Air 2 The desert goes from barren to lush in two weeks

[AZDave]

The drought here in southern Arizona was really bad this year ... a carryover from an almost nonexistent monsoon season last summer. All of the scrub oak trees lost every single leaf, and any grass that was left was so dry even the deer wouldn't eat it. The first video looks like a wildfire blew through here, but that wasn't the case. It was like that through most of May, all of June, and the first two weeks of July. We actually got a few decent rains by mid-July, though, and by the end of the month the trees got their leaves back and the tall grass went from nothing to two feet high. The speed of the rebirth is amazing. The first video is from July 11 and the second video is from August 5, but the rains didn't come until a few days after the first video and the hillside looked the same as the second video a few days before I was able to film it. Both videos were shot at 4K/60fps from a Mavic Air 2 drone in D-Cinelink mode with an ND16/PL filter, and I used the same minor color correction in post editing for each of them.

 

[MS Coast]

I just stumbled across this eight months after you posted it. Nice work. It's very interesting to see the difference in the landscape. I'd hoping to do some similar flights before, immediately after, and a few weeks after a controlled burn in the longleaf pine woods.

The music suits the video very well.

 

[Merrill277]

Amazing what a little rain can do right?

 

[G Randy Brown]

I live in Las Cruces,NM and shoot the Organ Mountains occasionally and I'm always amazed at what a difference a good shower or 2 can make.
Not just visually but the difference in hearing dead quiet to the birds and insects having a party (as short lived as it may be)

 

[AZDave]

I live in Las Cruces,NM and shoot the Organ Mountains occasionally and I'm always amazed at what a difference a good shower or 2 can make.
Not just visually but the difference in hearing dead quiet to the birds and insects having a party (as short lived as it may be)

Ahh yes, the insects. The first couple of rains here bring out the moths like crazy. We have a large (8 feet wide by 5 feet tall) window in our dining room that looks out over the same scene that's in the videos above. If we leave the light on in that room after dark, a day or two after the rains start that window will be literally blanketed with moths to the point you can't see out of it.

The worst part comes a few days later when the noseeums (also called biting midges that do their best to live up to their name) come out. We actually spread a few bug zappers on the floor around the house for them and the mosquitos (kind of an incongruity here in the desert but they seem to manage). We even have a zapper outside on the deck just outside the door, for which the birds seem especially grateful.

The moths pretty much go away after about ten days, but the noseeums and the mosquitos stay until the monsoon season is over.

And then after everything dries out it will be time for me to weedwhack the heck out of the lot (I scalp about three of our four acres) to avoid problems when the wildfire danger kicks in the following spring. Most seasons the "grass" gets about 30 inches high, but one year was literally chest high and was so thick that I wouldn't walk the lot because I couldn't tell if I was going to step on a rattlesnake or not. That's a lot of fuel for a fire.

We get our water from a well so I always look forward to the monsoon rains ... but I always look forward to them going away as well.

 

[G Randy Brown]

ahh yes, the weeds ?
Our place has one of those "desert landscape" yards with rocks and various cutouts for Italian Cypress trees.
Problem is with this much rain the weeds grow thru the plasic sheeting and rock yard