Iron Eagle

A twofer today.

Yesterday's thunderstorm and rain was very welcome. The 0.39 inches of rain was sorely needed. Before the storm we were roughly 4.75 inches behind in June and July, now we're only 4.36 inches in arrears.

Neighbor's dryland corn for your viewing pleasure.

Just over knee-high. A bit (lot) more rain and it might make a crop.

One thing the rain did which is rather unpleasant is it generated swarms and swarms of gnats in and around the corrals where I planned to work today. I struggled with them for a couple of hours -- long enough to get a good bit of lifting and carrying done (excellent physical exercise) -- before giving it up in disgust. In the ears and eyes and up the nose and down the throat.

It's a bit cooler today and with an non-predicted overcast, which makes the day a pleasant one for both man and gnat.

I had some other work to do (surprise!) but decided to do some roadwork instead. I put on the sneakers and shorts and did a delightful four-mile jog-walk. Heaven!

Then I called the Rocky Mountain Raptor Project to get an update on the Golden Eagle we rescued last week.

Turns out our bird had a healing fracture in the left wing "wrist area" and also a left eye injury which makes him "mostly" blind on that side. He lost flight feathers in the left wing due to compromised blood flow during the healing of the fracture, but they are starting to grow back in. They moved him to the flight enclosure today to let him regain muscle strength. He's eating well and otherwise healthy.

He's a male and probably just turning four years old. Pretty remarkable that he was able to survive with the fracture but I guess they are good scavengers when injured and often have help from other sub-adults in the area.

Nature is pretty cool, even when she doesn't do everything exactly the way koobecaf says she should.

Scorch!

Yesterday promised to be a scorcher, and in my opinion, yesterday delivered.

Warm season grass; mostly blue grama.

Superb cow food.

This cow is stripping leaves and flowers from sweetclover stalks.

When you have no hands, the tongue is an important tool.

Indian wheat and buffalo grass.

Prickly poppy and sweat bee.

Pretty as a picture.

Oh, it didn't get all that hot, the high was only 96 degrees.

But it was very still and the sun shone down from a nearly-cloudless sky. The very weight of the photons crashing down was palpable. I marvel at the heat generated by sol, and by the way my perception of that heat varies according to the axial tilt of our planet and the wide variation of atmospheric phenomena which mitigate the impact of the solar flux. Sol is 93 million miles away, and it's the same sun in relatively the same place whether it's January 17 or July 17. Freaky. As the now balding kids say.

Anyway, yesterday's task was to emplace a short section of fence posts across a corner of a pasture. The grass in this pasture, which we call the northwest quarter, is almost entirely warm season grass -- buffalo grass and blue grama. When you dig post holes in this stuff an interesting thing happens (especially when it's dry). A great deal of the soil you dig seems to disappear!

Of course it doesn't disappear, but when you've stuck your post in the hole, and backfilled and tamped it into place, You're left with a half-empty (or half-filled?) hole. Why?

Rats

Driving the skid steer across it reveals the character of the soil.

Basically, the soil is very fine and powdery and consists of decomposed siltstone and decomposing grass. All of this is held in the matrix of the grass root system, and the geometry of all the soil particulates is in equilibrium. When you grind that all up with a posthole digger, you destroy the root matrix. Put it back in the hole and tamp it down and it now takes up half the space it did previously.

No wind at all.

Crop ground is no different.

Half-filled post holes will never do. They need to be flush with the soil surface and packed tight, else nature's wind and water and temperature variations will lay the posts down for you.

The solution is to add soil to the partly full (empty?) holes. There are various ways to do this, none of which are not a huge pain in the @$$.

The method I chose yesterday was to bring in new soil in five-gallon buckets. There were only seven (I think) postholes, so this was a viable solution. There was also a handy pile of loose dirt located relatively close by. So I shoveled and bucketed and I got the job done.

By the time I finished the temperature had hit 95, there wasn't a breath of breeze, and the sun was pounding down from a cloudless sky.

And I was done for the day. It was early yet, only a bit past noon. There was plenty more work to be done, and I wanted to do the work. I wanted to complete tasks and continue to strengthen my ageing carcass. But my carcass said, "Firetruck that, sit the firetruck down!"

And wonder of wonders, I listened! I was actually a bit scorched.

In the evening there was a lovely thunderstorm which cooled things down and delivered 0.39 inches of rain.

And now, back to work.

Oh Emma Gee!

Herbert W. McBride was a Captain in the Indiana National Guard when WWI broke out. He volunteered to a Canadian rifle company because he wanted to see action. He was commissioned, but broken to private soldier after a number of alcohol-fueled escapades. He shipped to England and then the Continent with the Twenty-first Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, where he quickly regained his rank and the command of a machine gun unit. Later in the war he was a sniper. He wrote a pair of books about his wartime experiences; one about sniping and one about machine guns. The first is $0.99 and the second is free on kindle. Just sayin'.

In the forward to the second book McBride explains the birth of the modern military phonetic alphabet, (B-Beer, P-Pip, T-Tock, etc.) which led to machine gun sections being called the Emma Gees.

Now all of this has been a bit of background to explain why, when I walked outside into the dawn this morning, I exclaimed, "Oh Emma Gee!"

Followed immediately by, "Oh, $#!+!"

The first was because it was such a gloriously beautiful morning. The temperature was 54 degrees, which was delightful, the air was still and filled with the smell of high summer, and the sun, which had painted the dawn with an infinite palate of warm colors, began to peek above eastern horizon, sending bright streamers of white-orange light shooting across the landscape.

Exactly the kind of morning that makes me say, "Oh my god, what a gorgeous morning."

The second was because of the flatness of the left front tire of my pickup. I couldn't get myself too worked up about the flat tire though, because the morning was just too beautiful.

