The Art of the Drought

I like to walk on cooler mornings at Glassberg Conservation Area on the beaten and sometimes challengingly muddy path around the pretty three-acre (man-made) lake I sometimes fished in, that I privately called my own Walden Pond, and last week was stunned to see the lake dried out to practically nothing, surrounded by a Missouri moonscape of cracked mud and dead water lily plants.

In this picture you can see from the orange gauge where the water level used to be.

The lake is a tenth or less than what it was! The former sky mirror that had a whole bunch of us (or at least one person every day) hiking in half a mile carrying gear to fish there! The dead trees stuck up from it like wooden knitting needles. Fish remain in the increasingly scarce, warm water--jumping, as if to say, "Save us!" The Department took down the sign warning anglers about the daily catch limits.

Barely recognizing it and not quite believing it I crunched my boots across the desert landscape close to what water is left.

The Creepy Side of Spring

Suddenly I see sidewinding across the floor, at the threshold of the mudroom, two snakes, and say aloud, "Oh, for heaven's sake. Snakes in the house." While one soon vanished, this Prairie Ring-Necked Snake wasn't camera shy. The Ring-Necked and the black Rat Snake are the two snakes most common in the house, maybe having wintered in the fireplace I'd opened up the day before.

Snakes come in and out of my fireplace as if it were a nightclub. They are harmless and I let them be, but always do a double-take when seeing snakes in the house.

Then on a walk I see, on a tree cut violently short yet still bringing forth leaves, dense colonies of weird fuzzy purple vertical shoulder-to-shoulder parasites. A wildflower, I thought at first, but then got a closer look and saw it was pathology, utterly unfamiliar. At home I googled "purple parasites," "lavender parasites," "purple caterpillars" and finally, through an image, identified these. They're not animals at all, but--as close as I could get to an I.D.--Maple Spindle Gall (Eriophyes cerasicumena), the tree's reaction to an infestation of mites. These were generated by the plant; they're like tumors. There were no other examples in the immediate area and there is no Spindle Gall photo on the Internet quite like this one.

Spindle gall

Caught on Tape

Hugely surprised, on the carpet in front of my non-working fireplace with its vents all taped up to keep creatures from crawling in and out, this is what I saw and what I did:

And when I played back the video I saw only then that I had injured it and that it bled red, and I wept, very sorry I had added to its suffering. It's a Ring-Necked Prairie Snake (Diadophus punctatus arnyi Kennicott).