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Richard and Michael were up in the dry woods today to cut down our Christmas trees (we use Ashe junipers we’d want to get rid of anyway), and while they were looking for the right tree, they found a swarm of bees.   I wasn’t able to go out right away to photograph them, and by the time I did get out, mid-late afternoon, the bees were very, very, very active.    As in, those bees did not want anyone to come closer to where the swarm had been seen.

I’ve had bees (nice gentle Italian bees) and know that Africanized bees are in this county…so when a bee starts that “vrooom-vrooom” kind of humming/buzzing, I’m not inclined to argue with her.   I went on up the trail to Fox Pavilion.   The stonecrop is getting large enough to see; I love the delicate colors it has before its flowers open.

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A cold front cleared out the warm moist air of yesterday and gave us a brisk chill wind out of the north and partly-sunny skies.   So a long walk in the afternoon, producing (as usual) many interesting and beautiful things to see and think about.

First was a mockingbird’s nest in an osage orange or bois d’arc tree:

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A winter dawn with the full moon silvering the distant grass-fields, the light in the sky slowly growing, colors changing on land and in the sky moment-to-moment; that moment when sky-light and moonlight are balanced, and then the sun’s loom takes over–before the actual sunlight touches the tops of the trees with a rosy-golden glow.

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Thanksgiving Day gave us perfect weather and wonderful guests who enjoyed the beauty of the land…but no pictures.   The creek was too high to wade in regular shoes–beautifully clear, though, and today, with rain forecast to start tomorrow again, I thought perhaps I could make it across.  What are wet feet, after all?

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We had gorgeous weather for Thanksgiving, and an out-of-state guest who enjoyed a moderately long stroll around the place.  We weren’t in rubber boots, so we couldn’t cross the creek or wander as freely, but still a fun hour or so out wandering.

Saturday, in not-as-perfect (but still pleasant) weather I made it across the creek in regular shoes–not exactly dry-shod, but not too wet-footed.   I did put three knapsacks of rocks from the rockpile near the creek onto the ford, which has migrated a bit with the flash floods this fall.  Water quality looked great, clear, spring-fed, and flowing strongly.   This view is upstream from the ford (shown in previous post); the braced fencepost to the right, on grass, shows the north fenceline where it crosses the creek…there’s a mess of flotsam caught on the water gap.

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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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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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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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