Like
this Mexican Olive.
In
our yard.
Sometimes
a scattering of rose petals is in order.
And
in the morning, a scattering of bacon bits beside the breakfast taco might do
the trick.
That’s
just the kind of guy I am…
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
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.
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.
A
prolonged drought.
The
streets are flooded, so it’s an inconvenience, but today’s rain is so welcome.
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.
She
does usually, unless she wants something. Then she looks like this.
Or
this, if she has to explain it more than once!
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.
…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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.