Sunday walk

It’s been cloudy around here for several days, so these pictures are a bit dim, but I’m going to post them anyway.

You can see how dry it’s been this year from this first picture. This is a catchment pond up in the hills that at this time of year usually would have water out nearly to the little deer path you can see to the left of the picture. If you look carefully, you can see there is a bit of water way out in the center, where the pole (little white streak) is, but that’s maybe 10-15% of the area it covered last year.

They’re predicting rain some time in the next few days; I have my fingers crossed.

I didn’t notice until I got home and began processing in Photoshop, but there were ducks in the water. They showed up when I blew the picture up–I was trying to figure out what that white streak was. You can just make them out below, on the left side of the pond.

Because it’s been so dry, the wildflowers haven’t been nearly as spectacular as they were last year, but there are some out. These plants are well-adapted to drought; dry years are probably as or more common than wet years. This one looks like it’s related to sweet peas. At first I thought it was lupine, but then realized it’s growing on a vine. All in the same family (one of the few I still recognize from my college botany class.)

I keep trying to get a really good picture of this next one. It’s hard to get the camera to focus on the red flowers–it prefers to focus on the dark green background, and because of the dim light I had to use a really low f-stop. I love the way the flowers hang down below the branches. It usually starts blooming shortly after Christmas, and its colors are nicely Christmas-themed. I don’t know what it is, but I really like it–I wish one would volunteer in my back yard. I’m not even sure if it’s native–I see similar bushes in the nurseries around here. It could be an import that’s escaped and spread from people’s yards, or it could be a native that has been “domesticated”.

I tried getting under it to get a better shot of just the flowers, and it sorta worked. If I were a better artist (and more adept in Photoshop), or had had better light, I might have been able to turn this into a really nice picture. As it is–it’s close, I think; if you use your imagination, you can see what it might have been.

By now you may be wondering why this post has a “pets” tag. Well, here it is. The girl found a deer bone of some kind; I’m still not sure what it was. She wouldn’t let me near her while she had it–it was hard even to get these pictures, because she kept turning and trotting away. At first I thought it was a jawbone becasue of the split. If you look carefully, you can see it, though it’s somewhat disguised by the weeds.

Then I got this perspective on it, and decided it might be a leg bone, because it looks like there may be a hoof at the end of it. But if it’s a leg bone–why the split? It’s a mystery to me.

Anyway, she was as usual delighted with her find. She rolled on it several times (fortunately it wasn’t all that recent so the smell was undetectable to the human nose), and trotted around with it for several minutes, keeping it away from the rest of us. But shortly it got heavy, and she abandoned it.

Given how many deer we have around here (we see the tracks everywhere, and they come out at night and graze on our lawns), and the coyotes (and rumored mountain lions, though I’ve never seen one or even tracks), I’m amazed we don’t find more deer bones on our walks. The deer and the predators seem to be in balance–we don’t have a deer population explosion, as they do in places where the predators have been eliminated or heavily reduced–so I know that there must be deer killed out there on a regular basis. I like to get off the beaten paths because my dogs are not as civilized as they should be, and I like to walk them off-leash, so it’s best if we don’t meet other people or, especially, other dogs. And still, it’s rare that we find any deer remnants. There must be some really efficient scavenging going on.