80AcresOnline

Two years of drought followed by heavy rains in a warm fall has produced bursts of spring flowering and some spring butterflies even as it’s produced sudden fall color…a very odd combination.

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Forgot to mention yesterday that though I had heard a White-crowned Sparrow call in the yard a few days ago, I hadn’t spotted one until yesterday evening, up in the dry woods.  I came into the south end of the dry woods trail and startled some White-winged doves, who flapped off with their usual noisy behavior, but one smaller bird just hopped to the top of a cactus and sat there.

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Some grasses should be planted just for the way they look with sunlight slanting through them in the fall.

This is one.  It’s one of the Muhlys, but I don’t know which.

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Our on the land with visitors yesterday, I spotted a new fly (new to me):

That spotted abdomen was very obvious with the naked eye.   It’s a similar pattern to a spotted jumping spider we have (also white spots on black) and until I saw it fly I was thinking  “There’s another P. audax, never saw one on heath aster before.”   The “face” and antennae are the same golden color as the wings.

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The dry-woods swale is slowly drying up:

The pale area is where water stood for several weeks.

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Instead of raining yesterday as the front came through, the sky slowly cleared from the west,  and today dawned chilly and clear.  While Richard worked on fence, I put on rubber boots and went out to see if anything’s drying out yet.

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After the additional three inches of rain yesterday, the saturated ground is leaking water down every slope, making the grassland look like a marsh, or at least the margins of a marsh.

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Though we lost the two planted cypresses to the drought, and some of the water iris we’d planted in the “swamp”, this one survived and is now coming back up from the corm.

The water here is about an inch deep–this is an overflow/seep channel off the main creek; 8.5 inches didn’t put more than a flood pulse through it, but the final 1.5 inches left this wide shallow pool…and a brave little iris.

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One of the main activities for wildlife managers in Texas is providing supplemental water for wildlife.  Where natural water supplies are abundant and unpolluted, supplemental water may not be necessary, but  drought years come to all regions, and wildlife suffer if they do not have access to a reliable, safe, supply of water.

In a drought summer,  with all natural water gone, deer made regular use of this small, three-tub water on a rocky knoll.  Because of its small size, this waterer needed daily filling through the summer.   A small solar-powered pump in the lowest tub circulates the water.

When considering water for wildlife, it’s important to set up a system for reliable (constant) water that is safe for wildlife to use and is provided in containers that allow access by a wide range of wildlife.   This means thinking about the water source (rainwater, well water, stored surface water), water quality, and the shape, size, and location of water presentation.

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Several times in the past couple of years we’ve had to get a turtle out of the fence.  The horse lots fencing is pipe with welded-mesh cattle panels welded to the pipe–so there’s a pipe at the bottom.  Good safe horse fence, but not easy for turtles to maneuver through/around and turtles don’t seem to have the idea of paralleling a fence to find a gap.

So yesterday evening, shortly before dark, the horses were acting freakish in the barn and south barn pen, and Richard spotted a good-sized turtle.  I came out with the camera and first saw this:

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