Seems we've been living in New Mexico the past few weeks, dry and sunny and desert-like. But today a few clouds, and even a few widely scattered spatters. I've been starting to worry again about water levels.

Front yard birch signing off for this year.

Pax and I encountered lots of robins on our afternoon walk today. Lots. A flock. Maybe they think this southwestern weather will not last much longer? And on on prairie path, we had to avoid stepping on dozens of grasshoppers, some dead, but most immobile and unresponsive. I'm thinking the brief cold snap got to them, and their only future is in their progeny.

I'm at the point in the Audubon biography (1820) where he is, now in middle age, floating down the Mississippi, with nothing much more than his gun and a dog, completely destitute and depressed, hoping to find birds to draw so he can possibly put together a book which people might buy. Meanwhile his wife and two children are in Cincinnati trying to survive. I keep wondering if he will bump into Mark Twain, but of course, Twain wasn't on the river until almost forty years later. (Audubon did go squirrel hunting with Daniel Boone and he did extort money from the brother of the great English poet John Keats.)