All this talk about Trump and how he deals with women. It dredges up refuse. Refuse like being a little girl and the neighbor who has a horse fondles her as he helps her up to ride. In typing class in Junior High School, the teacher helps from behind and brushes against the front of her blouse as he reaches for her hands. As a fifteen year-old hearing a voice from the bushes in the park, to look over and see a man exposing himself to her as he masturbates. As a sixteen year-old standing up to the man telling her at gunpoint to undress. As a nineteen year-old being asked “So tell me what you’re doing for birth control.” in a job interview. All her teen years being peppered with catcalls and wolf whistles because she was walking down the street past a group of guys. As an adult, reporting obscene phone calls and being told she shouldn’t have listed her full name in the phone book. Enduring experiences that are not appropriate to describe here. Sexual abuse and predation by people who felt they were in a position of power over her. It’s enough to make a person reflective; a little moody. What we say and do matters. Even when (especially when?) we feel we’re in a position of power and there will be no consequences.
La Sal del Rey, National Wildlife Refuge. The King’s Salt. A closed lake over a salt dome. Water flows in but it doesn’t flow out. Summertime. Evaporation exceeds rainfall. The water level is low. The walking is easy. The surrounding sand is brown. As the super-saturated water recedes though, it leaves behind a layer of salt. Artifacts left behind might start out looking like this.
But end up looking like this.
Or this.
Or this.
A winter wonderland on a ninety degree day.
It could be that the hummingbirds prefer one feeder over the other and drink more from that feeder. It could be that they prefer one location over the other and drink more from that location, regardless of which feeder is there. It could be that the change in fluid level does not reflect a difference due to drinking, but is the result of some other factor, like evaporation due to difference in position relative to sun exposure.
So, what to do next? Our decision; pick a variable, change it, and test the effect. We chose flowers. There were red flowers under one feeder and purple under the other. We emptied and cleaned each feeder, reloaded them with exactly the same amount of food, and returned them to the places they were. Then we switched the baskets of flowers underneath them. Now the feeder on the north has red flowers under it instead of purple and vice-versa. What difference will that make?
Right in the middle of our experiment about how hummingbirds choose feeders though, the river of migrating hummingbirds dried up. Yesterday morning we saw our usual ten or fifteen birds. This morning we saw a total of one hummingbird come to the feeders. Suddenly we’ve got a lack of data. 
There is slightly less food in the feeders now, but we can’t tell any difference between the two. The more the level in each feeder goes down, the clearer any result will be, but it doesn’t appear that we’re going to get enough information to make any determination this year. We might have to wait until next year’s migration to figure out our mystery. 
It bloomed, but we didn’t get to see it.
Well, we kept paying attention and caught it early in the morning before the bloom faded.
What a cool bloom.
