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.