Sunday, July 16, 2017 - Some More Yard Notes and Interesting Evening Weather

  Later Notes for Sunday - As it turned out, I didn't do anything that I was planning to do as far as clearing the trails at the creek or testing out my old aquarium. There was just too much going on around the house and the day became very hot and humid. So I put these things off as projects for later.  

  I had taken a lot of photos of the back yard earlier Sunday afternoon (at the same time that I was taking photos of Feather Run), including a new "development" in the weed patch that is growing along the south side of our shed. Just this Friday, what I'm assuming is a Sunflower started to bloom there, amongst the Narrow-Leaved Milkweeds, Queen Anne's Lace, and other plants. It was really showy, so I took a couple of photos of it. The images are below: 

  As far as the weather went, Sunday turned into a hot and humid day, as the stationary front sagged south toward us. We'd started out with a low of 63F and a Dew Point of 61F, and by noon we were up to 77F with the Dew Point still tolerable at 64F. However, even with increasing low clouds through afternoon, the high temperature jumped to 86F and the Dew Point went as high as 71F! There were, as expected, scattered storm cells around Central Indiana during the afternoon, but none of them passed near the far southeast side of Marion County. 

  The weather took a very strange turn here, however, just before sunset. By 8:30 PM there was a small but potent thunderstorm cell that blew through Indianapolis, and it passed just a few miles northeast of our neighborhood, moving from northwest to southeast, generally along Interstate 74. There were almost constant thunder rumbles heard at home, and there were also a few sprinkles of rain. The view of the storm from our back porch was just incredible! I took several photos and even a video of it using my cell phone camera. Here are three photos that I took at 8:57 PM EDT, looking north, then almost overhead and to the west, and finally to the southwest: 

  Here is a final photo of the thunderstorm as it was starting to weaken and retreat further to the southwest, lit up by the setting sun, at 9:08 PM EDT. I didn't really play with the color at all! It was a golden color from the sunset that was taking place from almost the opposite direction in the sky.

  As dusk came on and the weather quieted, I should also note that I heard the first Katydids of the season in the back yard. Their sharp rasps joined what has been a rising night insect chorus every night this month; up from the softer cricket sounds that I started to hear in June.
 
  By midnight we were down to 76F and the Dew Point was still at 71F. We had only a Trace of Rain from all of the passing storms, and more were still blowing up around Indianapolis even at that late hour.

Sunday, July 16, 2017 - Some Back Yard / Feather Run Notes

  It's now Noon on Sunday, July 16th; officially the mid-point of summer. Skies are partly cloudy with cumulus clouds and there seems to be some haze in the air. There's a light to moderate steady breeze out there. The NWS site tells me that the current temperature is 77 degrees F with the Dew Point at 64F. A stationary front is trying to sag its way south toward Indianapolis from the southern Great Lakes today, bringing with it a slight chance for scattered thunderstorms later this afternoon and evening. This front is bringing us more clouds, haze, and humidity after we enjoyed drier air and sunnier skies Friday the 14th and Saturday the 15th, when high pressure was over the area. This high pressure, in turn, had replaced some very hot and rainy weather for most of last week. 

  Cicadas first started buzzing in my neighborhood on the very first day of July, and their numbers were already impressive just a few days later. Today their buzzing is coming in constant waves! I have yet to find any shed Cicada nymph skins, but, I haven't really gone out and looked for them, either. 

  After dropping Adrian off at work, I took a walk out to the easement to check up on Feather Run. However, as my cell phone camera photos show, there isn't much to see there! The growth of Cattails and other plants around the stream has been extraordinary this year (I'm guessing that's the result of a very mild last winter followed by a very rainy spring and summer so far.) When we received nearly 2" of rain last Tuesday the 11th, the water overflowed the banks, and it was visible beyond the cattail stands. Today, however, the vegetation is again blocking any view I have of the stream itself.

  The two photos below show what my "view" of Feather Run looks like today, such as it is, with all of the plants thriving along the bank and within the stream bed itself.

