Our park lost one of it's biggest trees in a storm today. You never quite know what is going to happen during monsoon season. Broken tree branches, flooded washes, and dry streets just a mile away from all of that are not at all uncommon. We seem to be having a pretty active monsoon season this year. We had a big storm come through while I was at work, and not long after, I got a text from Ava that said a tree at our park fell over.
This angle give you a pretty good idea of how big this tree was. These Palo Verde trees have shallow roots, so a big wind can take them out pretty easily. Someone also told me that they overwater these trees, which makes it easier for them to uproot in a big storm. I'm not sure if that's true, but after seeing the root structure under this huge tree, it's easy to see that there's not much holding it down.
We found these creepy grubs climbing around in the dirt below the tree. They were a couple inches long. Gross!
The girls thought they'd try to push it back up. I don't think it budged.
After climbing around on the downed tree, they went down to the volleyball court and dug around in the wet sand
They also found this wet little bird in the grass, so they went home to get a box so they could rescue it. It didn't look hurt, just looked like it's feathers were too wet to fly.
They took care of the bird for a little while, but then they had to go to volleyball practice. I told them I'd keep an eye on it for them while they were gone. They set the box down on the ground in case the bird was ready to get out.
I was enjoying a cool evening out on the patio reading a book, and before long, the bird flew out of the box and landed up on our grill. It hung out there for about 10 more minutes, and then it flew into the tangerine tree. Ava looked it up afterwards to try to figure out what kind of bird it was, and turns out it was a white winged dove. We're bummed to lose such a nice tree at the park, but at least it didn't fall on anyone's house! Gotta love monsoon season!
