Steve and Judy's Travels!

“Don’t tell my mother I’m a member of Congress. She thinks I’m a prostitute.”

Pat Schroeder.  Congressperson from Colorado.  (She didn’t say it today, I just learned of it todayish.)

After our 90^th day of triple digits this year, the summer weather broke.  (The previous record for triple digit temperatures was 62 days.  Could there be something going on here?)  For the first time in four months, a cold front made it all the way down to South Texas.  In the summer, the weather here just stays the same every day, only changing by a few degrees one way or the other.

We hit our high of 100 earlier in the day, then the front hit, knocking 20 degrees off the thermometer and dousing us with rain while the wind rearranged our deck furniture and yard ornaments.  Our highs for the next week are projected to be in the 70s and 80s, not even breaking 90 again until next Wednesday.  Certainly, a change in the weather.  By winter we’ll have fronts rolling through every week.

I chronicled the decline and demise of the historic little church out in the ranchlands.  Over a period of years, it went from this

To this

…to this.

It couldn’t be saved.

This little church used to be important.  It was built about 1920 out in sparsely populated ranch country, near the small town of San Luisto that no longer exists.  Until it was built, the closest church was ten miles away, in a time that much of the travel out there in the ranchlands was still by horse and buggy.

This last weekend Judy and I went on a driveabout on Highway 1017 planning to stop and see if there was anything left of the remains and found this.

A shiny new, almost completed, replacement in the style of the one they couldn’t save!

What a nice surprise.  They probably don’t really need a tiny little church like this out here now, but it was important enough to them to keep the history alive.

Hey, I figured something out.

There is this cool birding app for the phone called Merlin.  Turn it on and let it listen.  It picks out bird calls and identifies them.  It’s fairly new technology.  It’s not always right, and it takes some discretion and skepticism when evaluating its results, but it’s another good tool in the kit.

I was surprised however, while sitting there listening to a mockingbird and Merlin wasn’t identifying it.  A singing mockingbird isn’t that hard to I.D.  How can an app that can pick out a birdsong I can barely hear, or identify a little pip from the bushes that sounds like every other little pip, not identify a mockingbird, one of our most conspicuous birds?  I wondered about that a little bit but didn’t obsess over it and let it go.

Recently however, while I was again listening to a mockingbird sing, the explanation just came to me.  That blinding flash of the obvious!  Northern mockingbirds sing 200 different songs.  Mockingbirds are so good at what they do, if they trained Merlin to recognize every song a mockingbird sings, there would hardly be any other birds left to identify.  Merlin would think every bird it heard, whatever the location or habitat, was a Mockingbird!  Merlin can leave the really easy bird I.D.s to us to figure out on our own and focus on the ones we might need help with.

Freddy is actually a Gulf Coast Toad.  This is a picture of him from last year.

There were a lot of “Freddys” around last year.  There was only one in the puddle at a time, but there might have been another 5 or 6 around the yard.  Last year was an unusual year for these little toads; we’ve never seen so many before.

This year, the population was way down.  Hardly any toad sightings at all, and none of them ever ventured up onto our porch or into the fountain.  We don’t know anything about how or why the toad population fluctuates from year to year.  Just because Freddy didn’t come back this year doesn’t mean we won’t get a Freddy again.  Maybe he got a better offer and spent this last summer buried in the mud by a pond somewhere next to Mrs. Freddy and will pop up on our porch again next year.  Or maybe Freddy Junior.