Pigs in spring

It’s spring! Our air temperatures in mid-April are heading into the 90’s during the day, a 40 degree swing from the night temperatures. But even in the middle of the day I haven’t had to turn my air conditioning on yet because the house is still cool, because the adobe stays cool all day.

Keeping up with the temperature in the desert is always an exercise in chasing a moving target.

There are a few mosquitos are out! There’s not very many of them yet, and they are a mixture of two kinds. I’ve seen a few of the big, loud, slow northern kind that are most active in the evenings (the kind that most of you in the northern and western parts of the US are familiar with).

I’ve also seen a few of the small, nearly silent mosquitos that are a warmer climate mosquito. They are extremely aggressive and bite during the day. I believe they are Aedes aegypti. The Aedes varieties are small and striped and often called Tiger mosquitos. Those are the ones that tormented us last summer. Last year they came out briefly in April, disappeared during the dry months of May and June, and then were thick during the monsoon rains in July, August and September.

Some of you were asking about when the cacti bloom. It depends on which ones, and varies each year, but some are blooming now.

This ocotillo, pronounced o-co-tee-yo (no “L” sound) is across the street from my house.

A variety of trees are blooming (and others bloomed earlier in the year). These are around the corner from my house.

The rest of these cacti photos are from my yard.

There’s been a lot of wildlife too. I’ve been regularly seeing coyotes walking down the street in broad daylight. And the wild pigs have been wandering around. These guys stink! A javelina is not actually a pig, it’s a peccary, but most locals colloquially call them pigs. Like coyotes, they live in and around the arroyos and frequently wander the neighborhoods surrounding the arroyos.

A neighbor of mine said she recently saw the pigs while walking her dog late in the evening. And sure enough, our security camera picked one up around 11:00 one night. https://youtu.be/oOHPyAbUBfE

I had an out-of-state friend visiting the week of the pig visit – we didn’t realize (until John noticed recently from stored security videos) that pigs had passed by in the night. If we had known, we could have stayed up late one night to enjoy the evening with the javelina.

I’ll write more about our fun visit from my friend soon. But first I want to finish a follow-up post about the pineapple guava tree project from last month. I’m always running 2-3 weeks behind with this blog, no matter what I do! But I jumped ahead with this post, because I wanted to get my mid-April spring post published in mid-April, not sometime next month. By May it will be summer!

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