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With air in the tire I headed out to check cattle. I drove into the pasture via the southwest gate on county road 24. The sunflowers I posted images of yesterday are gone, munched down by cattle!  The Scotch thistle flowers I showcased are also gone, having been viciously eradicated by yours truly.

The fenceline where the sunflowers stood also shows off the difference between grassland that's been grazed  since spring greenup and grassland that's not yet been grazed.

A bit further along I came across a group of shrikes dining on grasshoppers and crickets.

Not sure if they're Loggerhead or Northern Shrikes.

Br'er Rabbit hoping he doesn't look like a cricket.

Whoa! Wait a minute, dude, that ain't no cricket!

Could be a Lark Bunting or a sparrow. Maybe a Horned Lark? Or something else?

Shrikes are interesting birds. They are predatory songbirds, and they do have a lovely song. They've got a reputation for being vicious murderers in some circles (the professional and semi-professional victim classes), because they impale their prey on sharp, pokey things like cactus spines, tree thorns, and barbed wire. It seems likely that shrikes evolved this behavior to stockpile food in locations that are hard for potential scavengers to access. I think it's very interesting behavior, and it makes me wonder at the shrike's level of intelligence. Did they learn to store food because they are smart, or was it just an evolutionary accident? Of course, not being an SJW, I'm blind to the fact that it's just the behavior of the corporate patriarchy, man!

Maybe the SJW classes (professional and semi-professional) hate the shrike because it it lent its name to Kurt Tank's FW-190, often called, like its namesake, the Butcher Bird. Rather unlikely that even a single SJW has read enough history to be aware of the existence of the Würger though.

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Cows and calves were enjoying the morning.

Bulls were comparing notes.

I headed back to the home place to work on some fencing. I had to wait a bit while combines hogged the road. It is wheat harvest, after all.

And then it was back to work on a lovely summer day.

Just a couple of flowers

Before I dug thistle I snapped a few pictures of flowers. Sunflower, wavyleaf thistle, and Scotch thistle.

Digging thistle is a heck of a good workout. I dug about 200 plants and it was a serious chore. It's the kind of thing that works pretty much all of your muscle groups. It's both aerobic and anaerobic, depending. The heart rate goes up and stays up and the sun beats down. It's a great thing to do, but I wouldn't want to do it all day, every day.

In the midst of serious work though, there are flowers.

I'm really lucky.

And tired.

Hot again

Two days ago the temperature only made it up to 76 degrees. It was overcast and the low hanging clouds spit a few raindrops now and then, though not enough to measure as precipitation.

It was a glorious day for working on fence, though I lost a couple of hours to a doctor's appointment.

The sawbones was pleased with the way I've recovered from the foot thingy. As am I. My labs were all normal, which was a plus. My blood pressure has been behaving itself without pharmacological intervention, and that's a plus too. The scale revealed that I've dropped 40 pounds since February. That's a good thing, although by definition it's a minus. Get it? Lost weight? Subtraction? Minus?

There is, however, an existential minus -- perhaps -- waiting in the wings. Over the last several months I've had a few episodes of very low blood pressure accompanied by weakness and lightheadedness.

Both my dad and granddad developed similar symptoms at around age 60, and in each case it turned out to be a form of heart block. Heart block refers to a problem with the heart's rhythm, where the electrical signal that causes the heart to beat and beat regularly gets partially blocked. Heart block caused granddad's heart to develop a malignant dysrhythmia while he was having hernia repair surgery. They got it beating regularly again but not before he suffered a profound brain injury and expired.

Dad has been fortunate to survive into the 21st century and the age of sophisticated pacemakers, so his heart block has been somewhat less problematic.

With those histories perhaps encoded in my own genetic makeup and with my recent episodic b/p drop/weakness/lightheadedness I naturally wondered whether I'm proceeding down the same heart highway. My EKG was good, but that's common with early-stage heart block. The next step is to do a 30-day heart monitor, and that's in the works. So it'll be interesting to see what develops from this course of investigation.

What's that? Oh, yeah.

So Wednesday was cool, and yesterday was mostly cool too, though it did warm up in the evening. The relative coolness was nice when it came to capturing the Golden Eagle.

Today it was just plain hot.

Not overwhelmingly so, but the temperature shot up into the upper 80's as the sun blazed down from a cloudless sky. As is often the case in the heat of July, there's been little or no breeze.

After checking cows I drove by an area I hadn't visited since before we left for the west coast on June 1. Last year I killed a lot of Scotch Thistle there. Before we left I looked for regrowth and saw none.

Well.



After playing eagle hooky yesterday I had to buckle down and fix fence today. We've just moved the cattle from the home place to the south unit, and that fence needs both routine maintenance and some rebuilding.

Routine maintenance means going around the perimeter, mending and stretching wire, nailing up where staples are missing, and replacing posts as needed. The perimeter fence is 7.5 miles all together, and today while doing maintenance on about three-quarters of a mile I managed to trudge five-and-a-half miles. The good news is that I prioritized the neediest part of the fence first, so after another day or so the rest of the chore will be increasingly easy. Which is good, because it's supposed to get increasingly hot.

Once the routine stuff is done there'll be a few corner posts to rebuild, then it's on to cross-fencing, which means repairing and rehabilitating the fences that divide the pasture into smaller parcels.

And oh by the way, I've still got to finish corral repair at the home place as well as rerouting about a half-mile of fence and rehabbing another half-mile.

So there's no shortage of work!

I can still feel myself getting stronger every day, and for the moment it's something I'm really enjoying.

I got an email from one of the eagle rescuers today promising some eagle updates next week. Looking forward to that. Another rescuer sent along a few pictures.

Giving the eagle water. Don't often see myself in this blog!