Cap'n Bob & the Damsel

Environment

Cactus Rescue

Cactus Rescue

The house being built to the east of us had a back hoe come and dig trenches on the hillside down the road from us for underground utilities. In the process, the numbnuts operating the machinery managed to trash much of the natural vegetation growing beside the road.

Most of the compromised plant life wouldn’t matter since it was scrub creosote and other brush that will be back with a vengeance. However, there was a hedgehog cactus cluster almost completely covered with the earth piled alongside the trench.

Damsel and I went down the road with the wheelbarrow and dug several lobes of the buried cactus out. Some of it was destroyed to the point of not being able to recover, but we rescued about six viable lobes, three of which we put in our rock and cactus garden seen in the image above. We put the other three lobes in pots pending finding another place for them.

Several of the lobes have flower pods growing on them. We’re hoping that the flowers still bloom despite the incident. Damsel will post a lot of flower pix this spring, so we’ll make a special note when a flower is from one of the rescued hedgehogs. Click on the image to enlarge.

13 Mar 2015 by Arizona Environment Home & Garden

Lurking in the Rosemary

Lurking in the Rosemary

After all those years of enjoying the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote Looney Tunes cartoons from Warner Brothers, it’s hard to think of the poor roadrunner as predator rather than prey (roadrunners are both, actually). You expect it to go ‘meep meep,” when actually the roadrunner has a slow and descending dove-like “coo”. It also makes a rapid, vocalized clattering sound with its beak.

Having watched our roadrunners (ours because living on or near our lot) for the past several years, it is clear that they are predators. They lurk near the finch feeders to try and catch an unwary goldfinch eating thistle seeds. We have not actually witnessed them catching a bird but we have seen them lie very still then leap and miss. We have seen them carrying prey in their beaks, probably small reptiles, as they scurry off to consume their catch.

I photographed this bird lurking in the rosemary ground cover near the feeders behind the RV drive in the late afternoon. Click on the image to enlarge.

10 Mar 2015 by Arizona Critters Environment Photography

Spring Poppy

Spring Poppy

The Town of Wickenburg posted on their social media page about all the spring wildflowers that are popping up after the recent rainfall. On our weekly trip to the supermarket today, we could see lots of flowers along the roadway as we drove. There were desert marigolds, orange mallow and lots of poppies. I got out of the truck just up the road from our house and took this photo of a poppy. Very pretty! Click on the image to enlarge.

05 Mar 2015 by Arizona Environment Flowers Photography

After the Rain

Thrasher Beavertail BudHedgehog BudsLots of Buds

I climbed up on the hill out back to replace the bird seed bell and block that would usually be up there; since the rain mostly abated today, I was able to go up and do the replacement. After I finished, the first customer impatiently waited on a cholla cactus about 20 feet away from where I was. I took this photo of the curve billed thrasher using the Canon SL1 and 300mm telephoto lens.

A little later, I went out front where Damsel has a few cacti growing in the landscape rock garden. It would seem that we’re going to have a lot of pink and purple flowers soon. Left to right in the lower panel above: beavertail cactus flower bud, several hedgehog flower buds and scores more beavertail buds on one very prolific plant. I took these photos also with the same camera, but with a shorter focal length for close-ups. Click on any image to enlarge.

03 Mar 2015 by Arizona Environment Home & Garden Photography

Seeing Spots

400 Years of Sunspot Numbers

Over eight years ago, we posted a chart similar to the above in a write-up about Correlating Sunspots to Global Climate. The conclusions from that post still hold true today given the lack of ocean levels rising and icecaps melting that the Greenbats would have had you believe. At this point in time, we’re way past the supposed deadline of doom that the Greenbats, UN loonies and Algorians foresaw back then.

I was reading the March 2015 issue of QST Magazine, the publication of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), when I saw the graphic above. The associated discussion with the sunspot graphic spoke about predicting sunspots for the next solar cycles. The author mentioned that the current cycle may lead to another period of minimum activity as the sun has previously exhibited.

Ham radio operators have known for a century that radio propagation is greatly affected by sunspot activity. The more spots, the merrier for long-distance communication on certain frequencies. Solar flux causes the atmosphere to ionize, thus refracting radio waves over the horizon and even around the entire planet.

If, as the writer of the QST article fears, another sunspot minimum is in the works, then ham operators that depend on ionospheric propagation for their hobby will be out of luck. The rest of the world, in that event, should prepare for the bitter cold that a new minimum will likely bring.

Click on the image to enlarge.

23 Feb 2015 by Environment Global Warming Science

A Glitch in the Matrix

GLITCH!

This is an actual, unretouched screen shot of the NOAA weather report for our town as observed on the internet this evening. I did a double take when I saw this on the computer screen and captured a screen shot before it reverted to the actual reported temperature of sixty-something.

It would not surprise me to see this erroneous data point merged into the annual average, knowing the way that the Government and Greenbats (but I repeat myself) manage climate statistics to look like the sky is falling. It is well known by those of us that pay attention, but mostly carefully concealed from the public-at-large, that statistical manipulation runs rampant among climate alarmists.

Remember, it’s not about the climate. It’s about taxation and control. Click on the image to enlarge.

27 Jan 2015 by Arizona Environment Global Warming Greenbats Humor

It’s Called “Weather”

Weather

We’re having sort of an unusual weather pattern this morning. The precipitation mass in the map above is moving southeast to northwest in the animated mosaic. We normally see movement in the opposite direction when precipitation moves through. The forecast is for a forty percent chance of rain this afternoon, increasing to eighty percent this evening. We’re not complaining, the desert can always use the rain.

Meanwhile, in the northeastern US, Airlines are cancelling flights, road closures are going into effect as a “potentially historic” blizzard approaches. Weather expert Joe Bastardi weighs in on Newsmax:

“The snow, as extreme as it is now, may be rivaled next week by the cold,” Bastardi, chief forecaster for WeatherBELL, told hosts J.D. Hayworth and Francesca Page Monday.

“In other words, when you look at deviation from normal this is a very, very big event and there are others coming behind it. Maybe not as strong as this, but snow in many of the areas getting it now, Thursday then again Sunday, and just spectacular cold early next week,” he explained.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if New York goes below zero a few nights, which is a very rare event over there,” he added.

Bastardi also said that some Northeasterners should be prepared for more of the same — snow and biting cold — well into next month.

“Some of you folks in the Northeast, you may not see it rain again before February 15 because every precipitation event will be in the form of snow,” Bastardi told “MidPoint” host Ed Berliner on Monday.

It would appear that the full “Gore Effect” winter is in progress. It’s not GLOBAL WARMING or anything else of the sort. It’s all about Government taxation and control of EVERYTHING!

26 Jan 2015 by Arizona Environment Global Warming Greenbats

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