Wet Woods and Snail Seed

The rains returned last night after a dry fall and many weeks of waiting.  Mesonet says 0.94 inches, just .03 less than the precip in my backyard. It began quietly at 2 am and then good heavy thunderstorm rain intermittent between 3 and 7 am. I parked at the NW Gate at 9:45 and walked in to see what the storm had changed. Beautiful Woods with 90% of the canopy leaves suddenly down.. bright yellows, brown and red. Last week 80% of canopy leaves were still up. The West Pond had hundreds of liters of light mocha brown turbid water.. up to the 2 inch mark on the post. (Oddly, a few bathtubs' worth of water appeared yesterday in the West Pond before the rain, after weeks of being completely dry.. not sure why water would be seeping up in the middle after no rain.) The East Pond is still empty. The West Wash was filled up to 36 inches deep at the post and flowing out across the Woods below the Elm Bridge.. just touching the bottom of the bridge. At the Beaver Dam, water was flowing well westward up to the SW 8 post. The Ragweed Delta was flooded with water flowing in on the east side and building westward.

I found 9 new Coprinus inky caps pushing their way up through the leaves fifty feet NNW  from the Beaver Dam.. and one beginning deliquescence SW of the post in the West Wash.
The Vespula yellowjackets were surprisingly busy, foraging in and out from their ground burrow. I watched through binoculars 3-4 meters away as an opilone daddy long legs walked and blundered within 2-3 inches of the entrance. I saw a wasp slowly descend towards the opilone and both disappeared then into the fallen leaves.
There were at least four whitetailed deer that scattered and bounded away south from the Northern Loop area east of the pond.. including one young buck with nice antlers.
Many more squirrels than I normally see, 8 or 9 foraging. Several crows were raucously calling overhead and mixed flocks of passerines, chickadees, sparrows, miscellaneous others were busy in the big trees east of the Elm Bridge. They all probably sense the cold is coming.
Here and there through the Woods, bright red clusters of color stand out, the berries of Cocculus snail seed.