Animals
For the first time since we've been living along this Creek, we spotted early one morning a porcupine. Then our neighbors upstream saw one on their game camera. Then September 20 I picked up this one, dead, a few hundred yards up the hillside on the county road where it had been hit by a vehicle in the night.
And then there are the animals we didn't see, but someone else probably saw. Like the animal that may have been brought down by a prehistoric hunter, maybe as far back as 800 BC or thereabouts. We dug up this atlatl spear point downstream, up on a high bank, about five inches deep in soil we've been excavating on the hunch that prehistoric people often camped along these spring-fed waters.
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| Late Archaic Castroville point from 2000-2800 years ago. |
The year 2021 was a tragic year for the sheep. Five have been killed by coyotes. We added barbed wires and electric wires to the fence, but coyotes kept climbing it. We finally took to penning them up in a small high-fence area and letting them out by day to eat.
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| September 21 (young ram) |
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| September 30 (young female lamb) |
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| Coyote |
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When a sycamore leaf is on a low branch,
beneath a perched vulture |
Below is a video of our honey bees drinking away at the sheep's water bucket. (One of the sheep in this movie is no longer with us.)
Plants
Mostly yellows and purples, this season.
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| Ironweed (genus Veronia) |
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| Larger Bur-Marigold (Bidens laevis, daisy family) |
These yellow ones next to the recently swollen Creek (big rains yesterday) join a small crowd of yellow flowers about the hills and within this little canyon. But this Bur-Marigold seems new to us. How can this be? For a decade now we've been living close to all the Creek life, and here is this bright yellow flower doing its thing unmistakably, without disguise, without excuse.
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Purple Bindweed, of the Morning Glory Family
(Convolvulaceae) |
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| Roosevelt Weed |
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| Spent buttonbush |
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Buttonbush, morning storm-flow,
sycamores, and Bur-marigold |
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| Curlycup Gumweed |
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| Sesbania pods held high |
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| Senna |
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Goldeneye (no plant quietly hangs with us all
year and then explodes the second week
of October like this humble friend) |
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| Same before it yellows out
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| Stonefield full of palofoxia |
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| Delicious |
Creek
Here's a slow version of the Creek on the morning of October 14.
And how dry the Creek got before rains the second week of October
.
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| September 20 |
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October 16, 7:00 p.m.
(Goldeneye across the Pond) |
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