IT RAINED!

 

It cooled down last week and — best of all — IT RAINED!  

 

As everyone already knows, we are not fans of gray, drizzly weather.   But Oregon and the Pacific Northwest need rain so badly this year that we've been out doing our rain dance along with everyone else.

So we were delighted to see the storm clouds moving in  and especially delighted when they actually produced some rain.  (Probably not nearly enough — but a start.) 

Birds always seem to be more active just before it rains and here some of the usual suspects from the week's walks.   

 

 

Scrub Jays are common here, but I never get tired of them.   They are rare in Florida and people there get very excited to spot one.    

 

 

Wild Turkeys are thriving in this area.  I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that it has been so much dryer in the past couple of years.   We've seen a few every summer we've visited here.   Now we see large flocks almost every day and our daughter and son-in-law have three flocks in their neighborhood on the other side of the Lake.

 

 

Here's a little  spotted towhee perched on "our" blackberry bushes.   It has been such an odd summer.   The berries usually are their best in late August-early September.   But this year, they are already dried up.  We started picking them early in July. 

 

 It's too bad that the kind of rain we had this week isn't really enough.  The area really needs some of those long, gray, all-day-long steady rains that we got so tired of back when we lived and worked here.   But the rain this week was so easy to take — it let up often enough that we could go outside without getting soaked.  And the light was beautiful — this storm cloud turned the fading sun into pale gold.    

 

SHARING this week with OUR WORLD on Tuesday;  with NATURE NOTES; with WILD BIRD WEDNESDAY;  and with next Saturday's RATHER B' BIRDING