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After an unpleasant day Friday (windy, cloudy, rainy), Saturday morning dawned bright, sunny and mostly windless. Which was good because were scheduled to spend the day in Palo Duro Canyon celebrating the 20th anniversary of Panhandle Chapter of Texas Master Naturalists. The day also coincided with the City Nature Challenge, which is a world-wide event where people go out and take pictures of wild flora and fauna around their city, except in our case we can include Potter, Randal, Armstrong, Carson and Hutchison counties. We had reserved a pavilion and the members fanned out to make photo observations in the morning. There is a competition to see which city or area can upload the most observations to iNaturalist and the scientists use that information to keep tabs on species around the world. We are at a disadvantage here on the High Plains because, while we do have flora and fauna, we don’t have the quantity and diversity of other parts of the world, or even the state. Nor do we have the population to observe them. We are outnumbered by the large metropolitan areas in Texas and across the country. Still, we do what we can. I might have logged a dozen or so observations but the animals and birds won’t hold still to have their picture taken so I got mainly plants. The ap will usually tell you what you photographed, which is handy.
After spending the morning chasing critters, we congregated in the pavilion for lunch. Our club president grilled hamburgers and hotdogs and others brought things like chips, pickles, onions; that sort of thing. I brought lettuce but it wasn’t used so I gave it to Kari when I got home. She was serving fajita bowls for dinner and had realized she didn’t have enough lettuce, so my contribution was welcomed.
Congratulations to Kaylee for being selected as one of the drum majors in her school band for next year. She called to tell me before school last Thursday, I think it was. I told her I looked forward to watching her lead her band next fall. She said she wouldn’t get to do that because she is an assistant, but she will get to lead the band as a conductor. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was leading the band on the field her senior year.
April was pretty dry, but we did get a half inch accumulated over the several days the last week. When I watched the weather one of those evenings, the weatherman showed towns all over the Panhandle getting one and two inches. Not Amarillo. Best we got was .54 over three days. The official tally for Amrillo was .08, which is what I had in my rain guage. Maybe our turn is coming but between the drought and some really cold weather before Christmas, we are losing trees and other flora left and right.
We had a pair of wood ducks visit the pond. They’ve been seen several times, but I’ve never gotten a picture of them, which would have been nice to send to iNaturalist. We have never seen wood ducks here before. They are pretty and we welcome them, but they likely are just passing through.
I put out a hummingbird feeder one day the first week of April. We usually start seeing them in early April. That evening Kari told me she had seen one in the garden, so I was glad I’d gotten the feeder out. Yesterday I saw a black chin hummingbird, which is the variety that frequently stays around all summer. We see other varieties, but they are usually transients.
