A Red-shouldered Hawk calls from the neighborhood trees while a long-awaited rain falls across central North Carolina.
As Jordan Lake and Falls Lake begin to recover from drought conditions, I find myself thinking about humanity’s long relationship with water, the importance of hidden springs, and a surprising truth: even deserts can suffer droughts.
Join me on the porch as rain patters softly in the background and a hawk keeps watch overhead.
P.S. After I finished recording, I checked the identification. The hawk calling throughout this episode was a Red-shouldered Hawk, not a Red-tailed Hawk.
Transcript
I hope you can hear the call of that Red-tailed Hawk. And maybe you can hear the delighted chirping...
Or is that a Red-shouldered Hawk? I will have to look it up. We have both kinds of hawks here in my neighborhood.
And you can probably hear some of the delighted chirping of the songbirds because they’re splashing in the saucers full of water in front of my house. Those saucers are their bathing pools, and birds love to take baths.
A good steady rain finally came last evening, and it has rained steadily through the night and into the morning. We needed that. Oh, let me make a correction. The earth needed that.
Our soil here has been very dry, and the reservoirs, like Jordan Lake and Falls Lake, have gotten very low. We’ve been in drought conditions here in central North Carolina, where we’re used to being green all the time. Things have gotten kind of wilted over the last month or so.
That hawk is still calling. And every time it calls, every songbird in the yard and the squirrels look in the direction of that call.
Droughts. That’s a condition that has affected humans for a very long time throughout our existence.
Droughts. Times when water was almost nonexistent.
Humans needed every bit of their prior knowledge as to where every spring occurred, because as the rivers and the lakes would dry up, it would be those springs, fed from deep underground, that provided the water so that the humans and the animals, the critters and the birds all around, could survive. And the plants around the spring survived too.
Did you know that even deserts can have droughts?
Sometimes deserts go through long spells where that brief respite of a rain or two during a wet season would come, and the plants would spring riotously into blossoms of all colors everywhere, rampant in their joy that the waters had come again.
A drought in a desert. Kind of hard to think about, isn’t it? But they do happen, and they have happened.
I can remember camping in the Mojave Desert. And I thought the dryness that I was seeing was the usual dryness of a desert, but it was not. I was there during an extreme drought, so some of the springs that I visited barely had any vegetation around them. If I had been there in a different year, there would have been more vegetation and more wildlife visiting. But I didn’t know that back then.
A drought in a desert and the ending of a drought here in North Carolina perhaps have some insights in common, because it’s going to take more than twelve hours or twenty-four hours or several days of steady rain to stop the drought here. It’s going to take a whole lot more water to bring Jordan Lake and Falls Lake back to their normal conditions.
For the moment, I listen to the birds, and you may be able to hear the light patter of that steady rain that’s coming down. For the moment, let’s enjoy it and say thank you that we’ve got rain that has started, just started, to replenish our water needs.
Take the call of the hawk with you.
Thank you for coming through the Open Door.
Have a very blessed day.
P.S. After I finished recording, I checked the identification. The hawk calling throughout this episode was a Red-shouldered Hawk, not a Red-tailed Hawk.
