More migrants showing up

Mostly Yellow-rumped Warblers and the first Wilson's Warbler for the year. When the tank first fills up the water is rather muddy, but once it settles down it looks better.

I'm sure this is the first time it has been full in April, although some years ago it filled in January, so that April it must have looked similar to this. The oasis is quite birdy. Since no where else around has much water, it really is an oasis. A visitor today said seeing the Lucifer Hummingbirds and their courtship displays, etc. was worth the whole trip (from Houston). She saw a female gathering nesting material from the cotton basket I have hanging for them. So breeding is in full swing. Well, maybe another wave of migrant Lucifers will arrive in May. Kelly Bryan has suspected as much but it's not provable at this time.

Migration starting already

None of the mulberries are ripe yet and migrants are devouring them green. I don't remember that happening before. Mostly Pine Siskins, but a Summer Tanager and two Rose-breasted Grosbeaks got into the act. Here's the tanager.

The grosbeaks were very uncooperative. I got pictures, but not good ones.

The Lucifer Hummingbirds are starting to visit the feeders more often now. Apparently the ocotillo are petering out. There was one female that seemed to be gathering nesting material from dead mulberry tree twigs. That's a new one for me. Here are several of the pics in the order they were taken. I shot quite a few but some were even more out-of focus. She moved so fast and I had to do manual focus. Couldn't keep up.

Resting and replenishing

It seems every day in Alpine is windy lately. I've got windbreaks around the tomato plants. Seen here in the background of this bluebonnet photo in our backyard.

Caught up for now

Being caught up doesn't mean I don't have plenty of projects that need doing. It just means I'm back on track again. Can catch my breath and reflect on the last few days. That rain was so unexpected and unpredicted. Actually, no where else got hardly any. Neighbors three miles to the south didn't get any. Once before I got a rogue cell of rain, a huge deluge, but it was in mid-June when rain is likely to occur anyway.

My water storage is at approximately 80% capacity, surely an April first. I increased the drip under the cottonwood tree. Really going to enjoy having plenty of water and not having to stress about the lack of it. The fact that the oasis got it and other places in the Big Bend didn't, might mean it'll attract lots of good birds and dragonflies, and butterflies. I won't be an oasis in the middle of oases this time like I was last spring. Unless it continues raining in the area, which is quite unlikely, I would think, but anything is possible.

I'm also looking forward to being able to add a little water to my wildlife pond. It accumulated about a foot, but that won't last long. It's a luxury I seldom have, to be able to add water to it. It attracts birds and odes with the reeds growing in it and all, but it doesn't hold water all that well. Here's an old photo taken January 2013 to refresh your memory. I forgot to take one today, but it has about the same amount of water in it now.

That Lucifer male challenging the other Lucifer's territory was the first time I'd witnessed that behavior. I've seen males do it at the feeders, but that's not quite the same as on their own staked out defended territory. The females nest elsewhere. It seems to me there's so much territory around that they wouldn't need to challenge one another. Perhaps they just enjoy doing it. No body contact was ever made. This is the closest they came.

A day of wonders

I can't begin to convey how much nonstop running it takes after a good rainstorm. Two birders were here this morning and can testify how the pumps, separating lines, in and out of the water, etc. kept me hopping. When I was finally able to take a short break, I decided to go below the big (lower) dam to see if the Lucifer Hummingbird was on his territory. Didn't need my big lens for that, right?

Looking south. Oasis barely visible in background

As soon as I got below the dam (to the right off the above photo) I saw a male Lucifer, but more intriguing, I saw and heard a Black-capped Vireo singing. First singing one at CMO. It flitted around inside Evergreen Sumac bushes as it foraged. I scrambled back to my pickup for my Canon, chastising myself for never learning to keep it with me at all times. When I got back to the viewing area, I again saw and heard it but it would not land anywhere long enough for me to focus my lens on it. In frustration, figuring it would disappear any second, I just snapped a bunch of frames of the bush is was in, hoping to get something at least diagnostic from the bunch. My philosophy is, no photo, it didn't happen.

As I was doing that, the male Lucifer was suddenly being challenged by another male Lucifer. I shot some of that too, but all this shooting was taking place at quite a distance. Here's through my 400 mm lens uncropped.

And here are a couple of cropped ones.

When I couldn't locate the vireo anymore I went and got the birders and we looked and looked in vain. I lamented to them that I wasn't able to get a photo of it. I totally discounted the rash of bush pics and forgot all about them. So wonder of wonders, when I downloaded my photos one of them has a decent shot of the vireo. I'm sure that's a once in a lifetime occurrence for me.

And I still can't get over the wonder of having plenty of water to lavish on my vegetation going into summer. I've been frugal with it so long I won't know how to act. 

At long last, dragonflies are starting to show up. And there was no hail damage.

Rain

Not sure how much CMO got but my sister a mile away got nearly an inch. A couple of storm cells just kind of popped up on radar out of nowhere.  I can't wait to get down there and see what I got. It's possible all my tanks filled up. Wouldn't that be amazing? Or it's possible hail denuded everything and I only got the edge of the rain. But anything is welcome. Small cells like that are very spot specific...drowning one mile and leaving an adjacent mile dry, so I'll just have to see and hope for the best.

