The Secret to Picking a Hummingbird Feeder

Some of these designs work and others do not

Here in the southern Rockies, our hummingbirds have almost gone. 

I saw one female broad-tailed hummingbird yesterday (Sept. 30th). Evidently, she was the stickler who said, "We paid rent on this mountain cottage, and I am going to stay there until the month is over!" 

Meanwhile, Dad was already flying to Mexico to look for a winter apartment.

Some friends gave us a newfangled hummingbird feeder this summer. It is the one in back — a horizontal tube with multiple feeding stations. And they use it. I grant that.

The problem is that refilling it involves removing one of the little rubber feeding ports and pouring sugar water in through a tiny funnel — while not tilting the tube to let sugar water flow out the other ports

Sorry, too much hassle, too much mess. 

Then there was the ceramic globe feeder someone once gave us — a globe with a single tube to drink from. How did you clean the spherical feeder? Beats me. Vinegar and slosh a lot?

The tube feeder on top is garbage. The one at lower left is not bad but requires careful cleaning.  The one at lower right, with its bottom part botton center, is plain, un-artistic plastic and is super-easy to keep clean.

Here is the secret. Get a feeder that disassembles for easy cleaning. Everything should be accessible to a toothbrush or bottle brush. You need to to clean it thoroughly at least every couple of weeks. Use white vinegar if you see patches of mold growing.

Keep it simple. Mix white sugar with water 1:4 (that's one part sugar to four parts water). No food coloring. No honey. No agave syrup. Nothing else.

And pick a feeder that you can take apart and clean.

Mushrooms, Fake Art, Food Trucks, and Controversy at the Colorado State Fair

The last bolete of August? Where is the Jägermeister to summon the hunting horns to blow the "last call"?

We are having what southern Colorado calls "State Fair weather," in other words, hot and dry after a pretty good July-August "monsoon."  Most of my county is now officially out of drought, although my home is on the line between that and "abnorally dry."  The mushroom-hunting ground was a bit dry and not so productive two days ago, so that may be the end of the season, pending some other changes.

Meanwhile, down in Pueblo its time for the Colorado State Fair. No, I have not been yet this year, but there is more weirdness in the news rather than the usual inflated attendance figures.

The Denver Post sent one Conrad Swanson to cover it, who expressed his feelings about the assignment on Twitter with the comment above: "It's no Iowa State Fair but it will have to do." 

Someone responded to the effect that, "Yeah but our butter is infused." 

Meanwhile, Governor Jared Polis himself ventured out of the Denverplex for a ribbon-cutting at a new Interstate 25 interchange near Trinidad.

This is a Good Thing (well, getting Polis out and around the state is probably a good thing too) because it is supposed to aid vistors to the new, big, wild Fisher's Peak State Park. I want to go see it too! (I have a parks pass.)  

Gov. Polis also went to the fair and presented an award to the winning food truck, out of nine contestants. Theme: Your Take on Fair Food.

Charles McKay of the Hungry Buffaltofood truck.

Meanwhile, about fifteen trucks parked at a church across from the fair. These insurrectionist food truck operators were not considered for the award because they were outside the sacred precinct.

[Pastor Tim] Miessler asked the Food Truck Union to staff the portion of the parking lot the church owns during the fair “to offer a more affordable choice and healthy, fresh foods."

Yes, there is a financial angle too, a dispute between the church and the state fair. Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence tricked the art judges

The winnah! (Discord screengrab via Vice.com)

This has already gone national.  Apparently judges at the fair's art show gave a first place to a painting created by articial intelligence at a website.

“I won first place,” a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. . . .

The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.

But Allen did not paint “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs.

 I expect that we will hear more about the art award.

Western and Colorado Drought Maps, August 9, 2022

 We remain "abnormally dry," despite all the rain. Dry soils, low reservoirs.

What the Mushroom Monsoon Looks Like

A quick shot from the Junkins Burn of 2016 in Colorado's Wet Mountains  — looking roughly west, so the haze is a cold front (relatively speaking "cold") rolling in from the north.

The summer "monsoon" lost its quotation marks in the 1990s or 2000s and is now full-fledged cultural appropriation — English language for the win! 

