Bad picture of a good fish

We walked in the creek. Apparently it's become our warm-weather holiday tradition. We spotted these fish, that I photographed poorly, and one other cool long-skinny-stripey one that I missed altogether.

Hubby said he thinks this is a sunfish. I looked online but couldn't find anything that matches exactly. (I'm hoping one of you will enlighten me.)

The weather was hot, the water was cool. The gnats were horrible. The mosquitoes, surprisingly, weren't unbearable. I did get an interesting bite that looked like it might have come from a 6-inch-tall vampire. It's still a little swollen, but I've experienced no bloodlust so far.

It hasn't rained in over three weeks. Most of the county got a nice downpour last weekend, but not here. The grass makes sad crunchy sounds. Hubby put in drip irrigation in most of the garden again this year, so I fired it up for a good soaking this week... and forgot to turn it off. For a long time. A looooong time. An "I'm embarrassed to tell my husband exactly how long" long time. The plants didn't seem to mind.

Animal tracks

I don't even know why I have an animal tracks book.



I'm so rarely able to figure out what anything is.



If I were a dedicated animal tracker, I guess I'd have hopped right down there in the mud, and planted a ruler next to the tracks.

But I wasn't carrying one, it was more than a hoppable distance, and I didn't want to get my good shoes muddy. And it probably wouldn't have helped, anyway.

If you know, please put me out of my misery. I'm to the point of imagining snickering little critters, roaming the creek banks at night. They've painstakingly carved no-such-animal mystery tracks onto the bottoms of their gaily painted miniature stilts.

Diluvian New Year

Holy cats, has it been raining!



We had 4.5 inches one night, then 2.5 inches fell the next day. (That's about 11.5 cm and 6.5 cm.)

I'm a few days late in posting these pictures, and the ground is still boot-sucking soggy.

If "beaver-drowning rain" isn't an old country expression, it should be. Driving towards town, I saw two dead beavers on the side of the road. You know it's a lot of rain when that happens.



It's hard to complain about this much rain after 3 years of drought. But it was starting to become worrisome.



Jasmine fretted. She whined. She barked at the water!



Just starting to recede.



Ahh. Much better.

This is a little drainage ditch that hasn't had water in it for 3 years or so.

This was the last time the water was so high. That was in the spring (when you expect that sort of thing), almost 4 years ago now.

They say it's going to rain again tomorrow...

Not meeting expectations

Beavers have dammed up the creek, so we moved the game camera to the path that had been worn between there and the pond. After a couple of weeks, I was sure we'd have lots of mug shots of the little orange-toothed destructivores.



But there were only masked bandits! Wet ones. Coming...



... and going.

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Raccoon, Procyon lotor.

For more on the game camera, click the "Game cam" label below.

Dry creek

Even though it rained (yay!) one whole inch (yay! yay!) the day before yesterday, the creek still looks like this... mostly rocks.



The ground was so dry that it sucked up all the excess water like a sponge. Nothing left over to trickle down into the creek. Fish, crawfish, snails, etc., survive only in places where the water pools.

One of the ponds is so low as to be practically non-existent. The Great Blue and Green Herons are constant visitors -- to them it's a treasure trove of little fish with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. (And Red-shouldered hawks seem happy the creek is so low, since they seem to love crawfish dinners.)

The garden loved the rain. I can water and water and water with the hose, but it's just not the same as getting rain. The garden and I had been pretty miffed lately... it was getting on our last nerve to hear the thunder and see the many dark clouds, only to have it all pass by just out of reach. Day after day after day.

But now I have to go pull weeds, or rather, grass, before it gets too hot. Always trade-offs!

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Alabama's governor has asked everyone to pray for rain. I had to roll my eyes. Call me cynical, but I don't see him asking people to pray for our dysfunctional state constitution. (Or to end poverty, stop the pedophiles, achieve world peace, etc.) So why pray for rain?

Those three words (pray for rain, not our dysfunctional constitution) always make me think of Guadalcanal Diary.

Don't call for love
Don't ask for gold
our daily bread
or no more pain
pray for rain

Thinking about Guadalcanal Diary always makes me feel better. Highly recommended for washing the bad taste of politicians out of your mouth.

