Deer Canyon Folks.org

Cloudy today, with about 0.2 inches of rain this morning, which came down gently over 3 hours or so. A good soaking kind of rain, no runoff here. The grasses should be liking that!

but not necessarily at yours! Actually, I'm writing about yesterday, when we had an intense mid-afternoon thunderstorm that dumped 1.35 inches of rain on us in just over half an hour. (That included hail, by the way, and we found a little chunk of ice made up of hailstones nestled next to one of our rain barrels this morning: snow in July!)

But Alan just learned from one of our neighbors, who lives maybe a mile from us, that he didn't have any rain at all! So all my rain gauge totals could be pretty irrelevant everywhere but our front yard. I knew that rainfall around here is very localized, but I didn't know it was that localized! This storm that hit our house yesterday seemed like it was inundating the world. The arroyos just east of our house were full to overflowing; half an hour after the strong part of the storm ended, Alan & I were out admiring the waterfalls in our nearest arroyo, just 30 feet or so from our back deck.

So, more irrelevant numbers: we also got another 0.05 inch of rain in the very late afternoon yesterday, and there were two other days since my last post when we got that amount; so since about Wednesday, Happy Camp has received 1.5 inches of rain. Your location may have received more, or less, or none. 

Today we have clouded up again, and at 2:45 pm it's only 76°. Humidity's not too bad: a comfortable 51%.

By the way, we're seeing some kind of yellow bird pretty frequently. The male is pretty much overall yellow, just slightly olive-tinged on its back, but pretty bright nonetheless; and the female is more olive above, with yellow below. Haven't identified them yet; we'd start with yellow warbler or orange-crowned warbler, BUT these birds are way too big for warblers. I'd guess they're in the 9 inch range, rather than the 5" size of the warblers. Any ideas out there? 

But not raining as much, and we actually had bits of blue sky today. Thursday's total was just over 1/4 inch, and it rained a little yesterday but not enough for me to get an amount from.  Then this morning we had a downpour for a while, and garnered another 0.15 inch.

The fledged phoebes have been returning to our house each night this week, perching on lights and open windows and insisting that mama phoebe come feed them. We don't remember the younguns hanging around this long last year and have been wondering if it has something to do with the cool temperatures and wet weather. We certainly are not seeing as many flying insects right now as we were a couple of weeks ago, so maybe it's just harder for the fledglings to become skilled hunters. We like seeing them around, though, and have been trying to be careful not to scare them off their perches once the sun goes down.