Rain Returns

Easter Morning and we awoke with light rain falling.. a miracle of sorts.. after weeks and weeks of drought. The rain gathered and grew heavy at times .. two and a half inches altogether in the day. At five I ducked quickly in the SW Gate to see what it had done in the Woods. Three white tailed deer were in the west side forest near Chautauqua.. looked like young deer. The Auricularia fungi were thick, heavy and fleshy on the hackberry down a short ways in from the gate. The Woods had a wonderful smell of fresh damped leaves as all the soil microbes returned to life by the rain were busy decomposing dead leaves and producing wonderful earth smells. The path was clear almost to Dragonfly corner where there was standing water moving my way. I walked on, in shallow water east until it became too deep. The whole drainage along the main SW Trail was filled with water flowing west from across the Beaver Dam.. flood waters from the Lloyd Noble parking area.. but the water was not red clay colored from the trash transfer site construction. It was turbid but only reasonably so.. mostly clean water moving across the forest floor. Looking out over the slowing filling/ flooding Woods I thought again of the huge change for soil organisms: millipedes, snails, ants, centipedes, ground beetles, earthworms, mites, soil micro-arthropods of all sorts.. and the change for the trees, going from mild drought stress to perhaps some weeks of drowned roots. It will be interesting to see how long the water stays and how deep and wide it is. I should go and check the culvert on the south side and be sure it is not blocked.
I walked across the West Dune trail to near the Grandfather Cottonwood and saw the Woods and the stands of green ash there north filled with water. The trail back along the South Boundary was clear and good walking on my way out..