got an incredible 19" in one day!

This afternoon about 4:30, Mary picked me up to go over to her house. We went down Sycamore to Welch. Even at the top of the hill here the street was awash. From the corner at Bernard, where the gutters were pouring full force through the storm drains, to about 2/3 of the way to Welch, the street was continuously gutter-full. We threw up a continuous spray mid-window height, even going really slow. Tributaries came swirling out into the street through the curb-cuts from the paved parking lot. Then the sun started to peek through the clouds, even while the rain continued. By the time we crossed the creek up by DHS and DUUF, it was barely sprinkling. There must have been much less rain there, because the creek was hardly up at all.

More showers and downpours three or four more times during the evening.

This morning a 4-ft oak limb stub landed on the deck, and sometime this afternoon the east end of the deck awning fell down.

hot and humid

2007-06-24T00:58:00.000-05:00

Not as hot as it will be, obviously, but really muggy. LOTS of rain. 27 inches so far this year, including the 5 inches on April 24 when Mary and Amy and I were at Lake Whitney. The basement is really wet. Today Shanna's friend Mike installed chicken-wire screens so the windows can stay open and maybe it will dry out. Also, after MUCH fiddling, he got the garage doors all attached to the track again. And repatched the holes. No more possums!

I'm not sure if I have mentioned all our water-bug dates or not. I need to check with Kay about a collection date in May. I think I was along on one, but didn't make the ID day. Then we collected with new protocol on June 8, and lab is next Friday.

The collection photo is at Gay Street, the Coreopsis, cattails, and blue damselfly at Burning Tree Street.

Finally, a few shots from Lake Whitney.

The lake ( — we couldn't see this view),

Amy and Mary on the porch,

the classic flower-photographer's posture,

And, of course, bluebonnets.

more bugs — my own photos!

2007-04-20T09:43:00.000-05:00

Another four hours benthic duty: 2:00 - 5:30 in the lab with Kay and Cheryl, plus a half hour printing more flyers for Kay to take to meeting tomorrow morning.

I took my camera and tried taking photos through the microscope. Todd was impressed at how well it worked, for such a simple-minded setup. It turns out that the ocular tube is just about the same diameter as my camera lens, so I just used a tube made of cardstock and tape to hold them in line.

The photo above is of the wonderful blackfly larvae antennae-fans, with which they screen food particles out of the water. Underneath the antennae are what I suppose are the mouthparts with which it cleans the food off of the fans, and below that, under its "chin," is the single proleg. Not the first pair of prolegs, the one proleg, right in the middle of the body — strange critter. Then you can see the hind end of another individual, with the circle of tiny hooks that help it hold on in the current while straining out food.

The very six-legged critter on the right is an almost-adult dragonfly, family Libellulidae of the order Odonata. Dragonflies are generally stout like this, while damselfly larvae tend to be long and skinny, with heads wider than their bodies, and three long gills for "tails." Most dragonfly larvae have this long extensible lower "lip" that shoots out from under their head for catching prey. Click on the photo for the full-size version, and you can just make out the hairs on the rim of the palps (the side parts) that are typical for libellulids. When the thing is closed up under the "chin" it looks kind of like a gas mask.