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Visit the Friday Ark for your weekly dose of crittery goodness.

And don't forget the fantastic latest edition of I and the Bird. (It's Frodo-licious!)

Summer camp

Away freeway trolls
and skull poison



Away chainsaw dogs
and anything downloadable



Welcome butterfly people and snake elves



unfamous artists
and freeform laughing



dark and beautiful
names that mean shadow



and drowsy bee biographers



Stand still long enough



Measure the angles of coyote eyes



Change your mind about
what is highly collectible



Get broken spiders back in love

Playing Jenga with beavers

A recent light but steady rain raised the creek level a bit:



The sound of rushing water made tiny light bulbs appear over the heads of several beavers:



This is a bad, bad, bad location for a dam. Flooding here could affect the neighbor's property, and would likely damage the gate that (sometimes) keeps their cows from visiting.

So one beautiful day last week I decided to do some deconstruction:



When I told my husband what I'd been doing he had a "Are you insane?!" sort of reaction, since I'd been having so many back problems lately. And especially since it was beaver-dam removal that had initiated his need for $25,000 worth of back surgery a few years ago.

But this partially completed dam was in such an open area that I really was able to approach it just like playing Jenga: slide the sticks out, rather than lift. No back pain at all.

In fact, it felt so nice outside that I went back in the afternoon and worked some more:



You can see at lower right that I conveniently left all the sticks just lying there for easy retrieval by the beavers. But no attempts were made to rebuild, since (as I suspected) this dam had already been abandoned... they must have switched all their labors to that mammoth 8-foot tall one downstream.

And I was right, it didn't cause any more back pain. What I hadn't counted on though, was the fact that I was doing a lot more bending from the waist than normal. Using leg muscles that did not normally get so much of a workout... those sadly neglected muscles screamed at me about that for about 3 days straight.

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One of my tracking books said that you rarely find beaver scat, since it's almost always left underwater. The beavers left me an educational exhibit, but just in case not everyone is interested in examining beaver poo, I've linked the picture here.

I want to save some of these nice straight sticks to use in the garden. The shorter ones will go to a neighbor of my sister's, who uses them in her artwork.

What else has been going on

Some of these¹



have been doing some of this,



while nearby, this² was found:



Toothwort³ mania began in earnest.



We had visitors⁴.



This



gave way to this⁵.



There was also this⁶, which is not the same.



And neither is this⁷.



Some excavation⁸ was going on.



But was apparently not satisfactory.



Ahhh it's almost trillium time⁹.



Tiny snails were observed, and also something else¹⁰ that I'm still pondering.



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¹Virginia Bluebells, Mertensia virginica
²See this earlier post if you're curious about the redrock fossils.
³Dentaria spp. Or is it all Cardamine now? I get confused.
⁴Canada Geese, Branta canadensis. I would say, "I know that you knew that already, I'm just trying to be consistent," but since there was a woman on a game show last night who did not know that the northern neighbor of the US is CANADA, for crying out loud, I'm not taking any chances.
⁵Hepatica or Liverleaf
⁶Rue Anemone, Thalictrum thalictroides
⁷Jacob's Ladder (Polemonium reptans) with Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) flower
⁸I'm guessing Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus), but I'm not sure.
⁹Trailing Trillium, Trillium decumbens
¹⁰Little groups of tiny, tiny rocks are held together and to the larger rock surface like glue. Is something alive in there?

Country life

Evidence of beavers upstream.


Evidence of people upstream.

Memorial Day adventure

My husband said his favorite part of the whole thing was the sight of me standing in the pouring rain, looking like a drowned rat, holding a dead fish in one hand and a large feather in the other...

Sorry I haven't written in a while. While I've gotten a lot of orders from the BH&G blurb about my soaps*, it hasn't been so overwhelming that I couldn't blog.

But that, in combination with many other things - volunteer commitments, planning for fall products, trying to screw up yet another veggie garden, a pressing Pride and Prejudice kick... well, all of it has added up to no time left to spend here.

