Paradise ponders: plumbing and wildlife edition...

Paradise ponders: plumbing and wildlife edition...  Yesterday and this morning I was fully engaged in finishing the plumbing work that I'm doing for our new irrigation system.  That's all inside the cedar shed we put up a couple months ago. The panorama below shows the west side of that cedar shed, with all the plumbing components in place and plumbed.  The normal photos below that show some of the details.  The first of these shows the pump with its check-valved bypass over the top.  The second shows my gauge array.  The last one shows the fine and coarse filters (but the fine filter isn't fully assembled yet, as we're waiting on a part).  We don't have water hooked up to the cedar shed yet, so I haven't been able to test any of this.  I'll be very sad if I have any bad leaks...

This past week we've made a couple trips back up toward Ant Flats (past Hardware Ranch), we rather spectacularly good wildlife viewing.  On the first of those trips it was early evening on an overcast day, and we saw an amazing variety of birds near Miller's Ranch.  The species I remember include Bullock's orioles, lazuli buntings, yellow warblers, Sandhill cranes, cedar waxwings, a lark (but not a meadowlark), a water bird we don't know walking around on duckweed, a beautiful tiny hawk (falcon-like), and meadowlarks (a pair with a juvenile).  We also saw a doe with a fawn (still spotted).  The next trip was also in the early evening but on a clear day.  We saw very few birds – but we did see three banded kingfishers sitting together in a dead tree, completely ignoring us.  Generally we see kingfishers as solitary examples, and they're very skittish of us.  This was weird!  The best part of that second day, though, was the deer.  We saw about a dozen does with fawns, including six or seven sets of twins.  All of these fawns were roughly the same size (and therefore age), all still spotted, but old enough to graze.  We also spotted a chipmunk (they're rare here, as are all the members of the squirrel family) and a muskrat swimming.


As I write this, it's late morning, and I'm about to jump back into the irrigation system supervisory software...