Survival Mode

The drought continues.  According to the weather services, the humidity late yesterday afternoon was 1%.  The dew point?  A ridiculous -20°F.  That’s right.  Twenty freaking degrees below zero!  And since the ambient temperature was 110° higher than that, it wasn’t likely that we would squeeze any moisture out of the air.

Somehow, despite the lack of any measurable precipitation since the end of last year, (and that was a single snow fall, so really, the dry spell goes all the way back to Summer), things are turning green.  It’s most noticeable when driving  home from town.  Huge green swaths of creosote bush surround the base of the Florida Mountains.  In the yard, the mesquite brush seems to be the most drought-hardy of all the plants.  Dammit.  Of all the flora I wish dead, the mesquite is at the top of the list!

I’ve been watering (and no, so far there’s no shortage of water in our aquifer, knock wood) the peach tree and the pecan tree, and the fruit is looking good.

The pines, at least from a distance, look as dead as the pronouncement from a friend who knows things about trees and plants.  But if you look closely, the trees have a secret.  When stressed, as they are in extreme drought conditions, they seem to go into a kind of survival mode.  First, they dropped almost two-thirds of their needles.  New needle clusters normally would be sprouting from the ends of the branches , but even with the constant, 24/7 drip I’ve got going to our two pines, the tree’s not sending water to the extremities.   But it is using the water!   A few weeks ago, I noticed these little green needle clusters start showing up on the branches closer to the ground.  As time passed more have begun to sprout, and on higher branches, too.

What seems to be happening, and I couldn’t find quite what I was looking for on Google, is the tree has gone dormant at the top, and the extremities, but it is keeping itself alive by pushing out enough green to keep transpiration happening. 

This is even more evident on one of the trees in the back yard.  Up until a couple weeks ago, I was certain it was dead.  While other trees in the yard were full of broad, green leaves, nothing was happening with this tree (which we’ve never identified, but we know the hummingbirds like to roost in it because it’s the closest tree to the feeder).  The ends of the branches were brittle dry.  No sign of life.
Then a strange thing happened.  Leaves began to sprout from the trunk; and from the thick areas of the branches closest to the trunk.  It looks odd, but this is another tree that’s killed off part of itself, to save itself.  Kind of like that kid in 127 Hours.

One of the climate models looking 6 months to a year out, shows a powerful el Niño is a possibility.  That , if it happens, will most certainly break the drought.  Will the trees then “wake up”, and go back to the way they were before the drought and the powerful February freeze?  Don’t know.  We’ll just have to wait and see, but I’m happy they seemed to have figured out a way to hang in there and wait with us.

Another Spring Visitor.

The peach tree is attracting all kinds of insect life, from common houseflies, the metallic green sweat bees featured in yesterday's post, regular honeybees, and this solitary Pipevine Swallowtail Butterfly. I don't know where his friends are, but he's now thoroughly worked over the tree for the last 3 days.

I Was Wrong A Lot In 2007

Oh, was I ever.

Last three years not exactly as I envisioned them.

UPDATE:  Just so you know how positively nuts it can get around a big time athletic factory in the throes of a coaching search... the denizens of the interwebz are tracking private planes all over the country and creating scenarios from whole cloth.  Crazy!

My Mistake. The Mystery Deepens.

A while back, I wrote a post here, titled "Winner... and still champion", voicing my amazement, and consternation over what I said at the time was the single most viewed post in the history of this blog.  I wondered at the motivation of people from all over the world who would want to view an image of two deer fu... mating.

Well, Blogger has new stat tools, and it turns out that I mis-identified the December 2007 post that everyone was looking at, and had I been more observant at the time, it would have been clear to me that they were all looking at this one*:

..and it's obvious when you look at the Google search terms used that brought all these people to the site, they weren't coming (no pun intended) for the article.  But, at least I have a little more respect and understanding for these sad, lonely men from around the globe.

So, case closed?

Not exactly, because when I look at the Blogger stats, I find that in their history (which, unfortunately, only goes back to May of last year), the most viewed post, by a very, very big margin...  is this one!

I just don't get it.  I really, really don't.



*Of course, posting this image again, means it will turn up in Google search results twice as much. Well, driving traffic to the blog, for whatever reasons, is what I want.  More eyes on the blog, means potentially more eyes on the ads.  There's a method to my madness.

Darwin's Mountaineers.

A follow up article in the local paper goes into more detail on the four "hikers" who had to be rescued from the top of the mountains last week, but it fails to make them appear any... brighter.

Take a look at this picture:

The arrow at the bottom of the mountain is the parking lot and picnic area. The arrow at the top is Florida Peak, (partially obscured by clouds in this 2009 image), some 2500' above the lot, with no trails between the two. On a day when the sun sets around 5:30, who in their right mind decides to make a climb (not a hike) at 2 O'Clock? They may be in college, but they're obviously not math majors.