May 9
On May 1 there was a Western Kingbird, the first of the season, sitting on our front fence. The next day we saw the first Mississippi kite. The desert willows (and the mesquite out at the Bluff) have leafed out. These are harbingers of summer though it is still spring. Another sign of the season, we have been visiting nurseries and planting the flowers we purchased. We have gotten a couple of showers of about a third of an inch each, one earlier in the week and one Friday evening. Showers were predicted Friday evening but it sure didn’t look promising in the late afternoon. We attended another symphony at six o’clock and by then dark clouds had formed. It was even just beginning to sprinkle as we walked from the parking lot to the symphony hall. The shower came while we were listening to the performance and it had stopped by the time the performance was over. Again this week we had a mix of warm and cool weather. We are glad to get the cool weather, knowing that there won’t be much more for a while.
May 16…
Last month it was turkey buzzards roosting in the trees on the place. This month there is a blackchin hummingbird that likes to roost on the fence in front of the house in between visits to the flowers and/or feeders. It is so small it is hard to see from the kitchen window but it tends to roost in the same spot so we know where to look and can pick it out. Another hummingbird of a bright green variety was performing a sort of dance above the sage in the front yard one day while we were having lunch. It would skim over the top of the sage then zoom up out of sight in a u-shaped or parabolic pattern. After a few zooms it would settle on the sage and rest a while, then repeat the performance. The sage isn’t blooming so maybe the hummer was doing a sage dance trying to encourage to get with the program. The hummers do like to visit the sage blossoms.
There was a drizzle of rain last Monday evening that only amounted to .07 in the gauge. Then Friday evening we were treated to an old fashioned thunderstorm with lightning, thunder and downpour that filled the gauge up to the .45 mark. Now we’re talking some decent and much needed moisture. Saturday evening they had taken all of the rain chances that were good earlier out of the forecast and we were consoling ourselves with that that we got the previous evening. It was enough to get us out of watering, which is always a nice reprieve. But just as I was getting to sleep good last night it puckered up and repeated the performance from the previous night times two. The little dry creek in the front yard was a raging torrent at times. Houses with people on the roof, cows, horses and other debris went floating by. As the saying goes, “we only get about 18-19 inches of rain a year but you ought to be here on the night we get it.” Total: 0.85 in the gauge.
Abigail got home for the summer Tuesday. She thoughtfully came and visited her elderly grandparents but has been on the go since then.
May 23
Abigail and I drove to the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge Tuesday for a playa day put on by Ogallala Commons. We had never been there, or even to Muleshoe. It was a tad chilly because of the wind but we still enjoyed the information presented and the visits to a couple of recently restored playas. The area had been very dry but got a rain the night before and one of the playas had some water in it. A dam which collected water for cattle and prevented water from entering the rest of the playa had been removed in the restoration so the runoff was able to spread across the playa. The landowner was with us and was glad to see his efforts at restoration bearing fruit. He had five playas restored since the first of the year. They weren’t doing any good for his cattle because the dams and ponds that had been dug in them long ago had silted in so he took advantage of the restoration funded by the state to put them back in their original form so they could function to recharge the aquifer and provide waterfowl habitat. Texas has over 20 thousand playas, more than any other state and most are located in the Panhandle, but only some 5 thousand are unaltered. Most have been plowed, some have roads through them and/or, like the ones we saw, have had holes dug in them, all of which disrupts the clay pan that forms a playa and thus the natural functioning. More and more people are coming to appreciate the importance of recharge for the Ogallala Aquifer on which we Panhandlers depend.
It was good to have my sidekick back this week. We got some mowing done Monday but Wednesday it was too wet to mow. After doing a few things in the shop, we ventured out to haul off the trimmings that had collected over the last couple of months. I apply Scotchguard to my boots to keep my feet dry but Abigail’s running shoes would quickly get soaked, as wet as the grass was. I thought that, with her smaller feet, her shoes might fit in Dad’s old pair of galoshes so we chased the spiders out of them and they turned out to be just right to keep her feet dry. Dad would have been proud. We headed out to the brush site with a big load but the attendant told us the area was muddy and if we got stuck they couldn’t help us. We decided it would be better to leave the load of brush in the pickup in the shop and wait for it to dry out. We seldom have to wait long for things to dry out in this part of the world and, sure enough, we had several days of wind out of the southwest. We’ll try again this week but the weather is still unstable and it could rain again to thwart us once more.
May 30
One evening this week the sky was filled with Mississippi kites, or seemed so. It was hard to tell how many there were as they were soaring high and low. I could only see the sky above SA but they seemed to be having a high old time looping and soaring, an aerial ballet that was fun and soothing to watch. Maybe there were a dozen, maybe there were twice that, hard to say. Abigail and I saw a couple of mule deer as we drove into Wildcat Bluff. They are not as prevalent as whitetail deer and it is always fun to see something a little different. Between the kites and the deer, it was a good week for animal sightings.
SA is as green as it gets and rain has been predicted the last few days. So far it hasn’t but it is still likely today and tomorrow. Abigail has the place mowed but there is still trimming I need to do and it looks like we will need to mow and trim again before long, whether or not it rains in the next day or two.