A bird! A bird!

That Bullock's Oriole that I had visiting the feeders mid-December in Alpine is back!  Not great photos through a window, but documentary.

The oriole works very hard at getting sugar solution from the feeder.

Three days until February. And in February the hummingbirds will start arriving. How cool is that! Meanwhile, I'm having fun working on my ancestry tree. I was contacted by a distant relative, related through marriage. He had a couple hundred pages of letters written by my first cousin twice removed, per ancestry lingo. (Per my lingo she's the niece of my beloved great-grandmother.)  He shared those letters with me. I'm transcribing them and putting them onto my tree for posterity. Fun stuff!

Still hibernating

Hibernating in town

In case you're wondering what has become of me, I'm in town most of the time working on my ancestry tree and cleaning pecans. Spring is just around the corner.

We have about ten feed sacks full of pecans. Hugh cracks them and I clean them.

That project will take me well into spring.

Days are lengthening

Surviving as best I can. Today Kelly and I went to Lajitas to see what hummers we could band there. Saw three and caught two of them, one Rufous, and one Anna's.

Here's a juvenile Yellow-breasted Sapsucker that Kelly discovered and photographed. I hadn't taken my big camera along, so sure there would be nothing to photograph. That's how bleak it is these days.

Before leaving we checked out the pond by the golf shop. The most interesting bird there was this Eared Grebe which I managed to get a poor shot of with my little Lumix camera. (Coot on left)

In four weeks or so I can start watching for early arriving Lucifer Hummingbirds.

Trying to cheer myself up

I saw a couple of gorgeous male Mallards on our pond so decided to photograph them. Before I could get out there some woman walking her dogs down our alley between the house and ponds flushed them off. Grrrr!!!! I said something about it and she glibly stated they'd be right back. Of course, as I expected, they never returned.

So I kept searching for something to photograph, anything. Finally found an American Goldfinch. Better than nothing.

Since we have more pecans on the trees than we have the energy to deal with we are giving some away. One of the people my husband gave some to has been out flailing for hours. Wish I still had that kind of energy. Just glad the pecans aren't going to waste.

Hubby's at the river fishing. He's catching fish but it's cool there too. Since I assured him the next few days are going to be warmer he's going to hang in there. If he came home he'd just wish he was back there.

Headed toward normal

I actually saw my first two butterfly species for the year today. One was at a banding site about ten miles south of CMO, near Terlingua, and the other was at CMO. Reakirt's Blue (Terlingua) and Sleepy Orange (CMO), about the most common species. It's a start.

At that Terlingua banding site we waited patiently for this Anna's Hummingbird to enter the trap. It had been banded several weeks before we think, which may be why it never did go in.

Meanwhile, as we waited, a Pyrrhuloxia landed on my head. 

Photo by Kelly Bryan

Photo by Bonnie Wunderlich

I know I look dorky with my head all wrapped up, but by keeping my ears and throat warm I never get sore throats, earaches, or even colds or flu, so it's worth it. Plus it keeps me warm.

In keeping with the strangeness so far this year, my feeders have been bedeviled by bees. Here's one from under the roof where rainwater can't overflow the baffles. Either rain came in sideways or wind blew the feeder excessively. 

So I changed it out with a fresh one, and half an hour later it looked like this. All I can imagine is that when I rehung the fresh one some solution must have gotten sloshed during the process of flipping it over. That does happen occasionally. I'm going to leave it and see if by tomorrow the bees have gotten all they're able to reach. Whew!

Can I hibernate?

This year has started out so strange that I just want to hibernate until March 1st. Wish my water supply could hibernate, too, so none is lost to evaporation between now and then. I haven't even photographed anything yet this year.

We're banding at Lajitas tomorrow. Maybe something interesting, or worth photographing, will happen there.

New Year's resolutions

I didn't bother to make many resolutions since I never really heed any of them for long, but it's always nice to take a little inventory. A few of my usual health-related resolutions and one to go odeing and butterflying to the Lower Rio Grande Valley this year. I'm very serious about the few resolutions I've made.

Also I've noted that I'm not very consistent with keeping odonate and butterfly records at CMO. I do keep a daily lists of birds. I've tried a few flawed and inconsistent methods for odes and butterflies. This year I'm trying a new one and determined it'll at least be an improvement. By the new process, in my bird journal, I'll mark a species in every month that I see it. Better than what I had before anyway.

These pages are at the back of my bird journal for 2016 with tabs for easy access. I document bird species daily except for the year-round species, which are recorded on the first page. There are 21 year-round species. I know I'm not going to be consistent at documenting butterfly and ode species daily so I figure I'll try to do it monthly. I'm optimistic that I can accomplish that. I've kept my bird journals since around 1995 (ie. 20 yrs) but have only been into butterflies and odes the last several years.

