Enjoyable day

I woke up this morning to wet ground. No typo.... WET GROUND! One inch below the ground.... bone dry. Checking the rain gauge it showed .4 inch. I don't see how the ground didn't get wetter, but I shelved my plan to go haul water. The puddles in the tanks had grown in the night. No water ran anywhere. The water in the tanks was from what actually fell into them.

In the big tank there wasn't enough water to pump out with the permanent well pump that's in there, but I put in a little portable pump and pumped some of it out. I worried about burning up the pump since it's supposed to be submerged, so I quit. However, I have a plan for tomorrow. I'm going to put the pump inside a bucket or tub and bail the water into the tub by hand as it pumps it to a cottonwood tree.

In the other smaller tank I keep a puddle of water to keep my gambusias alive, so I watered a few things with the excess water it had accumulated.

With the temperature cooler, I worked nonstop from 8 AM until 1:30 PM. By then my right arm wouldn't move anymore, but I got a lot done. Unloaded the pickup full of mulch, removed a walkway I don't use anymore, covered it with mulch, plus relocated the gravel that had been on that walkway, and pruned the "droopers" from an AZ Cypress tree. Droopers are the limbs that grow straight down and rub on the nice horizontal limbs. After a short lunch and nap, I went to enjoy watching the Wilson's Warblers picking the black flies off the hummingbird feeders. You may remember how they were covered with the flies. (If not, see the photos posted Aug 29.)

There were about a dozen warblers foraging on the feeders all day long, and those tiny flies were getting harder to find.

The flies must not be very filling because they sure ate a lot of them.

Wilson's Warblers migrate through here in the spring and fall. Today I saw only the males, so I look forward to continued insect control when the females come through in a week or so. I hope I don't run out of flies for them.