So July and early August have been fairly wet by southern Colorado standards. Our standards are these: 

1 inch (2.5 cm) of rain in a day: "Ma! Ma! The crops are saved!"

2 inches of rain in a day: "Oh no! Flash floods! The road will wash out — but we need the moisture."

Shaggy parasol, Lepiota rachodes.

On the plus side, mushrooms. Like everyone else who hunts them, M. and I are making forays, and while we have had no bonanza days, we never have come home empty-handed.

Tuesday was such a day: we drove 45 minutes, hiked to a new ridge top, Marco the dog ran happily,  and then when we came home, there they were! Mushrooms just yards from the house. 

Shaggy parasols with caps the size of softballs hiding in the scrub oak —  I left the biggest ones to spread their spores. 

I think this one is Suillus granulatus.

The Suillus that we see only in wet Augusts  — often called slippery jacks, a name applied to several species.

I think of them as the dollar-store version of king boletes: not as big, not quite as tasty, but OK to eat as long as you them before the worms appear.

Some Wednesday Wildflowers in the Wets

Spurred by Facebook reports of increasing mushroom finds, M. and I went for a walk last Wednesday. Although the higher Wet Mountains were not as dry as we feared, we found no fungi but saw lots of wildflowers.

Colorado columbines were blooming in profusion.

News meadows created by the Adobe Peak Fire of 2018.

At the upper end of one of my favorite old meadows.

Fringed gentian was plentiful too.

Colorado Drought Map July 5, 2022

Right now I call this good news, getting upgraded to "abnormally dry." And there was more good rain the evening of the 6th as well.

The Wisdom of the Hackberry: Reflections on a Weird Gardening Year

One day this past week our little hackberry tree turned golden. It was alone in that—true, the aspens are turning at higher elevations, but here the lanceleaf cottonwoods, the Gambel oaks, the various berry bushes, are  all still green. 

We got it a few years ago at some nursery in Taos, possibly the now-closed Blossoms in Ranchos de Taos, or possibly Petree, but I think it was Blossoms.

I nearly lost it one year to drought, but it has come back up to where — although the picture does not suggest great height — it is a couple of feet taller than I am. Hackberry is supposed to be fast-growing. That is true in the good years.

"Hackberry," says the University of Nebraska Extension Service, "Celtis occidentalis, is a native tree to the region. It grows up to 60 feet tall and has a spread of 50 feet. It is in the same family as the elm tree, Ulmaceae."

Another site notes that hackberry "can withstand high salt, acid, sand, clay and alkali levels in soils, as well as survive extended flooding and drought." 

"Flooding and drought" summarizes the 2021 growing season. Spring and early summer were soaking. In an article celebrating this year's hay harvest, one of the county weeklies said the core growing area received more than 19 inches (4.75 hands for the horsey set, about one cubit for you Mesopotamians) of rain in the spring in summer. At my place, I saw water running downhill in places where I had never seen water before, not even when big spring snow dumps melted.

"Ah," I thought, "this will recharge the soil moisture, and we will have wildflowers and vegetables and mushrooms and all of it."

Not so fast, hopeful foothills gardener!  

Our "Holderness" (that's its name) clay soil holds water if you apply it slowly, which nature often does not. As my old Soil Conservation Service book on local soils says, 

Holderness "loess and residium that derive from sandstone . . . . the native vegetation is mostly foothills grasses. . . . . Permeability is slow, and the available water capacity is high. . . . runoff is moderate or rapid, and the hazard of erosion is high. Gully erosion is common. This soil is suited to pasture and grazing. (Description updated here.)

M. was at the grocery store two days ago, and someone else was describing her vegetable garden this year as "crappy." I think that happens when you plant late because it's cold and wet — and then the weather goes dry and hotter than average in late summer, making it almost impossible to keep up with watering plants.

As for the local wildflowers, they were not all that spectacular. Maybe they need more recovery time. Up a little higher, about 8,500 feet, I saw amazing flowers in an area that burned in 2016, however, with aspen saplings coming up everywhere.

Mushrooms down here were not. The usual Agaricus campestris never popped (well, there was one I left alone) and the normal Suellus "slippery jacks" never appeared. 

But up in our usual mushroom grounds, the harvest was spectacular, so no complaints.

