As the years-long drought in Texas subsides, I feel this would be a good time to remind everyone that water is not only precious, but scarce.

Indeed, Africa is seeing some of the worst droughts in recorded history. Drought doesn't only affect humanity, afflicting us with thirst, famine, and war, but wildlife too. And while the famine in Somalia (not directly water-related, but...) has been declared "over", countries like Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone face dismal prospects for the near future.

. . . my Texas only bird count for 2012 is now up to 57!

We took the kids down to the national park today. It was as splendid as ever, if seriously drought stressed, more so than I have ever seen. Funny thing about the desert: if you'd never seen it before you probably wouldn't know it was drought stressed, but if, like me, you have, you'd notice the difference.

Regardless, it was a fantastic day. The series today starts here. The full series is here.

Enjoy!

We visited Marfa and the surrounding area today. We are off to Big Bend National Park tomorrow, which will be an all day trip, posting tomorrow is doubtful.

Today's photos, about 50, begin here. The full set can be found here.

Also, for those of you who have asked to see a photo of The Brunette, there is one available on my Facebook page.

Enjoy!

I had a great day with The Brunette and her kids. We spent the day in the Fort Davis Mountains. We'll do a Star Party at the McDonald Observatory tomorrow night.

There are close to 100 photos. The full set can be found here and the beginning photo starts here.

Enjoy!

The Brunette and I are taking the kids to West Texas this morning.

There have been lots of bear sightings in the Big Bend country this year, hopefully we'll get to see one!

From the front lines of 'deregulation:'

In separate reports released days apart, both organizations determined that Texas will soon have an inadequate supply of backup power during periods of peak demand. The shrinking power reserves increase the chances of rolling blackouts if a major power plant goes offline on a very hot or cold day, when power use is greatest.

So, how high will prices go?

And just in case prices don't go up quick enough, ERCOT and the Texas Public Utility Commission are exploring several "radical changes" to jack up prices during times when power is really tight. For example, the PUC is considering doubling the cap on prices in the wholesale spot market — already the most generous in the nation — from $3,000 per megawatt to $6,000. ERCOT is also looking at allowing prices to go higher in a secondary market used to balance supply and demand. The chairman of the Public Utility Commission, Kenneth Anderson, a Perry appointee, is driving many of the changes.

Passed on without further comment.

This 4-minute video features the work of the official Texas State Photographer. Isn’t it refreshing to find a ‘State Photographer’ that does something besides follow the Governor around for photo ops?!

Wyman graduated from Texas Tech. When he graduated, he moved back to a ranch near Benjamin so he could begin his photography.

He lived in a dugout for a few months, to be in the middle of the roadrunners, coyotes, and snakes. His work is wonderful.

Whether or not you're from Texas, or just love the outdoors and wild life and fine photography, this will stir your heart!

Be sure to turn on your speakers.

Watch it here.

. . . my Pastafarian car license plate? The links tells the story of Texas' new law allowing a religious license plate, in case you're wondering what blind link i am sending you to this time!

. . . (un)intentional dog-whistles!

. . . of the immense groundwater depletion that has occurred in Texas over the last twelve months. Yes, we've gotten a little rain in the last few weeks, but no where near enough.

Drought has interesting and sometimes useful side effects.

. . . 1% moves in to small town Texas? One thing the writer of this otherwise excellent story fails to note in the differences between Langtry and Marfa is the sky: in Marfa it is one of those big Western skies where forever is the horizon. In Langtry it is very, very different.

Well, Rick Perry said he "felt great" when he gave the already infamous Cornerstone Action speech over the weekend.

Psychoactive drugs can do that.

Errrr, so I've heard.

Seriously, if your excuse for putting on that kind of performance is simply that you "feel great," this raises all kinds of questions about your emotional and mental state.

More important, do they care?

A group of leaders from Houston is taking a stand against a proposed Confederate flag license plate for Texas.
“The Confederate flag is a symbol of oppression,” said Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. “The brutality of slavery and it is a symbol of fear and intimidation.”

The specialty plate is sponsored by Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson on behalf of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

“They make it sound as if there’s some brazen banner on the plate,” said member Frank Johnson. “It’s a three by three logo. It’s not the battle flag! It’s the Sons of Confederate Veterans logo.”

The Brunette and I took a Sunday drive today out to the Post Oak prairieland east of Austin.

We saw some cool birds, like the juvenile Crested Caracara, Northern Flicker and an Eastern Bluebird. We then drove through Bastrop following the Old Camino Real, where we got some shots of the fire damage that raged through the area last month. We also some took photos in an old tractor graveyard and got a tour from the man who owns the land and restores them, including a rare fully restored 1940 John Deere. The full set can be found here.

Enjoy!

At 12:24 UTC there was an earthquake in South Texas. Here is the location on googlemaps.

Was it due to fracking? Fracking has been proven, in multiple cases, to cause quakes. But we don't know yet the cause of this one. The quake is in the vicinity of the Balcones Fault, but there is also a great deal of fracking in this area: see this photoset (start at this photo and move forward) of mine taken just outside of Karnes City and Kenedy, Texas.

Whatever the cause, ask yourself what kind of unseen damage it takes to create an earthquake? Is it worth it?

This is huge. For a large metropolitan area like Austin to impose such restrictions is drastic, to say the least. But the spillover effects will be no less disastrous: the (permanent?) loss of vegetation and its follow on effects, the dust, the loss of businesses and manufacturing that need water security. I remember several years ago when USAA threatened to leave San Antonio, where it is headquartered, if they did not lock down their water supply for at least forty years. San Antonio did this by going out and buying a lot of water from the LCRA, which just happens to provide Austin will all its water. These are costs people rarely take into consideration..

And in the meantime the wealthy water hogs in Austin continue to water their yards. See this for a non-wealthy yard and this from a rich street in Austin for comparison.

The bird migrations this year tell me one thing in particular: we're in for a very screwed up winter down here in Texas. First, the warblers came early and have by and large lingered long. Northwest Park in Austin, where I walk many mornings during the week, is not known as a migrant trap. But many of the original migrants this year have set up camp there. Plus, there have been warbler sightings all across Texas that are very uncommon, birds have popped up in places like Houston and Austin that have no business being there. Palm Warblers in Austin and multiple sightings of Black-throated Blue Warblers in Houston (a bird that has no business ever being this far West). Several Hutton's Vireos spotted outside San Antonio--another rarity. I, myself, even spotted a Black-headed Grosbeak in Central Austin, which is a rarity inside the city, just two weeks ago.

The sparrows showed up two weeks early and in force. We've a huge group in the backyard--close to thirty that are competing with the over abundant White-winged Dove and Blue Jays. I've watched three and four sparrows at a time harry the Blue Jays away from food--and Jays are not unaggressive birds. Now, Jays are great mimics of raptors (and I've watched them run off Red-tailed Hawks from the big Oak Tree in the backyard twice). There is now one Jay--the alpha of a gang of eight--who will fly in from afar, perch high up in the Oak Tree like a raptor and mimic him, scaring off all the sparrows and dove. All of these are behaviors that are no doubt drought induced.

Other species of sparrows--White-throated Sparrows especially--have arrived very early as well, usually flying into the area in November. Flickers have pushed in to the areas around Austin early too, more highly unusual behavior. Juncos are in Central Texas and along the coast. We rarely get Scrub Jays in Austin but there have been multiple sightings of them around town and in local parks, and Scrub Jays compete directly with local Blue Jays.

Now, this may mean nothing to you. But birds and their behaviors do foreshadow environmental events. The general consensus is that early migrations portend a veery cold and very dry winter, which syncs with the La Nina conditions we're still enduring. Just consider this another bit of anecdotal evidence that weather patterns are seriously amiss.

We're are, however, so divorced from the behavior of our animal neighbors presently that we no longer notice what they are telling us.

We had ninety 100* plus days this year in Austin. That's three solid months of 100* plus weather. The record of the year (and for all time) I believe was 115*.

This summer in Texas was the hottest in the country's history, according to the National Weather Service. As of Sept. 30, Austin has recorded 90 days of 100-degree temperatures this year, obliterating the old record of 69 days set in 1925.

Just ponder that for a moment and then realize that we had only 6.53 inches of rain over a twelve month period.

Texas also saw its lowest year-to-date precipitation record smashed, with only 6.53 inches in the last seven months. The previous record, 9.36 inches, was set in 1917.

Combine the record heat with record aridity and this is what you get. Farmers can't get crops to local markets because they don't have any crops and local soils may have irrevocably changed. Worst, it looks like we've got another year of this, at least.

Count me among those who are very surprised at the swift collapse of Rick Perry's 2012 presidential bid. Can he come back? Maybe, but I doubt it. He's always been a mediocre debater and last night was a perfect example. Was it the extremist rhetoric? Memories of the Bush hangover? Or an attack from the right on the more sensible aspects of his record, like the HPV vaccine and immigration? Or was it an uncommon bout of common sense among Republican primary obsessive-types? I'd have to say it was a little of all of the above. Regardless, it's a very welcome sight. Apparently Rick Perry has been unmasked as the vacuous, self-serving politician that he is. All that being said: I would not be surprised to see a Romney-Perry ticket: two candidates with excellent hair would be a formidable challenge to Kenyan-Muslim-Socialist, which should terrify us all.

Once again this past few weeks, the ongoing education debate in the United States occupied the headlines, bylines and cable news scrolls. NBC launched its second annual "Education Nation Summit", billed as a way "to engage the country in a solutions-focused conversation about the state of education in America".

Meanwhile, President Obama, approaching warp speed on the campaign trail to try to convince us he's actually the transformational guy from 2008 - as opposed to the chary chap we've found running our country since - made a fresh pitch in his weekly radio address for his version of education reform. Obama tied it to the economic future of our country, and discussed waivers to allow states to opt out of provisions of his predecessor's much-maligned legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act.

The weekend brought rain area-wide, two inches, mas o menos, of the slow soaking variety.

We planted 160 acres of oats and overseeded 160 acres of hay fields with winter rye just before the event. I know a few others that took the same chance and I bet they're glad they did.

I can't tell you how nice it was to see trees on the verge of death get a drink. I'm sure it's too late for some, but others will live to see another day, good Lord willing.

It's too late to make hay but the remaining cattle in our region should have green pickings for a while.

Pecan harvest draws near. The crop is small, but the nuts we do have appear sound. I suspect they will be expensive this year due to short supply.

The continuing slow motion disaster that is the Great Drouth of 2011 is concentrating the minds of many people in Texas (and Oklahoma, where it is just as severe) and forcing people many to make the connection between climate change and drought. The second paragraph is really one huge question:

“In serious drought conditions, Texas does not and will not have enough water to meet the needs of its people, its businesses, and its agricultural enterprises.”

Let's rephrase this: what's the order of priorities? Food? Sanitation? Business needs? If you don't eat, you don't live. But you also die a lot faster from lack of water than lack of food. Then again, we've not had a lot of waterborne diseases in the US primarily due to sanitation. Sanitation equals water, plain and simple. But essential chemicals used for sanitation are created by the petrochemical complex on the Texas coasts that is a freshwater hog. And then there is fracking. Toss into this mix Texas' water laws, which are bizarre and you have a gordian knot of interests and priorities.

This may seem a rather peaceful, edenic-looking photo. Trust me, it's not. This pond is withering away rapidly. I've never seen it this low my entire life. It's easily three or four times lower than it should be. It's highly saline and the spoonbill feeding in it is a stressed animal, which should normally have a relatively different color set this time of year, a brighter, almost magenta hue to it's pinkish wings.

This is going on all around the Coastal Bend this year. Salt levels are three hundred percent higher than normal in the bays (think of them as giant estuaries). Blue crab populations are collapsing. Oyster catches are falling and on and on. A large fight is shaping up between environmentalist and chemical companies. There is so little fresh water flowing into the bays--much of it being used for fracking, refining and very necessary agriculture upriver that the survival in the wild of the last flock of Whooping Cranes is once again being called into question.

In an average year a visitor should see at least twenty to thirty different species of birds in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. I was exceptionally lucky to have seen only ten. There should be kites and kestrels and caracaras all along the roads, perched on the telephone poles hawking field animals running around in the cotton fields. But not this year. Cotton yields on the Coastal Bend are well below normal and the crop was harvested a month early. There should be swarms of orioles, both Bullock's and Baltimores in the trees eating the abundant early fall berries. There should be herons and egrets and pipers and all other manner of shore birds. There should be warblers galore: Nashville Warblers, Prothonotary Warblers, Black-and-Whites, Canadians etc. . There were few, if any.

Of course, one benefit to the deep plowing farmers are doing (they plow and turn over the soil deeply to catch the meager rains when they come) are the bugs which leads to a lot of flycatchers. But other than that? Nothing. What happens once all those bugs have been eaten?

Destroy the bottom of the foodchain and you also destroy the top of it.

Cattlemen in the Coastal Bend are deeply culling their herds. We saw few cattle and the ones we did were drought stressed, thin and the absence of cattle egrets was palpable. The drive from Rockport to the Refuge was a surreal concatenation of dried marshes, brown reeds and bone dry creek beds, normally full of water and meandering languidly down to the bays. Sure, it was humid. But it was also 104* degrees there Sunday. That's simply too hot this time of year, with a strong wind coming in from the Gulf every gets dried out even more. Everything is dying.

I was in no way prepared for what I saw down there this year. It was brutal and gut wrenching.

What few photos I managed to take can be found here.