Attack of the Moths!

Out here on the High Plains we're having a miller moth infestation.  This evidently is a migration thing in which the moths migrate from the plains to the mountains where they spend the summer (sounds like a good idea to me!) before returning back to the plains in the fall to breed.  In any case, this is one of the worst years I've seen.  We have moths _everywhere_.   I opened the truck doors yesterday evening and the rubber lining around the door was filled with moths.  Our door frames are loaded with moths.  At night there are thousands of them flying around any light that's on.  Of course, once you open the door, they fly inside.  They don't really cause any problems except for pooping on your windows and flat surfaces.  They can also get inside things like your furnace vents, ATV air filters, electrical outlets, etc and clog those up.  But they don't eat stuff or sting or bite.

This doesn't look too bad

A closer look at a cluster of moths

The entire surface of my hawk house door looks like this

Inside a door frame

Out in the pasture, we've made good progress at building fences.  We've got the one worst pastures fenced back in and it looks good.  Today, we're heading for the NW corner of the ranch where snow drifted over a mesa rim and crushed the fence below.  The fence was completely rebuilt several years ago and now it's lying in pieces on the ground.  Interestingly, we got here in '96 and it wasn't until 2006 that I had my first crushed fence.  Since then, I've fixed at least one every year.  It's like once something starts, the door is open.

A new brace

And on the very up-side, we've been getting rain.  Rain is life out here.

This results in...

...this. 

We look SO MUCH better this year than we did last year at this time.  Last year, it was cold and windy. Grama grass requires warm temperatures to grow and, due to the cold spring, the grass just got a very late start.  May and June were almost completely dry and never gave the grass anything to work with.  July and onward were pretty normal, and the grass grew good but with a late start there was only so much it could do.  Anyway, here we are and we're hoping and praying for a good year so that the grass will recover.  For me, it's not so much about making money as it is just seeing green grass and trying to be a good steward of what God's given me to work with.

No real news on the Davidic front.  We haven't heard anything from Denver and he's still on steroids and still responding well to them, so we're just taking this opportunity to breathe.

I'll be starting the search for a tiercel prairie falcon next weekend!