Instead, this was the Year of Tall Grass. To come up our driveway is to experience driving between banks of grass like grain waiting for the scythe — I say scythe because I mean tall stuff, not like dwarf wheat bred for combine-harvesting.

I let much of the cabin lawn go unmowed (the deer bed down in that high stuff, feeling hidden). It was a tough choice—tall grass is more of a fire hazard, but I wanted all those seeds! It sure beats buying seed, and now the mower can spread them. 

Everywhere, grass thicker than I have ever seen. What Holderness wants, it gets.  It wanted the early summer lambsquarter and amaranth; it did not want beets, and it was sort of indifferent to tomatoes, which are bearing but not heavily.

Meanwhile, the hackberry, in its weather wisdom, is one of the last trees to leaf out in the spring, and now it is the first one to cash in its chips when autumn comes. It knows that abrupt changes from cold to hot and back again are commonplace and always have been, as long as there have been hackberries. As the saying goes, "normal is just a number."

Will This Be Mega-Mushroom Year? Or, Foraging Texas-Style

 

I was hiking on June 25th with my wife and my niece when I found the giant puffball on the right.  I cut it in half to make sure it was still fresh enough to take home—and it was.

Then as we were driving the little road out from the trailhead, my niece, who was in the right-hand back seat, starts shouting, "Wait! Wait! Stop!"

She had spotted the other puffball. She has good instincts — she spent her teen years on my sister's farm, where aside from electricity and motor vehicles, it was pretty much 1890 — hand pump for water by the sink, wood heat, and the privy was out back. You blast the kudzu with a shotgun when it tries to crawl in through the screen door, that kind of thing.

"I never foraged from a car before," she said, climbing back in. 

"That's doing it Texas-style," I said.

But seriously, while the Western Slope is baking, here in southern Colorado we are getting early tastes of monsoon weather, and I have never picked so many mushrooms this early at this altitude (below 8500 feet, give or take). It was the first year that we had the dehydrator running in June.

M. and I will be heading for higher country soon. We have hopes.

A Strange Summer for Southern Rockies Gardeners

The Green Roof Farms honor-system farm stand.
Your money goes in the white-painted ammo box at lower right.

Scott's working 1950s Farmall Cub tractor, perfect for the small operation.

M. was at the hair salon last week, and her stylist, who lives in Colorado City, was lamenting how her garden had produced poorly this summer. Well, join the club. I have been hearing that a lot.

Let's review the year.

After a cool wet spring. Colorado was declared drought-free. I expected a great spring wildflower show, and while that was true at higher elevations, it was not true here in the ponderosa pine forest. Some regulars, like wild geranium, hardly showed up at all. Subsoil moisture still not replenished?

Then it got hot in July, but that was followed by a decent "monsoon" that gave us an adequate if not great mushroom harvest in early August and the usual flash floods below the recent burns.

Wild bee on some kind of
groundsel, at about 9800 feet,
early August.

Then more hot and dry weather all through September and into October. Up near Poncha Pass, a lightning-caused forest fire, the Decker Fire, that was burning up beetle-killed timber in the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness, has now crossed control lines and is moving towards foothills subdivisions and little communities along the Arkansas River like Swissvale and Howard.

The violent changes have been hard on garden plants and flowers. In some cases, we have just cut back perennials and let them go while focusing on collecting seeds from annuals. No hard freeze yet at this elevation, but the dryness is as good as a freeze. I have rolled up hoses and pronounced the season over.

In Florence, where there is irrigation water, truck gardeners Scott and Robin have been supplying us from their farm stand, which often just operates on the honor system. (M. says that reminds her of her girlhood visits to the Vermont side of her family.) If you are in that area, you can find them under "Green Roof Farms" on Facebook.

Thanks to them, we are drying tomatoes and have plenty of squash, peppers, and onions.

Some migratory birds left on schedule (black-headed grosbeaks, for one) while others are hanging around way past their usual departure dates (band-tailed pigeons, broad-tailed hummingbirds.) But that is another topic.

Brome Grass and Bear Shit — Thinking about this Summer

I

Liatris punctata

The Liatris are starting to bloom, which marks beginning of Late Summer here in the foothills. Funny thing, with last spring having been so wet, I expected a wildflower explosion. And the summer has been fairly rainy, although with a hot and dry period in July.

