Got Hot

It finally got hot.  It is not just the temperature, but the combination of the length of the days and the strength of the sun.  As you know, it is 20 days to the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year.  Of course, it is a 24 hour day as all others are, but the length of daylight hours, and thus the amount of sun exposure, is the longest at Solstice.  This length of sun exposure warming the earth, the roofs, the walls, the paved surfaces, and the water bodies warms the temperature of these objects and materials.  They radiate stored heat at night when it is cooler.  The nights get warmer and warmer until finally they will reach a low of about 90 degrees -- good swimming weather in a pool as warm as a bath. 

The sun is noticeably stronger and hotter on any exposed skin.  After a short sun exposure, 5 to 10 minutes around noon until 4:00pm, the skin starts to feel a slight burning sensation.  That's strong sun.  You do not want excessive skin exposure to the sun during the mid day hours and your skin will warn you of the potential danger with the burning sensation.  Even though the temperatures are high 90s to over 100 degrees, many people wear long sleeves if they are working outside during the day.  Early morning hours, early evening, and nights are generally delightful.

This morning I saw some baby quail.  They were the size of little chicks.  They were hard to count as they kept moving rapidly in disorganized fashion.  I estimate more than 12.    There were 3 or 4 adult quail.  The adults are more or less 11 inches tall with a distinctive "top knot" that is like a comma protruding from their third eye area.  Usually there are not so many adults with the chicks.  Chicks will leave the nest with their parents within hours of hatching.  The quail chicks are a dull brown-gray which camouflages well with the Southwest Desert ground color. The adults have gray plumage with distinctive black and white markings.  The males have brick red-brown skull caps.
I believe we have Gambel's  Quail, not California Quail, although many people confuse the two.  Gambel's Quail rarely fly.  They move about quickly on the ground.  Females lay 10 to 15 eggs resulting in many chicks.  As the days and weeks go by,  the chicks one sees with the parents are fewer and fewer.  There appears to be high mortality among quail chicks in the wild. 

It was a real treat to see the quail rush about in their cartoonish style.  Later, I found a large pack rat nest.  I poked around with a stick, moving some of the sticks, rocks, and dried prickly pear pads that the nest was made of, and found some shake skins that had been shed by one very large and one small snake.  The shed snakeskin is a glassy, slightly shiny, translucent, papery material.  It tears easily.  It is an attractive material. 

My neighbor was trying to figure out how many rats live on our hill.    They multiply like rabbits, but they usually do not come out during the day.  If they start damaging your possessions, chewing on them, leaving droppings, building nests, you know you have rats.  We imagined that if the rats had little lights on their backs the side of the hill would be dotted with lights at night.  I hope we estimated too high. 

I cleaned up the dead prickly pear cactus around the land until I got enough cacti spines in my fingers to go on to other activities.  I was wearing heavy gloves and using a tool to lift the dead cacti, but yard work around here always results in your hands and arms getting some cactus wounds.  You get used to it. 

The laundry dried on the line in under 2 hours.  The jeans were dry as a bone in the sun.  The dog is shedding his winter coat.  Yep, we got hot.  We got quail.  We got rats and prickly pear cactus. 

Stayin' cool,
Southwest Desert Blogger
C. (c)2011