Water and Boats

Out to the Canadian this Saturday morning at 8.. pretty quiet. The river flow is down enough to expose some sand bars but it is still about a foot too deep to shrink to main channel and shallow slow side channels or backwaters. Lot of water flowing. I did not see the great blue. There were a couple of kingfishers, some swallows up by the power lines, a couple of doves, a green heron fishing from the low hanging willow, a couple of cattle egrets. Lots of robust Grindelia gumweeds along the jeep road.. also Chaemaecrista partridge pea and white Chamaesaracha (looks sort of like a white solanum). Watched a dark red brown Polistes wasp struggling with a heavy green caterpillar it had killed. It was trying to climb a sunflower and gain a launch pad, but its load was too large and awkward.
  No snakes or turtles.. one large white-tailed doe in broad day light standing exploring a sandbar closer to the interstate bridge. It frequently looked up at the bridge with the truck traffic passing along. Wonder what it was thinking.
  Getting ready to leave when I heard a familiar roar from long ago in the Everglades and to my astonishment saw this approaching and then passing by with a wave. What would Dr Seuss say?

Turkeys to greet me

As I approached the head of the short path down to the river, I glimpsed a large mottled brown animal disappearing beyond some willow. Thinking it was likely a feral cat, I was surprised & delighted to round the bend and see two large brown turkeys standing in the shade. They moved off a few paces slowly and then began to trot away down the sandy road southeastward. I stepped onto the path and a few paces through the tangle of amaranths, willow,  ragweed, pokeweed and broken dead juniper branches, I stepped out onto the sloping sand levee of the river. By the brown churning turbid water, I saw the back of a tall great blue heron. It stayed just a moment and then flew off as a cattle egret was flying by downstream.

The water had receded enough to reveal a narrow sandbar where the heron had stood.. but the river was still high and deep and fast enough to be risky walking.  The moving sand made shallow 'quicksand' where the sand bars were shifting. The previous broad sand bars, barriers and winding channels have all been reconfigured by the continuing flood and high water. I headed upstream and enjoyed a few of the mudflats on the east shore but there was not much there. Corixids present in the tens and hundreds of thousands last year and the year before in the shallows were hard to find. Only one small pocket of minnows. A few bronze Bembidion beetles on one portion of sand. All the life was likely still there..just dispersed.. or maybe waiting to burst into rapid growth and reproduction when water levels fall a bit more and the warm side pools become freshwater estuaries for life.

On the jeep trail heading back: Oenothera evening primrose, Heterotheca, Chamaecrista partridge pea, Solanum/ Nicotiana (white) all in abundant bloom along the northeast bank and sandy road. The number of pollinators is picking up.. skipper, blue, syrphid, a bumblebee, lots of halictids. Tamarisk is still in bloom. One kite overhead and a few flycatchers across the river.. nice morning but exploration still limited by high water.

Flooded River

After yesterday's dawn flash flood, I went to the river at 7 this beautiful morning to see what the rains had done. I made it down the trail just as far as the first glimpse of the river. It was running high and fast with red brown flood water. I waded into the shallows but retreated from the deeper water. No river walk today. On my retreat, I saw the tracks of muskrat, otter or coon (i.e. I don't know) on the fresh sand washed out along the ditch parallel to the lower trail.

Several More River Walks

[From July 2012]

Like a frog slowly being boiled this past ten days we've had highs solidly above 100F..but I am starting to not mind so much. I just slow down and take it easy.. and get out early to enjoy the morning down by the river. Two days ago Thursday there was a large much anticipated rain storm - that just missed us.. rained east and south - a good bit. The river flow has been gradually decreasing and now with the warm temperatures and the 50+ days of no rain this river band of abundant life will begin to turn into a zone of death. But Saturday morning it was delightful as I stepped out to the river floodplain. I walked southeast this time and took the short path through the brushy willows and Arundo cane. Odd guttation from the leaves got me wet walking through the foliage despite the hot dry previous days. I wonder what makes for abundant guttation here. I did not expect.

Walking east toward the sun along the river sand bar and in the water.. much to see. I began recording GPS coordinates so I could watch and see if populations of surface dwelling aquatic insects like gyrinids tended to be found in the same location each day.

In the still well flowing river, a population of corixids gather around the white lid of a water bottle. crunched and coated with algae. Corixids must have it good.. lot of vegetation to eat and few predators on them. Why do they gather here? Is there some social value.. maybe some protection..?

A New River and a Beaver's Front Yard

I stepped into a new river, morning of fourth of July 2013.

In 2012 I had gotten to know riverside landmarks along this section of the S. Canadian: tilted willows, muskrat ponds, deep pools, kingfisher perches, bank side debris. High water of spring and early summer 2013 re-contoured banks, obliterated the muskrat backwater and removed the leaning willow where gyrinid whirligig beetles gathered. Old familiar landmarks were mostly gone.
I wanted to see what there was to see.