Nope. Where are the wild geraniums? Golden banner? Where are [fill in the blank]? Some asters, vetches, locoweed, yarrow . . .  they showed up.

At higher altitudes, there is much more profusion. We must have been in some kind of  meteorlogical "doughnut hole" again.

The Magyar Menace

Instead, early summer turned into March of the Brome Grass.  There have been patches of it here and there, but something — presumably the extra moisture — really threw its switch this year.

Fun fact: Smooth brome was imported from Hungary in 1884. Some consider it invasive, but the ranchers seem to like it. Not like cheatgrass, in other words, which is a brome too but which is evil.

What are some alternatives? The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources suggested these natives:

• Big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii)
• Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum)
• Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans)
• Prairie cordgrass (Spartina pectinata)
• Bluejoint (Calamagrostis canadensis)

I tried my own line-up this year with plants bought from Hartungs' Desert Canyon Farm in Cañon City, one plant each of Indian ricegrass, Achnatherum hymenoides; big (giant) sacaton, Sporobolus wrightii; and silver spike grass, Achnatherum calamagrostis. 

These are my three test plants. They are hard to see, but all are doing well. Now it's a matter of harvesting seed.

And the bears!

A black bear left this little calling card near the house on July 24th. Fisher the dog had been on alert that night — rushing out onto the veranda barking, then into the back dog run barking — he knew Somebody was out there.

It looked like the bear had eaten some immature currants, but I don't know how much nutritional value it extracted. One bush not far from the site was pretty well stripped. I ate on currant for form's sake the next morning, out of a sense of brotherhood with the bears, who taught the peoples what to eat.

That was Early Summer. Now it is Late Summer, mushroom season. More to come about all that.

Hummingbirds Co-Existing Peacefully

I was going to relax with some blogging yesterday afternoon (I really was), and then the rain started falling all up and down the Wet Mountains, leading to some stream-flooding, rock slides, and waterfalls appearing in unexpected places.

The fire department was called out, mainly for traffic control — we were shutting roads down left and right, based on radio calls to the effect that "the water is over County Road XX."

All that took up four hours or so, then it was time to go home. This morning, the county Road & Bridge crews and various local residents — especially everyone with an irrigation ditch head gate to maintain — are out moving mud, tree trunks, etc. out of the roads and culverts.

And this afternoon, it might be "lather, rinse, and repeat."

Meanwhile, in the morning sunshine, the hummingbirds are demonstrating how they can live in harmony, which to them means "All against all."

You can see the ultra-aggressive rufous males flashing copper, hear the buzzing broad-tailed males (the females of both species wade right in there too), and slipping through the crowd, there is one male calliope hummingbird, something of a rarity here. The calliope hummingbird is the smallest bird found in the United States.

Not-Gardening in a Time of Drought

Lamb's quarter, self-seeded in a big tub.

It rained three nights ago, boosting our total for the past four weeks to a magnificent 0.2 inches, or about 5 mm. Coming after a dry spring, it's serious drought time.

The creek had already gone dry, although the sandy bottom was moist. Since our well is in the creek aquifer—somewhere—the state of the creek is always a concern.

Some areas upstream got more rain than here, and a trickle of flowing water has returned, muddy water that must be coming off an upstream burn scar.

Knowing these conditions were coming, thanks to the shamanic prophecies of the National Weather Service, we did not even try to garden like normal. Almost everything we planted is in containers—some tomatoes, some herbs.

And there there is the Zen of not-gardening.  Instead, we took what showed up on its own.

One is lamb's quarter a/k/a goosefoot, a Chenopodium, which means "goose foot" in Latin. How lambs get into the story, I do not know. I assume that sheep would eat it. When it's too dry even for Swiss chard, these are our greens.

Another edible volunteer is wild amaranth, when it's young. Call them both quelites, if you prefer.

A third is nettles, which M. planted several years ago and which have firmly established themselves, putting them in the class of feral greens. Lots of hippie/Greek nettle pie is eaten in this house, "hippie" because she insists on making a whole-wheat sort of-phyllo dough.

We were going to try growing a similar plant to lamb's quarter, "Good King Henry," Blitum bonus-henricus, this year, but put it off. (In case you were wondering, it was apparently named after Henri IV of France, which just goes to show that you can preside over decades of religious wars and still have a tasty pot herb named for you. He did apparently encourage tree-planting.)

