Marvelous Rain

Great Rain overnight.. all night long.. mostly all been gentle.. and almost all has soaked deep into the dry ground.

I went to the Woods 8 AM to see what had happened. It was marvelous. Everything had changed overnight, the color of everything, the smells. There was actually a small amount of water in the West Pond maybe 20-30 gallons pooled up maybe an inch deep ..an area the size of 8 or 9 bathtubs. The East pond had the same amount but deeper.. actually registering 0.09 feet of water on the new staff gauge there.

The water in the Western wash was flowing well enough that some of it had begun to back up above the Beaver Dam, into the SW woods. There, near the old grandfather hollow cottonwood, I heard a puzzling and amusing thing, There was an approx. 40 cm DBH, middle age green ash tree near the moving front of the water, as water was slowly moving west across the floor of the woods. From the base of the tree there was a very audible gurgling sound.. like a soda straw sucking away at the last bit of a drink from a cup. I scooped away the leaves at the base of the tree and listened. It continued. I walked around the moving front of water. None of the other trees were making the sound. I listened for five minutes..then went on west across the west dune trail. I came back 15 minutes later and the tree was still gurgling just as audibly. Quite remarkable and puzzling.

A white-tail deer I encountered seemed interested I was there at that hour but not alarmed. She sat 50 feet away from me chewing her cud.. and didn't bother to stand and sprint away.

Two younger yearlings in the eastern woods dashed and sprinted along the steep slope of the escarpment and some squirrels scolded the disturbance.

The jelly ear fungi are rehydrated and looking full and fresh on the old ash snag east of the east pond.

Rain off and on most the afternoon. Now with the rain clearing off to the east tonight we've had a total of 385 hundredths.