As can be seen in the photo below, the Narrow-Leaved Cattails seem to be at their peak. They still have the top staminate flowers and have those sausage-like pistillate flowers below. (I think that all of the Cattails are the Narrow-Leaved species as opposed to the Common Cattail species that doesn't have the gap between these two types of flowers, but I may take a closer look at this later today.

  Red-Winged Blackbirds are still present in pretty good numbers at Feather Run today; both males and females. I'm sure they nested there this year. But I never found any actual nests and I haven't successfully identified any juveniles yet. 

  I am still playing with the idea of setting up an aquarium at home holding some of the life that lives in our stream; plants and small organisms; maybe even fish (though I haven't seen any fish for sure so far this year ... with the few looks at the water that I've had. I think that I might take the first steps toward actually doing this today. I may make a small "trail" or two from our side of the easement to the edge of the stream bed. I may also get my old ten gallon fish tank out of the garage and see if it holds water (it was the dry home of my pet gecko ten years ago).

  Another reason I want to make these small trails is because, even after almost two years, I still have the Hoosier Riverwatch Project in mind. If I ever get the materials together and get involved with this volunteer research, I think I'll be using Feather Run for practice. 

  While I'm clearing the vegetation to create some (hopefully) small-impact trails today, I'm also going to try to get some more looks at the stream itself today and try to identify some more life I see there. I'll try to post what I find in this entry. 

Sunday March 13, 2016 - Notes

  Some Weather / Nature / Bird Notes for Mid-February through this Weekend.

  Daylight Saving Time started during the predawn hours today. I could write a very long rant about how much I despise this useless time change, and how I feel about this area being in the wrong time zone, but I'll save that for some other time. The result is that the daylight hours seem to have been artificially set back. On Saturday the 12th, sunrise took place at 7:00 AM and sunset was at 6:49 PM. Today those times have been backed up to 7:58 AM and 7:50 PM, respectively.

  It was a very rainy night, and from dawn through noon we had overcast skies, periods of light rain and drizzle, and some pretty dense fog that slowly lifted (though the air was still misty). The overnight rain combined with the wet weather we've had since Thursday last week has absolutely saturated the ground in and around my neighborhood. Fields all around Franklin Township are flooded with large areas of standing water. My back yard also has small puddles here and there and I was sinking into soft mud with almost every step I took while I was outside at noon filling up my bird feeders. Feather Run is full of water to its banks, a foot or more deep in places, with a fairly strong current. I took a couple of photos of it with my cell phone right around noon today. The banks of the creek are looking pretty empty these days, with almost all the old Cattails from last year bent and broken from the winter winds and weather, and no new shoots visible yet.

  I should note that there have been some signs of new spring growth lately. I first noticed the Daffodils had sprouted up three weekends ago on Saturday, February 20, near the door of the backyard shed. At the time the shoots were just two or three inches high, and the unusually warm weather we'd had that weekend had probably accelerated that growth. A couple of bouts of colder (even snowy) weather over the next two weeks had slowed the growth down again, but the mild rainy spell that set in all through last week had resulted in more growth. Today, some of those plants were showing flowers, though they hadn't quite opened yet. Here's another photo from around noon today:

  In addition, today, for the first time, I saw the first sprouts of Tiger Lilies near the shed and along the north side of the house. Some of these are visible on the left side of the photo above. There were a few blooming Dandelions in the back yard today, but I've actually seen these off and on throughout the winter during thaws (I even found a couple blooming on New Year's Day, following what had been a mild and rainy week of weather to close out 2015!)

  The buds on the Red Maple Tree in the back yard have been getting noticeably larger for the last few weeks, but over this past week they've really gotten showy from a distance. Now they're up to half an inch long and look like dark red clusters on every branch. I tried to take photos of them today, again around noon, without much luck. My cell phone camera really didn't get them into focus well. But I'll include the best shot here:

  Besides the Maple Tree, most of the trees and bushes are still bare. A few are starting to show swollen buds. The grass is just starting to look greener but the yards are a mess of old leaves from last fall and twigs and branches from winter storms (winds, some snow, and lots of rainfall). It's going to be a real project to clean them up before I have to do any mowing! And that day might be coming much sooner than we think, if we continue to have a wet and mild early spring!