In the woods, brush, and pastures, not much is happening. A few tiny acorns. A scant handful of wildflowers—and what does bloom seems to come early and is stunted, as though the plants are trying to get through an abbreviated life cycle. Even my bomb-proof penstemon is just hanging on, barely existing.

A couple of days ago I thought I saw some Liatris about to bloom, which rocked me back, because its normally a flower that marks the end of summer. I need to go back and double-check. Maybe the plants just want this summer to be over.

Futility at Camera Trap Spring

Some time when I hike to Camera Trap Spring — particularly during dry summers like this one — I take a trowel and try to dig out the spring a bit, making a little pool for the water to collect in.

And then this happens. Or a bear does the same thing. Fine, boys, enjoy your mud wallow.

"One of Our 50 Is Missing"

Click to enlarge.

The current Southwestern drought does not stop at the border but extends into northwestern Mexico. Sitting here with a mid-day temperature of 98° F., humidity of 8 percent, and only a tenth of an inch of rain, if that, for the week, I was wondering When will it end?

So I went looking online for 2018 Southwestern monsoon forecasts and found one from The Weather Network. Pretty informative — but also geographically "challenged."

I scrolled down through the charts and graphs and found this video: "Must See: Time Lapse of the Monsoon Season in Mexico."  Late summer rains do start first in Mexico and then move northward. And ponderosa pine trees do grow in the Mexican Sierra Madre.

But wait — that logo says "Angel Fire Resort," which is in northern New Mexico, admitted to the Union in 1912.

And who will appreciate that error more (I hope) than the editors of New Mexico Magazine, which for decades has run an item in every issue titled "One of Our 50 Is Missing" (archived here).

Even today, traveling in the USA and elsewhere, New Mexico residents are complimented on how well they speak English, while postal clerks in other US states tell people that they must fill out a customs form to send a package to Las Cruces. And so on.

Should we cut TWN some slack because they are headquartered in Ontario?

A Sudden Little Fire and a View from the SEAT

Single-engine air tanker drops retardant at the Horse Park Fire
in southwestern Colorado on May 28, 2018.

I was just about to make the turn to the post office at 9 a.m. on Saturday, June 2, when my cell phone rang, and suddenly I was a volunteer fireman again.

A little blaze had popped up a few miles from town, possibly caused by lighting three days previously, but so far no one is saying so officially.

We got one brush truck with three volunteers as close to it as we could by driving through pasture land — the fire was nearby on national forest. A colleague and I were just tightening our bootlaces preparatory to walking up there and scouting it when the Forest Service arrived — in force.

There were command vehicles, wildland fire engines — and here came a line of crew buggies, which turned out to be the Twin Peaks Initial Attack crew, normally based in Utah. They formed up and started marching up the slope.

The Twin Peaks Initial Attack crew from Utah pauses to confer before climbing to the fire.

We looked at each other and said, "Well, it's their fire now." Our second brush truck was on-scene by then. We got a new mission, to visit all the homes nearby that had been put on pre-evacuation notice, look for potential problem areas, chat with the homeowners, eat cookies . . . and watch the air show.

Two Single-Engine Air Tankers (SEAT) arrived early, flying out of Fremont County airport. A four-engine tanker swooped down low. Two helicopters circled, dropping water. The fire already had a hashtag: #hardscrabblefire

Large air tanker dropping retardant (Ole Babock).

The bigger tankers can do the most, but it felt good to see the SEATs come in early.  The video above, found on the Fire Aviation blog, gives you a view from the pilot's seat.

Everyone is on edge about the drought, but the fast and heavy response stopped this little quickly.  Bullet, dodged. By five o'clock, some of the nearby residents who had decided to evacuate were coming home again.

In January, Missing Summer Storms

Better in full-screen mode.

Off to See the King

King bolete. Slightly past its prime, but with careful trimming and slicing,
onto the drying screen it goes.

After last Friday's hailstorm left our vegetable gardens looking bombed and machine-gunned, there was only one thing left to look forward to — mushroom season.

I envy people who live in wetter climates like Alaska and the Pacific Northwest for this one thing: they can hunt mushrooms much of the year. We get some in the early summer, but the frenzy starts in August.