New Year's Eve day

Checked out the hummer situation at Lajitas and then to CMO and back to Alpine. During my peregrination I was speeding (not literally) down Highway 118 when I had to brake for a family of javelina crossing the road. They were moving fast so all I got was this one shot with the closest camera I could grab as the momma screeched to a halt for a split second before catapulting away, baby practically underfoot. Such a cute baby!

National Geographic Channel is showing a series called Badlands, TX. I've enjoyed watching it so far. It moves a little slow but it captures the spirit and ambiance of S Brewster Co perfectly. It's based on the murder of La Kiva's owner, Glen Felts by Tony Flint. I think it's egregious that Flint wasn't even found guilty of so much as aggravated assault.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/badlands-texas/

So when I drove past La Kiva today I stopped and took a couple of pictures. New owners have totally remodeled. It has reopened but doesn't serve food yet.

At CMO there was still a trace of snow on the mountain.

I usually don't post photos of this mountain (Williams, by name) because when I bought land here it was pristine. Shortly thereafter, before I could get a surveyor out, a fly-by-night mining company bulldozed that road across it. I got it stopped, but not in time to save the beauty of that mountain. My land goes a ways above that road. I've fought to protect my land for nearly 40 yrs. It can be a constant battle from poachers, loose cattle, cactus collectors, hunters, and more. Just because you own land doesn't mean it's protected.

Until next year!!!

2015 in review

2015 has been a strange year that started out promising. Not too cold, and plenty wet. It had been a long time since we've had such a wet spring. By April and May everything was blooming although it was still a little too cold for butterflies and odonates.

Weeds and vegetation overtook my pathways and I didn't manage to get them cleaned up until after my spring birding tours were over, unfortunately. (Keep in mind that a cool wet spring doesn't mean water running into my tanks. That happens from summer monsoonal flash-flooding.)

Spring birding was not worth mentioning, although all Lucifer Hummingbird seekers had no trouble adding that species to their list, including birders doing a Big Year.

The reason for slow birding, I believe, was because with all the moisture my oasis was an oasis amid endless oases. The birds were able to disperse. That dispersal did provide one species previously undocumented at the oasis; Gambel's Quail. Also had a brief visit from a Broad-billed Hummingbird.

Following spring, the oasis was plunged into a horrible hot, dry summer. Three months of over 100° temperatures almost daily, and no rain other than a puny one early in July that didn't run enough to fill up my tanks. And a lot of that water was lost due to the stucco tank springing a leak. Got the leak patched but the tanks never did fill up. In October the upper dirt tank caught water that I immediately pumped out, even though it meant pumping all night long. I didn't want to lose the many hundreds of gallons that would have soaked into the ground during the night. In my haste, I forgot that I had rigged up a fitting I could install and run the water directly into the stucco tank. Instead, I pumped the water into the lower dirt tank. So I ended up having to double-pump it all, which probably lost as much water as the all-night pumping had gained.

Butterflies were not abundant and I didn't add one new species to my CMO list this year. The best butterfly of the year is the Zebra Longwing at Austin a few days ago.

Odonates were much better. Six new species were added to the CMO list. Plus I drove to several other locations in the Big Bend and added more lifers. Of course the more lifers one gets, the less remaining ones there are to get.  Just trying to salvage what I could of summertime. Next year I'm determined to go farther afield, like the Lower Rio Grande Valley. I couldn't this year because my tanks weren't full. I had to be here in case it rained and I needed to pump water to fill them.

Clockwise: Striped Saddlebags, Turquooise-tipped Darner, Smoky Rubyspot, Pale-faced Clubskimmer, Red-faced Dragonlet, and Three-striped Dasher.

So the year ended with my tanks not having been filled, not to mention all the water I had to spend watering the trees during the extremely hot months. By comparison, I've had years where it never got above 100° once all summer. Rain cools things off. Without it you can be sure the summer will be hot. I'll have to ration water severely unless we get a wetter than average spring again in 2016. It's nerve-wracking.

Ultimately, I feel like I lost one precious oasis summer of my life. And with probably less than twenty remaining, that loss is significant. Finding great dragonflies helped redeem the summer for me personally though.

My life hit the three-quarters of a century mark this year. Healthwise, my eyes are the best they're going to get. I'm getting by. My dental implants are doing good. I need to get my cholesterol and blood sugar lowered. They're borderline high. Gonna work harder at that.

The new-to-me pickup I got this year should last me another 10 years (I hope), and my almost new camera and new laptop, likewise. With my family all healthy I have a lot to be thankful for. Not every upcoming year is going to be this good. I won't complain if I can just eke by on water until my tanks fill up. My life revolves around the oasis. And the life of the oasis revolves around water. Therefore, my life revolves around water.

Early July 2015