  I haven't kept very organized notes so far this year, and I might try to make a better summary of this winter we've just been through sometime soon, but I'd like to summarize some recent events here along with some notes about what I've been able to see around the area so far...

  The last really "big" snow event we had was four weeks ago today on Sunday, February 14. That afternoon we received about 2.5" of new wet snow cover, and about 3" lay on the ground. I'm using the word "big" here in a relative way; this was such a mild winter that this was actually the thickest snow cover we had on the Indianapolis Southeast Side! However, the week that followed featured a slow warming trend. Before the week was up, we had no snow cover left at all, and Saturday, February 20 turned out to be an incredibly warm day with a high of 72°F and a lot of sunshine! It was an unreal change in just one week.

  Lots of memorable "firsts" happened on February 20. I saw the first Red-Winged Blackbirds of the year; one was perched on one of my sunflower seed feeders by the patio at noon, and I heard others calling all around the neighborhood. They've become very common over the following three weeks, though, as of today, I still haven't seen any females.

  That same day, I also spotted up to 100 Sandhill Cranes flying high to the west, heading south to north in several groups. As usual, I heard these birds before I actually saw them! I heard more on the following Monday and then during the last weekend of February, though I haven't seen them so far in March. (I need to stress, of course, that I've been away from home a lot in the last few weeks, because of my work schedule!)

  That evening, I also heard the first Killdeer somewhere in the neighborhood after sunset. I've heard them occasionally since then, both here and around the Honda plant in Greensburg.

  The following day, on Sunday, February 21, I spotted the first Grackles of the year in the back yard. Since then, these birds have become very common and they've actually been kind of a nuisance over the last week. When they (and, Starlings and some Red-Winged Blackbirds) descend into my seed and suet feeders out in the back yard, they pretty much eat everything!

  Robins have become much more common than before over the last few weeks, and especially this past week. They never really left the area; I saw them in the neighborhood every month last winter. But now I see them and hear their calls, and they fill the outdoors with song before the start of dawn (this is something I just noticed over the past week.)

  Wintry weather wasn't quite over and done with after that unreal, spring-like weekend in late February. In fact, just days after this, we were threatened with the possibility of a bad winter storm as a strong low-pressure system tracked right through Indiana. As it turned out, Indianapolis was right on the edge of the worst weather. The system came through on Wednesday afternoon February 24 through Thursday morning February 25, and there were Winter Storm Warnings and even Blizzard Warnings for Western and Northern Indiana, where over six inches of snow fell, and there was a Winter Weather Advisory for Marion County and counties to our West and North. (The Advisory didn't extend to Johnson County, Shelby County, or Decatur County.) We ended up mainly receiving rain, though wet snow fell here during the predawn hours on Thursday. About an inch or more accumulated on grassy areas, but streets remained mostly wet. We really dodged the bullet with this storm. By the weekend the last traces of this snowfall had disappeared from the ground as much milder and very windy weather moved in.

  After a milder weekend on Saturday, February 27 and Sunday, February 28, another low-pressure system moved through the area and brought us more snow chances. No Winter Weather Advisories were in place this time, but local meteorologists predicted some travel concerns with this new system. The key, for us, was that temperatures were supposed to remain mild enough for most of the precipitation to fall as rain, and this is pretty much what happened. I did see some snow flurries falling before dawn on Wednesday, March 2, and then lots of wet snow before dawn on Thursday, March 3. The latter snow event put a little 1" of accumulation on grassy surfaces, but streets remained mostly wet (I did see some snow stick to side streets, parking lots, and our neighborhood streets before parking the car at home from my trip from work.) Any snow that stuck to the ground was gone by Thursday afternoon. This might (and I stress ... might) be the last snow accumulation that we see this winter; a winter that had us far below normal in snowfall already. And, as of this writing, Friday evening March 4 was the last time that we've reached a low temperature at or below the freezing point. We've been above freezing, and sometimes far above it, for the last nine days! (This probably isn't the total end of subfreezing temperatures, of course.)