The first part of the week produced a flush of "slippery jacks" (Suillus granulatus) near the house. They are boletes but low-grade ones (from the eating standpoint)  that quickly turn wormy and mushy — the window for picking them lasts about two days.  M. says that they are "too bland" but dries and adds them to her vegetable soup stock mixture.

Today M. and I  drove up to the mountainside that we call The Mushroom Store, and the first thing we saw was a car parked in "our spot," a little pullout that I like because it is is a couple hundred yards from where the picking starts, instead of right beside it. I pulled onto a nearby old logging road instead, and we got out as quietly as we could.

We started toward the first area that we always check — and saw movement through the trees. Time for another route. We wear muted colors and communicate with little whistles and hand gestures. You never know, there might be Russians.

So we faded off into the woods and in about an hour had 23 pounds of mushrooms, mostly boletes with some hawk's wings. That made for a couple of hours of processing — the dehydrator full and laboring, screens all over the greenhouse, another screen on the hood of M's Jeep in the garage — for now, because it's raining. We will be dancing them in and out of the sunshine for the next two days.

All this rain — the high water, flash floods, sandbagging — at least it's producing mushrooms here in the Southern Rockies.

Notes from a Small-Town Independence Day Parade

Kids and and early-model Farmall Cub tractor. Can't beat that.

Florence, Colorado, has joined the trend towards "wet" parades. The parade route is divided into two halves: all units move through the dry half first, and then at an intersection, those who do not wish to continue—such as units with lots of bunting and young children—peel off.

These spectators are staying dry.

As we frequently do, our little fire department contributed a unit to the parade — and a unit to another parade in another small town. For the second year running, I drove in Florence.

Hah, what is your puny squirter against a city water truck? (Florence VFD photo)

The wet half of the parade is a water battle between spectators and parade units. The former have all manner of squirting apparatus plus garden hoses hooked to spigots on buildings. The latter have open tanks of water, buckets, and squirt guns — plus some of us have fire engines.

Soak that cop! Soak his Can Am Spyder Police Edition! You know you want to. (Florence VFD)

In our case, the fire engine is a brush truck (small wildland engine) with a gasoline-powered pump. (Most large fire pumpers run their pumps off the engine, which means that the vehicle must be stationery to pump.) We restrict ourselves to one-inch hoses, two of them. Our complement included the oldest firefighter, a retired Navy pilot who loves this stuff, and the chief with his wife and three children.

Wet-zone combat.

Me, I just rolled up the windows and drove toward what I knew was coming — the downward blast from one Florence's aerial nozle.

Into the (watery) hell mouth.

I noticed this year a couple of purpose-built wet-parade units, like this one below. Also, this "Murica" thing is becoming meme-ish. Who started it?

Two views of the same truck, with water tank filled and ready.

Who says oil and water don't mix?

In the end, what makes a parade (along with high-school bands) is somebody riding something. I asked the two riders on the saddle longhorns if I could take their picture. They agreed, and said that they had been in the parade the last two years as well. "That's the trouble," I said. "When you're in the parade, you can't see the parade."

While we were waiting, the oldest firefighter remarked on the incongruity of devoting a parade to spraying water in an arid state.

"Maybe we're celebrating Florence's senior water rights," I said. "They go back to the 1860s, I think."

As I wrote once before, humans love orgies.

Where Are These Foxes When I Need Them?

It has been a major rodent year, building on 2015. First, the rabbits. For years we hardly saw a rabbit or a rabbit track, and when we did, M. and I would comment on the sighting to each other.

Now I see cottontails frequently in the woods. One hopped across the driveway this morning. Another was under a bird feeder. The greenhouse vents are now protected with chicken wire and some of the more vulnerable vegetable garden beds screened as well.

It's not enough. There are mice as well. Through the summer they invaded the house and garage in platoons; I was live-trapping three or four a night, night after night — and sometimes in the daytime.

These mice I dumped in a brushy gully about 150 yards from the house. (I hope that that was far enough to keep them from coming back.) It's a smorgasbord for foxes! Where are the foxes?

Drought Status July 26, 2016

Click to embiggen.

For a discussion of this graphic, visit the U.S. Drought Monitor site.