And I had another senior moment a few days ago. Remember I said the underground water system wasn't usable because it wouldn't hold pressure, either a leak or bad check valve? Well, I was dragging tons of hose around watering the other day with a little pump in the tank when the hose snagged on a faucet and turned it on and water gushed out. The system had been turned off for two days, so that meant it had held pressure in the line that long. Didn't leak a drop. So what happened? All I can figure out is that the faucet that I used to test the system has two faucets on it. I know that, of course, and I'm sure I was careful to turn them both on. And surely, if no water came out, the first thing I would do is check to see that both faucets are on. But obviously they couldn't have both been on or water would have come out. Frightening.

UPDATE: Rushed to CMO to see the situation. First thing I noticed is that no where else in the area driving down seemed to have gotten much rain. Not a drop did we get in Alpine. Then I noticed all the holes in the road that I had been filling with silt that I cleaned out of the tanks had washed out. Oh well, at least I got .85" and the big tank filled up. So tank cleaning is pretty much over for this year. There's enough water in the upper settling pond and the upper dirt tank to pay for me to set up the pumps and pump them into the stucco tank.So I'll start on that at daylight.  All good.

Can't really assess if there was hail damage until daylight, but there doesn't seem to be any.

Weird looking bird

Teresa Keck and I saw this bird today at CMO but couldn't get pictures to do it justice. First photo by Teresa. Others by me. It's a leucistic Bell's Vireo.

My photo, taken from the other side, seems to have more extensive white, but I observed the bird many times and every time, from whatever angle, the whole head about the eye looked white. I'm determined to get better photos tomorrow. I had my camera set for butterflies.

Here's a cute bug...

Hummer update: Hummers aren't coming to the feeders at all these days. Maybe the ocotillo.

Water update: I measured 3 feet left in the one tank. That's it until rains. Scary!

CMO update

Yesterday I saw the first damselfly of the year at CMO, a Powdered Dancer. But the big update is that the pump isn't burned out. I really dodged a bullet there. We got what we could out of the stucco tank. The mud is still too wet to work with.

Tomorrow we're going to cement some of the curbs along the road. Two need extending and a couple need repairing where vehicles hit them. That road will always be a work in progress, as will the tanks. I found some new hairline cracks in the stucco tank that weren't there when I patched a couple of weeks ago. But with freezing nights and hot days that happens. Just keep up with the patching as best I can. I don't think those cracks leak but not taking chances.

The pressure tank at the oasis isn't holding water. It could just be a bad check valve but I can't take chances so I'm not going to use the system until I have more water. The lines are underground so I can't check for leaks. For now I'll just use two long hoses from a little sump-type pump stuck into the big tank.

Encroaching senility

I get really frustrated coming to CMO and forgetting to bring things I bought to bring and need. But that pales in comparison to letting my submersible pump, pump dry in the stucco tank. I think what happened is I carefully monitored and turned the breaker off when the pump was still barely covered with water. Then I'm thinking I saw one bush or tree that needed water badly so I turned the breaker back on for a few minutes and then turned the faucet off instead of the breaker. There's a drip under the cottonwood so without the breaker being off it continues to drip. And after 2 days of that plus evaporation it did the deed. I know the pump cuts off when it gets hot, but sometimes it also burns up the pump. And that is a new pump. Grrr!!! I'm so hoping it's not ruined. Tomorrow I plan to shovel out what mud we can get and then start adding water. So tomorrow will tell.

Here's Teresa helping in the big tank today while we waited for the stucco tank to dry out more.

Optimistically there could be as much as four feet of water in this tank although it's choked with pondweed and up to a foot of silt in the bottom. That's all the water I have left until the next big rain or flash flood.

Speaking of senility, yesterday at Lajitas I was odeing when Teresa was a ways away looking at birds in a patch of blooming mesquites. Up came 3 golfers in a golf cart and asked me if I could move out of their way. I replied, "where would you like me to move to?" I saw Teresa watching silently. One of the men said, "under a tree so you won't pass out from the heat." I bit my tongue and later learned Teresa did too. Then one said, "I haven't seen any dragonflies today. Are you going to the ranch later?" I asked if I could move to the mesquites. Then my son said "I can't believe you didn't recognize me." He knows I have a bit of prosopagnosia (face blindness), but thought I would recognize his voice. Didn't ever catch on, even though only family calls CMO "the ranch." I can't believe all those clues went right over me. I didn't look at their faces. They were maybe 60 feet away, too far for me to recognize had I been trying, which I wasn't. And I had known my son was golfing there that morning but thought he had been long gone by late afternoon.

One final story. For about 30 years I've kept an item in a kitchen cabinet. A couple of weeks ago I decided to just keep it on the woodbox ledge instead. I knew from experience I'd keep going to the cabinet for it for some time to come, but didn't see any reason to have to open a cabinet door to use it since I use it so frequently. So a couple of days ago I decided to use the item and remembered where I had moved it to. I congratulated myself for remembering all the way to the cabinet as I went for it. Did I ever feel stupid! I guess my brain knew but my body wasn't trained yet.

Odeing to Lajitas

Worked cleaning some of the dried mud from the tank this morning with a friend, then headed for Lajitas; she to bird, me to ode. It was a lovely day but I only saw one dragonfly, a Common Whitetail.

 Quite a few dancer damselflies.

Powdered Dancer

Blue-ringed Dancer

maybe teneral Blue-ringed Dancer

male Kiowa Dancer