SUN JULY 11, 2010 After The Rain

SUNDAY JULY 11, 2010 AFTER THE RAIN

After a couple of weeks of very hot weather with no rain a cold front came through on Friday evening and Saturday morning and provided some much needed rain. Sunday was a very comfortable high seventies low eightees on the mountain. There was no water running in the ditch through the lower parking lot but there was water in the Opferkessels on the summit

The next picture is a composite of three shots from the first false summit looking up the Ridge Trail and demonstrates I still have a lot to learn about photography.

Pipilo erythrophthalmus Eastern Towhee

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Eastern_Towhee/id

The Eastern Towhee is very common on Old Rag but they are hard to get a good glimpse of because they like to hang out in dense brush and are a little bit shy. They like to turn over the leaf litter looking for bugs. It is not unusual for them to make a lot of noise while doing this and many a time I have thought there must be a large animal over in some brush only to sneak up and see a Towhee busy at work earning a living. Unusually, the Towhee in the picture above was perched high out in the open and singing its lungs out.

With the sun going down so late in the day I have usually headed for home long before I can can enjoy a sunset this time of year. I decided it would be worth it to go ahead and stay to enjoy the sunset even though it would mean getting home after mdinight. Of course this also means that at least a part of the trip out on the fireroad will be in the deep dark. Fireflies, the eyeglow of spiders and the close acrobatic flybys of bats catching bugs attracted to my headlamp are just a few of the simple pleasures of a night time walk out on the fire roads in July.