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.

It seems like a long month, which I guess it is compared to last month. Wylie women were our guests for spring break. The weather wasn’t great for the most part, too cold and windy. No one seemed to mind much. Jill worked a couple days but took time off toward the end of the week. Wednesday was the only day that wasn’t chilly, but it more than made up for that with wind. In spite of that, we trekked down to Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. I needed to make my quarterly inspection, so I killed two birds, so to speak. Nothing had changed that the state would be interested in for the Great Texas Nature Trail map but we were able to get out of the house for the afternoon.

Our balmy early January weather was interrupted by snow that crept onto the plains in the wee hours of the 24th and continued most of the day, though at times the flakes were minute. There was a time about midday, when the flakes were large and showy, silently drifting down onto the snow-covered ground. The flakes were building up on the trees, too, especially the pines and junipers, giving them a most pleasing aspect. No artificial Christmas tree ever looked better. The snow had a good moisture content and amounted to about of a quarter of an inch, which is not nothing in this part of the world.