Hello to All:
It has been a quiet week out here. There were a couple of days that we nearly received the full force of a big storm system. In the end, we missed the torrential rain, damaging wind and hail. We are thankful for about 1 ½” rain for two days. That perked the weeds up pretty good. A day or so later I went out and tried to get some mowing done and the gnats and mosquitoes nearly made me slap my ears off trying to shoo them off. I remembered a neat item that I bought a couple of years ago, a net that goes over your head and you can tuck it in around the neck of the shirt. That was a life saver.
We did have a near miss at the local post office. Lightning struck the flag pole. It blasted the ground out around the base where the pole goes in the ground. The good luck was it missed the building by about 3 foot. That flag pole saved our post office. I am not sure that the pulley and other parts still work or not. I think they got welded to the pole.
The little chimney swifts are back. They are using the same two nests year after year. I can see 6 or 7 adults flying around taking turns catching insects and taking turns coming to the nest to feed the babies. I can see three chicks in one nest and don’t really have a good view of the other one but judging from the activity there will be 3 or 4 in that one. I like them. They are mosquito eating machines. Well, any insect that flies around. I was told that when you see the adults flying along and suddenly make a dip, they just caught a flying bug of some kind. I also saw our local lizard out. I looked them up one time and they were called a skink and usually found in water ponds. They are also bug eating specialist. They must have gotten lost somewhere along the line as there isn’t any kind of a pond near here. I noticed that the roadrunner catches and eats small lizards but they leave the larger skinks alone. They are a good foot long plus a long tail. My two cats just watch.
So it goes in our quiet little corner of Coleman County.
Talpa Bob