After a period of so much rain that we couldn't get the garden in, it turned dry, dry, dry. The creek was down to the perfect level for wading, though.

Off we went in our old tennis shoes, and me in my floppy straw hat. The water was chilling at first, but before long I was edging towards the deeper spots, to cool my knees. (A few weeks earlier I'd tried to wade barefoot, but quickly realized I'd become a miserable old tenderfoot.)

There were many delights. We heard an Acadian Flycatcher in the branches above the creek - a new yard bird!** Found a few little red-rock fossils. Almost stepped on the perfectly intact shed exoskeleton of the largest crawdad we'd ever seen.*** Wild hydrangeas were in peak bloom at the creek's edge. (So many flowering things love edge. Why hadn't I brought the camera?!) Picked up a long feather from a Red-shouldered hawk in the pebbles near a clearing (he was probably doing some crawdad examinations too).

We heard distant thunder. There had already been a brief shower that afternoon. We spoke of turning back, but didn't. The bridge was the goal, and we hadn't reached it yet.

Despite the low creek level, tiny fish were everywhere, sometimes swimming right through our legs. I wished again for my camera - the footing wasn't as slippery as I'd feared it would be. We began to spot iridescent purple and green fish!

"I wish we could catch one," I said. "I'd take it back and get a picture." Two minutes later we saw one shining from the bottom of a deeper pool, on its side and clearly not doing very well.

After a little irrationality (had I wished it dead?) and a little panic (it didn't look ill - was the water that polluted?), I picked it up to carry back. It hadn't been dead long, but still I really wished I'd brought a baggie.

The thunder sounded closer. We had to turn back. The louder the thunder, the faster we slogged. Our feet sank deep into the sand. Grit seeped into our shoes.

It started raining.

As we reached the spot to climb onto the bank, the most active part of the storm seemed directly overhead. The thunder was incredibly loud, and lightning flashed much too close for comfort. We decided to wait it out there in the low area, rather than making a dash for home that would leave us exposed in the open too long.

It rained harder. And harder. I'd recently discovered that a floppy straw hat was better than a baseball cap at keeping gnats away from the face, but for keeping rain off of glasses it wasn't doing much good.

It is a constant comfort to me though, in times like those, that I'm able to say, "At least it's not as bad as that pelagic trip." I may have been soaked to the skin in a lightning storm... I may have been rediscovering just how unbelievably cold rain can be on such a hot day... but at least I wasn't seasick too. And, we'd seen some birds, which was more than I could say for that worst-day-of-my-life-and-we-didn't-even-see-any-birds deep sea birdwatching trip. Oh, and I wasn't hallucinating from an overdose of Dramamine either.

I was glad I hadn't brought my camera.


Even though I failed to get a better picture than this.

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* Everyone who's phoned their order in has called it my ad. I can only imagine that the cost of advertising in Better Homes and Gardens must equal that of buying several new cars. Hubby laughs and says I should tell them, "That's not an ad, that's a glowing endorsement!"

** We're kind of liberal in what we consider "the yard".

*** It was perfectly intact until I tried to pick it up, at which point it broke into several pieces. It was so large that I could not have contained it in my palm.

Warmer

I'm not sure what happened to spring. The days are consistently in the 80°s now. It's been over 90°.

(That's about 30°C and 33°C, respectively.)

I want to go wading.

I'll probably have to wear my shoes though, or buy some of those sock-shoe combos made to wear in the water. The creek looks idyllic, but a lot gets washed into it. More rusty metal and glass than you'd think.

My grandfather lived by a small creek when I was a kid. There were even concrete steps leading down to it, which I loved. You could sit on the steps and still dangle your feet in the water. Back then the biggest worry about wading was the slippery rock problem, which often led to a soggy backside problem.

Recent activities

New bass and catfish were added to the ponds.


If we'd known you were dropping by, we'd have cleaned the bucket.


Looking for a way out.

It's been stormy and has rained a lot.


The wind chimes have already been stored away twice due to tornado warnings.


Watch your step.

Life has been busy, but we always try to find time to sneak away for exploring.


Remains of what was the biggest tree in this area.


I wonder who lives here?


Flower time.