Pretty much as usual, unless there is a major flood, there isn't much news from here. But that's a good thing.

The wildflower and grass seed I sowed a couple weeks ago is coming up, in spite of the bluejays and ravens making a buffet out of some of it, and I am looking forward to when the flowers bloom in a few weeks.

We are finding places along the riverbank where it looks fine, but dirt inside the bank was washed away by the flood, so it's hollowed out. What's holding it together is three roots. The last few days we've been trying to poke dirt and rocks down into the hollows to give it more structure and give the trees some dirt for nutrients. I'm afraid we are going to lose them, and am surprised they made it through this past winter.

We have 9 hummingbird feeders outside. Each holds 10 birds, and at dusk every spot is filled with male birds because the females have already gone to bed. I don't know what the ratios are, but that's 90 males, maybe 70 or 80 females, and now the babies are starting to show up, one or two per female. They look like females when they are young, don't have the red throats.



See that one with the crease on her chest? That is a brood patch - where bare skin can make contact with the eggs she is sitting on to keep them warmer.

We are not seeing the hummingbirds flying over the river to catch bugs like they usually do, and I'm worried that the flood wiped out one of the species of bugs that we usually have. For that matter, I haven't seen the fish feeding on bugs, either. I was seeing them earlier this spring, and that would be in response to one bug species hatching out, but maybe there is a gap in bug availability.

The high runoff appears to be over, and although there is still snow to melt, the Bureau of Reclamation that controls the amount of water in our river is sending a large amount of the water we should have had in the river over the mountain and back into the river at the mouth of the canyon.



This is protecting some of the fragile flood restoration work along the river channel down the canyon from us: it would not have held up to the high water. The house in the picture is a good example. That is the highest runoff licking at its toes. It was supposed to be torn down, but they didn't get to it before the runoff started.

We wouldn't have had too much problem here, although there were a couple of spots to keep an eye on, and this fall when the river goes down a lot, we might bring equipment back to do more work.



In the shade, on the right, you can see where some of the dirt from the bank below our dining room slid into the water. There are boulders under there, so it's not a big emergency. By next spring we hope to have more vegetation established along there to hold the bank together better.

Someone gave us a water pump for irrigation to replace the one we lost in the flood. I don't know if his supplier is donating them to him, or he's being generous. He said it was because his flood loss was so much less than ours. Originally he'd told us they would cost $500, which I think is a good price, although not earth-shakingly good. So yesterday we went to his house and moved 21 wheelbarrow loads of fine sand from his yard out to the road because the county said they are going to pick up that flood silt. We ran out of steam and have to go back, figure there are at least 20 more loads to go.

It is amazing how insignificant a pile of dirt looks next to the problem it is there to solve. We'll dump a good-sized bucket load of dirt from our front loader, and it's obvious that many more loads are needed to make a difference where we are working. Mr. Troutbend doesn't drive the skidsteer (similar to a Bobcat, but it's an old Ford), he leaves that to me. I'm getting better at moving dirt around, but snow is a lot easier.