Dry pond

After Hurricane Katrina last August, it did not rain until the first of October. Then it was dry again for a long while. The pond shrank.

It's deeper at the far end than it appears, but I had nightmares of fevered fish rescues... up to our knees in muck, trying to corral flopping fish who couldn't understand the concept of their own salvation.

I had sometimes wished for a little mud edge in the summer, which might prove attractive to migrating shorebirds. But that's a lot of edge, and the shorebirds are long gone.



Before the end of the year, it started raining again... better, but not yet normal. I heard it's supposed to rain all weekend, so maybe that will help.

Of course Jasmine likes it dry, since she can get right up to the edge and bark at fish.



In the background is the tree that fell during a storm. Beavers had gnawed all around the base, so even though it leafed out last summer, I suppose it was only a matter of time before this happened.

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Critters at Friday Ark.

Scaredy deer

I guess I'd be nervous too, if I had to live out in the open with all those coyotes and bobcats roaming around.

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Update:
Whoa! Go look at the bobcat pictures over at the Dharma Bums blog. Daytime, in-person, bobcat pictures. Our game-cam is soooo jealous.

More obnoxious bragging

Might as well get all the rest of the obnoxious bragging out of the way in one day.



Florida Cracker told me back in December, "Hey, I was in Borders today and there was a book, 'Blogosphere, Best of Blogs'. You were in there!"

I thought he'd been eating bad mushrooms. The book wasn't due to be published until February! But then, because I'm vain and nosy, I researched and found that the book had been available as a special to Borders in November. I pre-ordered from Amazon (we don't have Borders here) and just got the book. I was in there! (Sorry for casting aspersions on your sanity, FC.)

I noticed that some of my blog friends are in it too. (If I were writing the book you'd all have been in there!) There's also a blog to go with the book, of course. (Plus extra material.)

I'm in the "Garden Diaries" section. So, that's at least twice now that I've been able to convince people that I know something about gardening...



when really, I don't!

I erased the last names to protect the innocent. I noticed that there's no date, but it's hot off the presses... I just graduated.

I still have almost everything to learn about gardening. But I highly recommend the Master Gardener course. It's one of the most fun things I've ever done. Plus, it's a fantastic way to make friends in a new place.

OK, no more obnoxious bragging for a while, I promise.

This really made my day

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably tell you that this envelope was sent to me by a cousin. (She added "Incredibly Good Smelling" to the actual business name.)

But still. It really did make my day!

Bobcat Valentine

Jackpot! Two bobcats (Lynx rufus or Felis rufus) traveling together.

I'm assuming that this is a male and female, since it's bobcat breeding season.

Snow!

As far as snow, north central Alabama has been skunked for several years in a row. A flurry here or there maybe, but nothing much to speak of for about 6 years.

Lately the forecasters have cruelly been getting my hopes up... Hopes that then got drowned, by all the rain that we got instead of snow:



Then late on Saturday...



Snow!



More snow!



Even more snow!



Snow on hubby's back. Unfortunately this was about the only thing that it stuck to. It was in the low 40s (5 - 7 C), so the flakes all melted soon after hitting the ground.



Snow on white dog... Jasmine did not think much of the snow at all.



She barked at it. Ran around and snapped at it!



And was generally very, very worried about it.

She was definitely glad that it stopped after about 15 minutes. Even though I wasn't.

Skunked again!

Visitors

We had some handsome visitors. They didn't stay long, though... Jasmine wasn't very hospitable.



When I first got interested in birds, I took a local class, where I learned that I'd been calling these by the wrong name my whole life. It's Canada Goose, not Canadian Goose! Branta canadensis in Latin.

Go see the Friday Ark for more critter pics!

Uh-oh

Hubby thinks the neighbors might be trying to tell us something...

Watershed

Wayne at Niches wrote about his watershed, and invited his readers to do the same.

All the water on our place drains into a creek that runs through the property. We had a very dry fall, but the creek still flowed, at least a little.



Once it started raining again, it rained more than usual, and as a result the weathermen say we're back up to "normal" for the year. (Somewhere around 55 inches or 140 cm.)

Here's the creek yesterday, after several inches of rain the day before:



By today it'll probably be back somewhere between those two extremes.

Here's the big picture, showing all the major rivers in Alabama: I've somewhat shakily outlined our county in red. You can click on any of these for a larger view.



Here it is with only the Black Warrior River shown, including all its forks, tributaries and feeders. Most of the water in Blount County eventually drains into the Black Warrior. (Exceptions here.)



It's the Locust Fork that's our watershed. There are supposed to be 15 sub-watersheds, but I haven't been able to find a list online. Our little creek drains into the Blackburn Fork (a Locust Fork tributary).



