Where's the Lake?

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, 

places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas 

had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, 

pretending to greenery and growth 

as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. 

They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. 

They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, 

and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. 

Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, 

all because someone could get a pump going. 

Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. 

They'd had aspirations. 

And then the water ran out, 

and they fell back, 

realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, 

and there would be no more coming.

~ Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

We headed out to Devine Lake Park late Saturday evening. A rain shower and the sunset combined to give us a rainbow (and one drop of rain on the windshield. It was a reminder that everything is drying up. Counties are

Couldn't remember the last time we saw a rainbow.

Stunning sunset from the road.

We knew it would be better in the park.

We had been warned the lake was almost dry, but we could hardly believe it.

There is supposed to be a lake here. Now it is more like shallow pools in spots and some canals that might have been animal trails.

There were Great Egrets (and maybe others, but I could only recognize a couple of Great Egrets closer in), a Great Blue Heron, and a massive flock of Black-bellied Whistling (Tree) Ducks.

We heard the cricket frogs. They hang on, providing food for the birds and snakes. We split into two groups - flashlight glow indicates one group.

The smudges against the sky were the BBWD, disturbed briefly. They flew up and then settled again in the shallow water - whistling and fussing all the while.

We saw many geckos (Mediterranean House Geckos).

They scattered quickly as we shined lights to count them.

We need rain...(and underground water districts in this county).