Spring is Sprung

The old saw about "Spring is sprung, Fall has fell, Summer's here, and it's hotter'n ...." is not true now, for sure, but it is indeed starting to be true.  At least the part about Spring, springing.

The first harbinger of a change that I saw was the rate at which my Hummingbird feeders are being emptied.

Five of the six feeders hanging on my front porch.

During the late summer, we have 75-100 birds coming and going all during the daylight hours, especially during the very early and last-light times.  But during the winter months, I have taken down two feeders, until that slows down, and then removed two more, leaving only a basic two feeders for the mid-winter months.

This year, I cut down to four hanging feeders, but never went lower.  In November and December I would fill them about every third or fourth day.  But in late December, and especially during January, the activity level picked up, at first slowly, but still increasing.

But about mid-January, the feeding frenzy in the early and late hours has become frenetic again.  I am now filling all four feeders every other day, to stay up with them.  I think it is a bit early to put up the final two feeders, but that time is surely not far away.

Morning feeding time.

In this forum, I have talked about things I observed in the surrounding Nature, and reported them to you. This increase in Hummingbird activity was quite expected, but not until now, maybe even another couple of weeks, before we began to see an upswing in activity.

So I am wondering if that 13.30 inches of rain we got a month ago was not only the high point in winter storms, but may have also been the last shot out of the cannon.  We have seen this happen in years before, as the winter rains quit early, but it means for a somewhat shorter grass year, too.  The final flush of growth on our hillsides depend on a good drink of water sometime in late-February and hopefully a little more in March.

But, that time is still a ways off, and we could still get a good rain.  Nothing is drying out around the ranch yet, as every possible niche is either oozing water, or only now beginning to stop leaking.  So the ground is wet, and the grass is feeding on it.

Above the fog level, here in the foothills above Lake Success, the sunshine is delightful.   It is beginning to warm up during the middle of the day now, and that will certainly put the plants into a growth burst.

Speaking of fog ... which nobody likes to drive in ... many folks commented on the "smell" of the fog Wednesday evening.

About 4:30 that afternoon the evening fog came swirling in with a vengeance.  I stepped outside the building on Olive, just west of the PHS, and was startled as I smelled smoke.  Then I realized it wasn't smoke, like from a burning fire, but smelled more like a fireplace.  

I puzzled on that one a bit, wondering why we suddenly had early and thick fog, as it has been a little less aggressive.  Then I realized an old science fact, and it began to make sense.

Fog is nothing but a high level of humidity floating along.  When something solid gets in the way, a small bit of that humidity attaches to the tiny piece of something and becomes a floating water droplet.  The smoke from the Main Street fire during the morning hours threw a large quantity of smoke in the atmosphere.  And smoke is nothing more than a plethora of tiny particles of carbon and other chemical compounds, floating away from the fire.

So when the sun went down, and the air began to cool, the humidity found the smoke, and bingo ... we had a thick, aggressively-formed fog bank.  Granted, we had fog that morning, but it wasn't nearly as thick, and only formed during the late-night hours.

Spring is fencing time in the ranching country, as the ground is wet and much better for digging than during the summer months.  The weather is more comfortable too.  My neighbor, Rusty Hunter, and I are replacing a fence between us, renewing the entire thing.  The only way to fix this one was to tear it all down and start new.  The new posts on the ends are in, and the first wire will soon be strung to define the line where the two or three wood posts in between will be placed.  We'll both be glad to get this one finished, and get the cattle back in that pasture.