Wednesday June 22
I tried really hard to get up early. I think I made 7:15, which was an improvement over the day before. And then I proceeded to put Zack out, as usual, tie his leash to the door handle, as usual, get Molly, as usual, put her harness and leash on, come back out the door...
And trip on Zack's leash and splat on the ground. My right hand and right hip took the fall, and padded it well enough that no major harm was done. Except to my pride. Am I becoming an unsteady old woman who falls and breaks a hip every year or two?
Anyways...since we were up somewhat early and moving, we decided to run over to Canyon and grab a McDonald's breakfast, then head on to Buffalo lake national Wildlife Refuge.
unidentified flycatcher, probably ash-throated
Kingbird
We got there at about eight-thirty and took the auto tour route. With stops here and there to hop out and search for wildlife. Plenty of Western Kingbirds and Meadowlarks but little else, as it turned out. We could hear a bobwhite in the distance. When we first arrived, Ed spotted a coyote wandering around in the dry lake bed. And on the road, finally, I saw a jackrabbit!
I know that most people consider them common as mud, but I haven't seen them consistently in forever. When I was a college student in the 1980s I went on a desert trip and saw them all over, trotting by the side of the highway. And more recently, I saw a few down in one of the campgrounds by Killeen. But no more than that.
So it was good to see one again. After our drive we went down the highway on the east side of the lake in search of the prairie dog town. We found it, finally, and it was a sad and dry spectacle. The site where they'd built a walking path was pretty much deserted, although Molly kept wanting to check out the abandoned burrows here and there. The ground all around was parched and bitter dry, inhabited only by dusty sage grasses and large red ants.
Way off to our left, at about the limits of binocular vision, I could see a few dogs eking out a dry living. I hope they can handle it. They were on a hill slope, so they might get a little runoff precipitation there.
The lake was a valuable wetlands habitat for migrating birds, waterfowl especially. I'm told that sandhill cranes were especially plentiful in the spring. But I couldn't see it. It was only June, but there was only a little water in a cattle tank that the wildlife service had a pump attached to, letting excess water fill a puddle. There was mud in the bottom of the puddle, but no standing water. And over near the end of the auto tour was a walkway out to a cottonwood grove. There may have been water there, possibly just under the surface.
The Ogallalla aquifer feeds this whole area, and it appears that agriculture and cities are sucking water out of the ground at a rate much faster tahn it is being replenished. I read in the museum (more on that tomorrow) that the aquifer was created during the uplifting of the Rocky Mountains. A hard pan under the surface trapped the water there; eventually the inflow from the mountains was diverted or redirected somewhere, but the water remained. Until now.
It sucks, though, that springs and wells are running dry and the land getting more parched by the day. Maybe man will get some brains on the subject one day and replenish the springs and creeks that once fed such a rich marshland.
On our way back, we had the shock of our 60-some-odd-years of life. At ten-thirty in the morning in the bright hot sun, we saw a huge bobcat by the side of the road. He was just poking around there, in no particular hurry that I could see, but when we stopped to look at him and he saw our Jeep, he skulked off into the dense brush of the broken up lands right there.
Cool, to the max. This is a picture of his ears and back after he moved into the brush.
After a short sojorn at camp, we headed out again. But this time, with no dogs. Our destination was the Museum of the Great Plains at Texas A&M University in Canyon. It was only a 20-minute drive and we'd passed it in the morning, but we had dogs then and couldn't stop.
What a museum! One of the best--maybe the best--I've ever seen. Geology, Paleontology, human history, Indians, Cowboys, an old-timey village (does every museum have to have one of those?) and on the top floor, an art gallery featuring paintings and sculpture donated by local people. A lot of it was from the early to mid 1800s, and most of its subject were people and scenes from the southern great plains. Lots of cowboys, Indians, buffalo.... Really great stuff, and I'm not even an art buff!
A few of the collections included modern nonsense (sorry, art buffs) and paintings of people of noo particular historical interest. But so much more was right on target.
But more important, the museum's historical animal and fossil exhibits were marvelous! You could spend a month in there learning about the area though the ages. All animal and plant fossils that were collected from the area, too. Sabre-toothed cats--mastodon--lots of early horses. Camels, a giant sloth--cool! I could go on and on.
It was probably allowed to take pictures, but I was so busy looking I didn't even think of it. And then there were a lot of exhibits on oil drilling, refining, and on windmills of the great plains. So much stuff!
Our feet and our brains were sore after a couple of hours. And back we returned.
Molly got a nice long walk when we returned, but then she got a scare. It's all my stupid fault and now I'm doomed. You see, we were really curious about how loud the show's lightning effect sounded back at the campground. So we wanted to be outside when it did. At about nine o'clock, I walked her over on the little trail until we could hear the music. It was a party scene, so I thought, "not yet." But then I heard thunder! Didn't low rumblings of thunder precede the effect?
So I texted Ed really quickly and started back. Just then I heard the choral music that I distinctly remembered--this was it! So I stopped to text him again and hurried away. But I'd only gotten halfway when it came! It scared Molly witless; plus, Ed missed it because he didn't get my texts.
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