  Since those first days of March, a lot of mild and rainy weather has moved through Indianapolis, and this continued up through today. The change has brought a few more "firsts of spring." When I was leaving work after midnight on the morning of Tuesday, March 8, I heard the sounds of Chorus Frogs coming from the ponds around the Honda plant.(I believe that these are the frogs that make a sound like a finger running along the teeth of an old metal comb.) During a drive with Adrian late on Thursday evening, March 10, I heard some more of these while we were on Combs Road between Main Street and County Line Road, and we also heard a few Spring Peepers. So the frogs are starting to wake up and come to life with this streak of mild air!

  As far as birds, when my feeders have been full, I've still been getting a lot of the usual bird species to come and visit the back yard over the last week. They do have to compete with the larger blackbirds much more than they did a month ago, naturally, but I still get a dozen or more House Sparrows, House Finches, and Goldfinches visiting. As of Thursday, March 10, I still had several (Slate-Colored) Juncos pecking around on the ground. These don't seem to be appearing in the numbers that I saw them last month, so they might be starting to migrate north. Occasionally I see Cardinals, White-Breasted Nuthatches, Downy Woodpeckers, Carolina Wrens, Carolina Chickadees, and Mourning Doves out there. (I haven't seen the Red-Bellied Woodpeckers around the back yard lately, but this might be because of that increased competition at the suet feeders.)

  After that summary, I'd like to make a few last notes about today (Sunday, March 13). Clouds started to break up late in the afternoon and we actually had a lot of sunshine. We also had high clouds and some really scenic low clouds through the rest of the day. Winds picked up a little and it was very mild.

  One final note ... I was outside in the back yard around 8:10 PM today (twenty minutes after sunset when it was starting to get dark) and I was amazed to see a Little Brown Bat fluttering over our house! I'm sure this is what it was because I had several good looks at it. I'm not sure that I've ever seen one out and about this early in the spring!
 
  We're in those earliest spring days, when changes are just starting to happen with momentum. There will be much more to write into this blog soon, whenever I have the time to summarize it all.

Sunday August 30, 2015 - Notes 2

 
  Weather Notes for Sunday the 30th
  Bird Sightings and Absences
  Insects Seen 
  Bat Sighting at Dusk

  Sunday August 30th turned out to be partly sunny for most of the day with cumulus clouds really piling up through the middle to late afternoon. There were also a lot of altocumulus clouds around. It was a very hazy and humid day (and I believe that we still had a lot of high-altitude smoke drifting in from wildfires that were blazing in the Pacific Northwest and the Southern Great Plains). Isolated cells of showers and even some isolated thunderstorms sprang up in Central Indiana from afternoon through evening. Between 6:00 PM - 6:30 PM one cell of heavy rain passed through downtown Indianapolis from Southwest to Northeast, and sprinkles of rain started falling on the Southeast Side from it. It just missed us; there was even sunshine coming down as it was raining! We ended up getting just a trace of rain from this system.

  Sunday's morning low was 69°F while the afternoon high reached 87°F. Dew Points wandered around between the upper and lower 60's°F all day. Winds were mostly light with some moderate gusts around noon and late afternoon. It was a humid and summer-like day, and many more were in the forecast for the upcoming week.

  Birds still don't seem to be very active, but I did see a lot of American Robins, Northern Cardinals, and Blue Jays today; especially during the late morning.

  Perhaps more importantly, even though I spent a lot of time by the creek, I didn't see or hear a single Red-Winged Blackbird today. In fact, I don't think I've seen any throughout August. They were still very active there in July, but they must have moved out once breeding season was done.

  I also didn't see or hear any Chimney Swifts today. I looked for them as sunset neared and as dusk was coming on, but saw none. I DID spot one lone Little Brown Bat zipping over the back yard as the sky was getting dark.

  I spent a lot of time in my first entry today writing about Dragonflies, but insect life is peaking these days, and there's a lot more to write about.

  Cicadas are still everywhere and their buzzing went on all day long. Crickets are all over the lawn and the weedy areas, chirping all through the daylight hours and increasing their volume after dark. Other Long-Horned Grasshoppers can be heard buzzing outside through the day and then, after dark, the buzzing, whirring, and clicking becomes extremely loud.

  Monarch Butterflies are still fluttering around all over our area and are still often visiting that patch of Narrow-leaved Milkweeds that grow next to my backyard shed. During late afternoon, I spotted a Monarch Caterpillar munching away on the leaves of one of those plants. In addition to the Monarchs I also saw several white (Cabbage?) Butterflies fluttering around the back yard today.

  Those Milkweeds that I mentioned in the last paragraph are, strangely, covered with bright yellow Aphids these days! I didn't realize that these poisonous plants ever become hosts to them.

  Bumblebees and Wasps of several species were active today especially around flowering plants. And, one final note, in spite of our lack of rain for the last couple of weeks in August, we still have a lot of Mosquitoes swarming around after sunset!

Sunday August 30, 2015 - Notes 1

  Tree Foliage Early Changes - Ash Tree
  Feather Run - Mainly Dried Up - Precipitation Lately
  Dragonfly - Common Whitetail Skimmer
  Dragonfly - Common (or Eastern) Pondhawk

  So I'm going to start by writing about tree foliage...

  During the last half of August, and especially the last full week, I've noticed obvious early signs that some trees in the area are already starting to change color with the season. While the vast majority of tall trees are still various shades of green, there are many with parts or all of their foliage taking on a yellowish tinge, and over the last full week of the month these trees, while very scattered, are starting to be obvious to pick out from the rest. On our property, the big Ash Tree in the front yard started to show yellowed leaves around the middle of August or just afterward, and it's really showing them now. This is a photo I snapped of it with my cell phone just late this morning:

  This tree seems to be the only one on the property we own that's showing any changes so far, though some of the other ones like the Roughleaf Dogwood and the Forsythia Bush in the front yard, along with the big Lilac Bush in the south side yard, might be showing some slight changes. The Ash is always the last tree here at home to get full foliage in the spring and the first tree to show autumn changes, but this year it seems especially early! In fact, when I looked at older photos I snapped with the cell phone last year, this is what the Ash Tree looked like around the middle of September in 2014. I wonder if all the extra-rainy weather we had from late spring through July, then the dry spell that we've had since, has somehow accelerated the process for this tree? I'll keep documenting it.

  I walked around our bank of Feather Run Creek just before noon today and snapped a few photos of it. The water in the creek is very low, and it has been for most of this month. The last measurable rain that I've recorded here at home was 0.01" during the early morning hours of Thursday the 20th, and the last time we had over a tenth of an inch of rain was almost two weeks ago on Monday the 17th, when I recorded 0.35" in my gauge. We've only had traces of it since then, including a few sprinkles yesterday.

  Here are two photos I took of Feather Run late this morning. One shows the view looking northwest from my back yard fence, and the other is a closeup showing the muddy creek bed with just shallow, slow-moving water moving through it. The bed is also sporting plant growth. Cattails near the creek are at the point where many of the brown flower heads have started to erupt into seed.

  There's a lot of insect and bird life that I'd like to mention today, but I'm going to concentrate first of Dragonflies. Just like last weekend, there are a lot of them darting and hovering over that shallow water in the creek, chasing each other around. They're of a species that I've seen around our property in the past, and I think they must breed in shallow, slow moving creek water. I did some research online today after getting some of the best looks that I could, and I'm certain that I'm seeing the Common Whitetail Skimmer (Libellula lydia). Interestingly, I'm also seeing males, not females (though females might be around). The dragonflies that I've noticed have whitish or pale-blue abdomens and wings that have a big black bar or spot in the middle. But these dragonflies show sexual dimorphism; females have different colored wings and bodies. Here are a couple of photos that I was able to get from the Internet:

Male Common Whitetail Skimmer (from azdragonfly.org)

(Older male; younger males have an abdomen pattern like the females but have this type of wing pattern.)

