Suburban Wildlife Garden: Storm

Saturday, March 28, 2009

All Hail Precipitation!

We're experiencing a major drought here in Austin, so I relish most anything that falls from the sky. I would, however, like to draw the line at large chunks of ice that break car & house windows like we had on Wednesday. Most of the hailstones in my garden were about the diameter of a quarter, like this one...

Though I've read and seen on the news that some parts of NW Austin had some tennis ball-sized hailstones.

When the hail hit the noise was tremendous! You can see a slideshow of the Greater Austin hailstorm here. My property did not have too much apparent damage, other than beat-up plants, but we're still waiting for someone to come out and take a look at our roof. We were very lucky compared to others in the area.

This is the first photo I took during the storm...

Right after taking the photo I sat with my son under the stairs to calm him down until the noise was over. He's been afraid of storms since we were hit by 3 hurricanes in 2004. Poor kid.

Once the hail had mostly stopped I opened the door to get a closer look...

and grabbed a piece of ice for the photo at the top of this entry.

To get a good idea of the force with which this hail actually hit, you may want to watch the amazing video below that I found on YouTube. You can see how high the water splashes in the pool when the biggest hailstones hit. The video was made by someone whose house is relatively near my own as well as Annie's from The Transplantable Rose:

The day before the storm I caught these two doves relaxing on my newly-cleaned container water garden. The pair stayed there until well after dusk. I hope they weren't hurt by the hail.

Of course, crazy hailstorms are nothing new to Texas, as one can glean from reading about Isaac Cline's experience with them in the late 1800's:

"Visitors from the town of Ben Ficklin fifty miles up the Concho came to San Angelo [Texas] and reported that a monstrous hailstorm had struck about ten days earlier, the day of the flood. The storm discharged stones the size of ostrich eggs that killed hundreds of cattle and fell in such volume they filled erosion gulches and piled to depths of up to three feet on level ground." from [p.61] Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson