Tandem Bicycle

 

 

The bigger stronger person rides in the front to control the bicycle.  The smaller person gets put in the back, so they never get to see anything but the back of the front guy.

 

Here’s a better setup.  Put the front person recumbent.  The bigger person can ride in the back and see over the smaller person in the front, and the front person gets to see everything!

 

 

A little hard to make out the configuration from the photos I took in the park.  This picture I snagged from the web might show it a little better.

 

A soaring caracara

 

 

 

 

A South and Central American bird that just touches southern portions of the U.S.  It’s part of the falcon family, but it’s mostly a scavenger so it’s not very fast.  It will eat something live if it can catch it, but that may not happen very often.

 

 

A Black-crested Titmouse

 

 

 

With a black oil sunflower seed treat.

 

As he navigates through the trees with the greatest of ease.

 

Do the Chachalaca

 

 

You put your left foot in,

 

…you put your left foot out….

 

That’s what it’s all about.

 

You may have already noticed

 

 

 

I really like gnarly old trees.

 

 

 

The sun will shine again!

 

 

 

And no flooded streets the next morning.  The drainage is so much better now, no Lake Sandpipers even after 10 inches of rain from this storm.  That’s a lot of water!

 

Well, maybe Sandpipers Pond.  There is still some standing water.

 

 

We’ve been so dry

 

 

A prolonged drought.

 

The streets are flooded, so it’s an inconvenience, but today’s rain is so welcome.

 

 

On the wall

 

 

Below the television.

 

We got the fireplace.

 

Warm and cozy.

 

Common ground dove

 

 

Cute little thing.  Even smaller than an inca dove.  About the size of a big sparrow.

 

Not migratory, they are permanent residents in the southern U.S. and Mexico.  Rich chestnut wing patches when they fly.  Hardly any tail.

 

 

Jesse doesn’t always smile

 

 

 

She does usually, unless she wants something.  Then she looks like this.

 

Or this, if she has to explain it more than once!

 

Long-billed Curlew

 

 

 

A shorebird that likes dry land too.

 

Usually, we see them on the beach, probing the sand.  We found this one 60 miles from the ocean, grazing for bugs in the grass.

 

Getting ready for the summer diet, I guess.  They winter here in South Texas and Mexico.  In summer, they migrate up into the plains states to breed out in the grasslands.

 

It’s fun to travel

 

 

…and see all the different places.

 

But there is plenty of cool stuff right in our neighborhood too.  Here is Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge.

 

 

 

With observation decks to look out over ponds.

 

A view of the mighty Rio Grande from a remote vantage.

 

And a suspension bridge between two towers for a bird’s eye view into the forest.

 

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

 

 

 

Stretching.

 

Or preening.

 

Or maybe just showing off.

 

A spectacular bird, dashing out to snatch a bug and returning to its perch, it can be seen in the south-central U.S. down through Central America.

 

 

Sugar Cane

 

 

The entire sugar cane industry in the valley closed down this year.  The growers couldn’t get enough water commitments, so they couldn’t afford to plant, which made it unprofitable for the Sugar House processing plant to stay open, so it shut down.  Now that the processing plant is down, there’s no point in planting cane even if more water does become available.  There is no place to process the product!  No more black clouds on the horizon from cane fields burning prior to harvesting.  No more black snow at our house from drifting ash put out by the burning fields.  The end of an era.

 

 

 

Can you spot the Cactus Wren in this picture?

 

 

 

He wanted to check me out.

 

But he didn’t want to get too exposed.

 

His call sounds like a car that won’t start.  Easily recognized.

 

Not uncommon in Southwestern deserts.  And right at home in this habitat as well.  There were prickly pear cactus right below him.

 

Keeping Time

 

 

Time has been kept locally for thousands of years, as long as we have been keeping track of time, from the days of shadows and sundials.  When the sun is at its highest point, call it noon.  When portable timekeeping came into play, in maybe the 1500s, when traveling, those portable clocks had to be reset for local time at every location.  That wasn’t much of a problem until the late 1800s; that’s when trains came into popular usage.  Every location keeping track of its own time didn’t really work for train schedules, so time zones were instituted.  Divide the globe into 24 roughly equal one-hour slices and there we have it.  At the sun’s highest point in the sky, in the middle of each zone, it will be noon (roughly).  East and west of center, in every time zone, noontime won’t correlate exactly with the clock, it will be plus or minus a rounding error.  Close enough.

 

 

Remember the citrus grove?

 

 

An entire newly planted orchard back in 2022.  Each tree encased in a bag to protect it from pests and extreme weather.  Not Ruby Red grapefruit, but Rio Red.  A South Texas specialty, even sweeter than Ruby Red.

 

The early protection paid off.  Here is how it looks now.

 

Thousands of trees, and super healthy.

 

 

La Sal del Rey

 

 

(The King’s salt.)

 

The lake was very white today.  It’s an evaporative lake.  It has been very dry here lately.  Several intermittent inlets.  No outlet.  It sits on top of a giant salt dome.  Hypersaline at least.  Solid salt on occasions like this.

 

 

 

I like how water blows into the animal tracks along the shore, then evaporates to white.

 

Deer, nilgai (deerlike exotics), javelina, wild boar.

 

 

This is breeding territory for snowy plovers.

 

They nest in the sand along the shore.  No closeups today.  A couple very distant shots with a long lens.  Don’t want to disturb them.

 

 

This is the plover crouched down in a sandy depression.  It might be the nest, it might be diversionary behavior.  We’ll let that question remain unanswered.

 

 

And a raccoon track in the center of this frame.

 

They have hands on their feet.