Monsoons

Last year, you may recall, the oasis had three major monsoons that did lots of damage, including destroying my big non-leaking tank. This year we had a good rain in April that I was able to harvest water from, then in May a big monsoon filled everything, and now already in June we've had another huge monsoon.

I went down this morning, fearing the worst, like that the dike was washed out, which would eventually lead to the oasis practically washing away. The dike was bad, but still holding. It was built nearly 30 years ago and surely a foot higher than it is now after so many years of wind, rain, and compaction. It would be a major job to build it up, and not worth doing for the few years the oasis and I have left. Also it's so overgrown with vegetation that getting equipment in to work on it would be major uglification. This photo is of what I think is going to be where it gets breached first. Covered with brush so you can't really see the big pit in it on the right half of this photo.

                              

Here's another photo of the dike where it nearly washed out last year. I filled that hole with rocks, although I'm sure that won't prevent a flood from breaching it.

The settling pond at the upper dam used to look like this after a monsoon:

2023

Today it looked like this after yesterday's monsoon:

That's because we no longer clean it out of the silt and sand that builds up in it, which purpose was to keep it from going into the big, now broken tank. Eventually, that tank will fill up with this and look like this too. For now it only has about a foot of sediment and 8'  of water, because the above pond caught it before it could go into the tank. Obviously, it won't any longer. But of course, it no longer holds water for more than a few weeks now so doesn't much matter. On the above photos, the small soapberry tree has grown along the inside of the dam, but you probably couldn't detect the dam if you didn't know it was there.

While I was there inspecting everything, I saw this Olive-sided Flycatcher. It had a a bright yellow belly, which I thought was unusual.

A visitor last month, Roy Freese, took this cool photo of a pair of Black-tailed Gnatcatchers doing some serious nesting material gathering.

Horned lizards

Through the years, I've posted photos of horned lizards on this blog. Never thought more about it. But I read where someone is doing a horned lizard study in Texas and wanted sightings reported. About that time a visitor to the oasis captured one, not knowing what it was. I told him it was a Horned Lizard and to release it. Luckily, I thought to snap a cell phone shot of it first.

I posted it on iNaturalist as "Horned Lizard," not knowing there were different species of horned lizards. Soon it got ID'd as a Round-tailed Horned Lizard. That made we wonder what other species of them we had in the Big Bend. Seems there are three, but only two in Alpine or the Christmas Mountains that I'm likely to encounter. (The third, Greater Short-horned Lizard, is restricted to the higher elevations of the Davis and Guadalupe Mountains.)

Now I'm inspired to post my other horned lizard photos to iNat. I have photos of the Round-tailed and Texas Horned Lizard. I've posted both previously to this blog as simply "Horned Lizard." I've now edited those posts to be more specific.

Here's the one that started my journey into two horned lizard species. Always so much to learn, and so fun learning it, that I had to share it here.

The other species I've photograghed, Texas Horned Lizard, was from Alpine in July of 2020.

Now you probably know everything, or more than, I know about horned lizards in west Texas. I'm still on a learning adventure!