Female Common Whitetail Skimmer (from bugguide.net)

  There was another kind of Dragonfly that I saw today that had a bright green body with dark bands on the abdomen, and clear wings. I was able to get a photo of it after it landed near the creek bank on an old Cattail stem, but the photo wasn't great. Again, some research on the Internet has made me pretty confident that what I saw was a Common (or Eastern) Pondhawk (Erythemis simplicicollis). This time, the one I saw was a female, or possibly a younger male. Older males of this species tend to have blueish colored abdomens. I honestly never knew before today that different sexes of the same species of dragonfly have different coloring, at least in some cases! Again, here are some photos of this species I was able to get from the Internet:

Female Common (Eastern) Pondhawk (from dragonflysite.com)

Male Common (Eastern) Pondhawk (from dragonflysite.com)

(Younger males have an abdomen coloration similar to that of the female.)

  According to the information that I have, Common Whitetail Skimmer females lay eggs in water by landing near it and dipping their abdomen into water several times, while the Common Pondhawk female drops its fertilized eggs into water (I'm not sure if this means that it dive-bombs.)

  There are over 5,500 species of Dragonflies and Damselflies known in North America and over 450 species are found throughout the United States and Canada, so I'll never get to know them all. But today's observations and research are a start!

AM Sunday, August 30, 2015 - Introduction and Predawn Notes

  Weather Notes - The Return of Heat and Humidity
  Night Insect Chorus
 
  After what had been a fairly dry, cooler-than-normal week, the last weekend of August turned warmer and more humid again. Saturday the 29th was partly to mostly cloudy and hazy, and the Indianapolis Southeast Side dodged scattered showers and a few thunderstorms from morning through nightfall. Only a Trace of rain fell here; barely enough to wet the pavement outside during afternoon and evening. The low on Saturday was 64°F and the he afternoon high was 82°F. The real difference from last week was that Dew Points reached the upper 60's°F range during that afternoon and hovered there past dark. Even at midnight we were still at 75°F with a Dew Point of 67°F.

  Now at 2:00 AM the sky is overcast, with clouds now thick enough to cover the Full Moon (actually about half a day past Full). Earlier on Saturday evening and even past midnight, there were thin clouds and cloud breaks letting the Moon show through. The air seems still. The Temperature is 73°F with the Dew Point still at 67°F, making the Humidity 81%. The summer insect chorus is at full swing, just as it's been on every mild night this month. I'm hearing constant Cricket chirps all blending together like a long, suspended note. Along with that are the whirring sounds, buzzes, and sharp clicks of other Long-Horned Grasshoppers. (What I'm not hearing in the back yard, as usual, are the "croaking" sounds of Katydids; I often hear these in more wooded and rural areas around us, so I think they're just not as attracted to my property for some reason.)

  Even with all of this summer-like weather and night life around, there have been a few signs of the change of seasons here and there, and this seemed like the perfect time to start this blog. Why did I start it at all? There are a lot of reasons, but here are the main ones:

•  The main reason I want to keep notes in blog form in the first place is because I'm at the point where it's easier to do this, in a lot of ways, than it is to keep handwritten notes. Not to mention it saves paper (unless I print these out) and the entries are saved "in the cloud" and hard to lose!
•   I was making too many notes in my amateur astronomy blog about other things like weather changes, bird sightings, and other animal sightings and plant changes in and around our property. I wanted to keep Feather Run Astronomy more strictly about astronomy! So I started this one to keep track of everything else! 
• In four weeks, on September 26, I'm planning to attend a workshop and become a volunteer water tester for Hoosier Riverwatch and the Sierra Club. I'm hoping that this blog will also help me keep track of where I go and what I find through this program as I get more involved.

  We'll see where it all goes from here. I'll keep adding entries when I can, and I'm hoping they'll be interesting ones!