Locate your watershed

The bigger picture:
South Atlantic-Gulf watershed

The really big picture:
Regional watersheds

I found a watershed lookup for Canada too, but it doesn't seem to be working. If you know of any good links feel free to post them in the comments section.

Local links:
Alabama Rivers Alliance
Friends of the Locust Fork
Beautiful photography of the Locust Fork from The Kingfisher Editions by Beth Maynor Young

More game cam

I'm still fascinated by the game cam pictures. I believe there are two pairs of coyotes who use this road as part of their territorial boundry.



This one has a mate, but he/she usually shies out of the picture after the first shot, which invariably only captures a portion of him/her.



Talk about your evil eyes!



The two above are another pair, I think. One is stockier and lighter in color, and their tails seem a different color than the animal in the first two shots.



Another night... a raccoon is curled into a ball, focused on the approaching coyote. I don't think the camera is triggering on smaller animals like raccoons. We just see this one because a coyote happened to pass by at the same time.



And stay away!





Barking? Chewing? Coughing? Choking? I can't tell.

One thing the camera does not handle too well is bright daylight. The pictures look grainy and strange. I tried fixing these, but had limited success. I decided to post them anyway since I thought the subject was so interesting.



Deer with a withered hindquarter.



Maybe you can see it a bit better in this one. The back leg seems to be just hanging there. I can't tell if she's able to use it minimally, or not at all.

On the Cuddeback Gallery there have been some pictures of a doe with only three legs. She seems to get along just fine, but I think that she, and this doe, demonstrate the current lack of predators. (The pictures rotate off the Gallery page so they may not be there still.)

My round rocks

There is a blogger called Pablo who owns some land called Round Rock. It sounds like a pretty cool place, what with all those round rocks that were formed by a meteorite 350 million years ago or so. It's hard not to be jealous.

So imagine my joy when hubby and I were walking recently, and I glanced down... "Hey, look! Round rocks! Round rocks!"

A pause.

"It's slag," said hubby.

He is always ruining my fun like that.



I looked it up, and he was right. There are several types of slag, all of which are by-products of iron and steel furnaces.

They use it a lot for railroad track ballast.



In contrast to the round (pelletized) slag, which seems heavy for its size, this type (expanded or foamed) is incredibly lightweight. It's porous like a lava rock.

There's also a vitrified or glassy type of slag, which we found but failed to bring back. (If it ever stops raining I'll try to go back and get one of those and put the pic here, for the sake of completeness.)



My husband calls this configuration Slaghenge.

Sunset (with cat)

That cat-shaped lump on the Catalpa tree is Dusty, who's a great climber. Unlike a lot of other cats I've known, she doesn't seem to mind coming down either.

Check out other critters at the Friday Ark.

Da birdz

This rather handsome fellow is called Big Red. I never in a million years would have purposely ordered a Rhode Island Red rooster, since they have a reputation for meanness and we already have enough of that.

We were supposed to just be fostering him and five RIR hens. But when we never got paid, we were stuck. (No good deed ever goes unpunished!) So far he's actually very sweet though.

Anyway, Big Red dropped in to tell you about Birdstock, the 16th edition of I and the Bird, that is hosted over at the Dharma Bums.

He also reminded me that I never posted a link to the last Circus of the Spineless. Sorry about that!

Gardens & garden books

In March last year I wrote about attending the Alabama Master Gardener conference, where Lee May was the keynote speaker. (Don't ever pass up the chance to hear him speak - he's wonderful!)



What a nice surprise to open the February 2006 issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine, to find a feature article with several pages of pictures of his gardens. (Mine's a subscription, but I believe it is still on newsstands - go buy one to see the other pics.)



I probably should not admit that both of the lovely books he autographed for me are still sitting on my "to read" shelf. I have not found a lot of time for reading in the past year.

Of course that does not stop me from buying more books.



(As an aside, I believe bookstores that perpetrate placing impossible-to-remove stickers on book jackets should be punished. Severely.)

As far as I know, Lee May doesn't blog... but Amy Stewart does!

Hopefully both my garden-book reading and our actual garden will fare better this year than last.

We've come to the conclusion that we must install raised beds if we're going to be able to grow anything at all. Our beautiful vegetable garden spot apparently lacks any sort of drainage whatsoever. So when it rains heavily, like it has for the past two years, the veggies tend to sit in water for quite a while.



Hubby resisted the raised bed idea for a while, because it means no more driving around on the tractor in the garden. But I think it's inevitable.

Now, will we have the time and the energy to devote to this project? Stay tuned...