My welcome was the call of the kingfisher flying along the river... followed by a pair of green-backed herons I surprised as they were starting to land on the river bank below the sandy levee where I stood.. until they saw me just above them, did an aerial 180 turn and headed back across the river. I watched a youngish yellow & black water snake in shallow water (1 foot depth), quickly head for the steep bank.. try to climb the slippery side, then turn and come towards my ankles, then turn again & head down river. A young small garter snake in a good slimy side pool zoomed away swimming ten feet from me - keeping its small black head high up above the algae and froth like a periscope. A family of four eastern kingbirds gathered in the dead branches of an elm on the opposite bank.. spying the land and looking for breakfast on the wing. 

The sandy broad bed of the river is quite a banquet breakfast with all sorts of things to eat and things eating.  Fast moving small Bembidion ground beetles, shining bronze glinting light are everywhere along the wet river edge. In shade of reeds long the northwestern bank there were schools of black, elliptical gyrinid whirligig beetles. In the sun on the flat sandbars & along the river edge small shallow 3 inch deep pools hold trapped minnows by the thousands waiting for slow drying of their pools and death. Nocturnal foraging raccoons gather dinner there, leaving their tracks. Cattle egrets with their bright yellow feet and black legs love these shallow pools.. eating there is like shooting fish in a barrel. Trapped minnows are Nature rolling the dice. In the small pools they escape predation from larger fish, can find abundant food and can grow quickly in warmer water. If thunderstorm rains come then and wash them into the main channel, they win. If rains do not come, the small pools dry and they lose.

The largest snake I saw was a big fat well-fed water snake sunning itself on a bed box frame washed up along the river bank above a deeper pool. I splashed water on in it to see it move and slip into a darker hiding place.

There was one - just one Mississippi kite circling overhead. Last year, the weather brought down 10-20 to this part of the river. Lower down over the eastern wooded river bank a lone turkey vulture was soaring, looking for food.

I walked down a mile to the inflow of Inhoffe creek.. closed in with tall reeds overhead and young willows almost touching across the narrow, shaded, cooler and deeper small creek. Very little flow but enough good water depth to provide a highway for muskrats commuting in the stream 50-100 feet away from the river to small burrows in the thick impenetrable stand of reed. Lots of cool insects along the river: tiger beetles mottled wine red and bone white.. fast running and flying chasing the small flies and other insects along the water's edge. At the mouth of the creek there was a young turtle in the water, a red-eared slider the size of a silver dollar. Up on the dry sandy levee above it I surprised an old 3-toed box turtle with its back to me grazing happily on some polygonum until I came around front into its view. Then it froze. I stayed a good 6 feet away so it did not retreat into its shell but stood there, staring at me with its yellow green face looking as if it was willing me not to notice it.

There were tracks there.. some I think were otter from nocturnal runs along the river. There were batches of white turtle shell egg cases that looked like some had been dug out and eaten and others had survived to hatch. 

By the box turtle there was a small wetter depression of soil with a good population of white flowered saggitaria.. bright and colorful with fresh large arrowhead leaves.. also stands of 4 foot high Oenothera evening primrose were full of yellow flowers and invasive Tamarix salt cedar shrubs were blooming pink. There were young white toads hopping along the white sand,  green & brown leopard frogs in the water along the shaded river's edge, and small quarter sized red brown clay colored young frogs hopping away from their birth ponds.

Lots more.. swallows zooming around and feeding under the bridge, dragonflies and damselflies, dark green and black Gomphus clubtails or bright sky blue Enallagma damsels, 100's of thousands of small young corixid water boatmen feeding on any submerged plant or plant debris, a nice big black bull snake disappearing into tall johnson grass off a dusty road, aerial duels between agile predatory robber flies and predatory dragonflies attempting to defend the same patch.

This Sunday morning a new highlight was a face to face encounter with a beaver. I was scanning the bank under a cut older willow tree when I saw the glint of the eye of a beaver facing me 15 feet away. It watched me for a moment or two, then slipped fully out of its burrow under the willow and disappeared into deeper darker water. On the adjacent sandbar I found fresh cut willow stubs and tracks where branches were dragged across the sand to the water. 

As I was getting ready to leave I saw another kingfisher dive to the water.. and right beside it a flycatcher did the same (great crested?). I watched the flycatcher when it flew up to its perch in the top branches of a dead cottowood, and saw it repeat its dive. I think it probably was not going for fish, but may have been picking Polistes wasps or other insects off the water surface. The Polistes come to drink and float along on their tarsi with no trouble. But I also found a pretty grey and gold Ctenucha moth trapped in the water surface. I netted it and left it on some sunny leaves to dry. 

More..  a couple of flickers chasing around a big cottonwood, velvet ant rust red trundling along the hot sandy jeep road, sphecid digger wasps digging for prey in the loose hot sand like insect dogs - sand flying out between their back legs, white flowers of Cephalanthus button bush, small mysterious tumuli of fresh diggings in moist silty sand - with no one underneath, crayfish skeletons and bits here and there and one good large live one.