Foto Friday

The ocean is a desert with its life underground
And a perfect disguise above…
— America: A Horse With No Name

That snippet of lyric from 1971 came to my mind as I contemplated our weather last Tuesday. If you replace “ocean” with “Horseshoe Bay” and “desert” with “wooded area” and “underground” with “under the fog,” you have a perfect simile (or is it a metaphor?) for…well, I’ve lost my train of thought here. Never mind.

Here’s the sunrise on Monday:

And here’s what it looked like the next morning:

I’m a sucker for a foggy morning, so when I saw on the Austin news that visibility in Horseshoe Bay was a fraction of a mile, I crawled out of bed, launched my drone, and recorded the event.

The preceding photo obviously is a view to the east (for the locals in the audience, the steam from the Ferguson Power Plant is faintly evident in the upper left portion of the image). Here’s a view above the fog (around 380′ in altitude) looking more to the north:

Dropping down into the fog, the drone’s view of Pecan Creek from our back yard is somewhat dramatic:

The fog didn’t prevent us from heading out for a pre-breakfast run:

The street going out from our neighborhood appeared to end in the clouds:

I realize that you’re mesmerized by fog photos, but that wasn’t all that I deemed picture worthy this week. Take this ant bed, for example:

I’ve heard it said that there are no perfectly straight lines in nature, but I submit to you that perfect circles, while not impossible, are certainly rare. But try telling that to the ants that constructed this barrier wall around the entrance to their nest. I’m not sure what happened to it between Tuesday and this morning; the heavy morning dews may have contributed to some collapse.

Then there was this snail, creeping across our sidewalk:

The bluebonnets in our neighborhood are beginning the next phase of their short life cycle, going from flowers to seeds that will become next year’s crop (although more likely two or three years down the road). Unfortunately, not everything bluebonnet colored fades:

We’re now well into snake season in the Hill Country. Yesterday, Debbie and I watched a very pretty non-venomous Western coachwhip (Masticophis flagellum testaceus) flash by and disappear into a hole under our house’s foundation. It’s difficult to accurately estimate the length of such a fast moving snake (and practically impossible to photograph one), but I’m guessing this one was 3-4′ long. In any event, it was much longer than this tiny (~8″) non-venomous DeKay’s brown snake (Storeria dekayi) that was struggling to get moving across our walking trail on a cool morning. I moved it to the other side, into the grass, to protect it from less tolerant humans and more curious dogs.