Viewing the June Night Sky

The month of June has featured a rare planetary alignment for the early riser. 

If you're like me and have to get up to pee before sunrise, if the skies are clear take a few moments to gaze to the East - Southeast.  Beginning with the morning of June 3rd you'd be able to view all five naked-eye planets align themselves in their proper rank order from the sun in the pre-dawn sky.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all in a row.   

This gets better as the month progresses.  Mercury becomes easier to view with the naked eye and with a pair of binoculars or a telescope the notoriously evasive Uranus and Neptune may be visible.  As the end of the month approaches the Moon joins-in on the action.

So whether you're getting out of bed an hour before sunrise to shower and dress before your morning commute, milk your cows or wring-out a kidney you might want to bookmark this page so you can reference what to look-for.

This is a rare event and you've almost the entire month of June to check it out.  Fingers-crossed for clear early morning skies...

Stellarium

The Garden Chronicles

German beer radishes. 

 

First sowing was May 8.

 

First really measurable harvest was today, June 7.

 

These put your ordinary, pedestrian, California radishes that languished for ten days on a truck to shame.

 

Vive le jardin magnifique!

 

Death Pays a Visit

I absolutely hate when this happens.  It's rare - yet it occurs.  A bird strikes a window on the house and is killed from the collision. 

Poof!

In this instance it is a Neo-tropical migrator that is among the last species to arrive in the spring and the first to depart at the close of summer.  An oriole.

An immature, male orchard oriole to be exact.  

It's a fairly common bird, smaller than a Baltimore oriole and characterized as a darker, ruddier bird when it reaches adulthood.  The bird pictured features plumage that is a dull, greenish above, yellow below and a black bib.  That's how to tell it is an immature male.

This is an adult male. 

eBird

Wile E. Coyote

The scientific name for the coyote is Canis latrans – literally barking dog.        

A diurnal or crepuscular creature (namely active during daylight hours or at dawn and dusk) coyotes that reside in closer proximity to people tend to be more nocturnal.  Unless they become habituated to our presence wild coyotes will make every attempt to steer clear of people.   If you were to inquire of a wildlife biologist they would tell you that there are nineteen subspecies of coyote that are exceedingly well-adapted to living in urban, rural and wild America.  

Male coyotes tip the scales at about 44 pounds while females weigh-in slightly less.  For scale my Labs weigh-in at 75 and 80 pounds respectively.  Coyotes dine on large prey and also eat snakes, insects, rodents, fruit and other mast.  As an opportunistic hunter coyotes have been known to prey-upon small pets and livestock.  In an urban setting they will eat garbage and pet food left on a deck or patio.  The coyote is a gregarious animal - socially-inclined - like the wolf.  This is likely a consequence of the need for a family unit or pack of animals combining to bring down large game. 
 
Recent genetic studies suggest that coyotes are not native to the eastern United States - The implication is they largely evolved on the Great Plains.  As the eastern old growth forests were cleared for settlement and agriculture coyotes adapted to the new environs.   It is thought that coyotes dispersed to our neck of the woods early in the twentieth century.  These canids are presumed to have come from the northern Great Plains and are unique in their genetic origins.  Additional coyotes dispersed from here to New England via the northern Great Lakes region and southern Canada meeting in the 1940s in New York and Pennsylvania. These coyotes have inter-bred with gray wolf and Eastern wolf populations adding to their own unique genetic diversity and further contributing to their hybrid vigor and ability to adapt to an ever changing environment.  Coyotes here are known as the Northeastern coyote.   

Song Birds

I have to admit I derive a great deal of pleasure, amusement and satisfaction from the spectrum of songbirds that visit here seasonally and year-round.

This includes, but is not limited-to, a couple of kinds of orioles, goldfinches, house wrens, red-wing blackbirds, norther harriers, sandhill cranes, crows, ravens, cardinals, brown thrashers, ruby-throated hummingbirds, white-crowned sparrows (who passed thru and moved on north), house sparrows, song sparrows, fox sparrows,  indigo buntings, catbirds, bluebirds, mallards, turkeys, tree swallows, barn swallows, robins, blue jays, red-tailed hawks, mourning doves and five kinds of woodpeckers including the raucous pileated pecker that is as large as a chicken!

Sure, I know I missed some.  And a few of these birds don't sing - preferring to caw, squawk, scree, croak or gobble. 

From our walk the other day most of the nest boxes we checked had occupants.

Tree swallow

House wren

Trump Gas

A curious thing happened on the way to the gas pump recently.  A friend of mine messaged me this:

Still missing my Trump gas!  I'm sure Biden gas gets better mileage. 

This is not the first time my pal has voiced this lamentation and fondness for low-price Trump Gas.  Between you and me I think he's twisting my tail.  Giving me a friendly poke and trying to get a rise out of me.  I'm not a Biden guy.  And I was never a Trumper so I'm not gonna take the bait.  But I understand my buddy's sentiment.  We went on a marathon road trip a couple of months ago.  In this order, lodging and gas were the principle expenditures.  We burn only non-ethanol premium grade gasoline in all of our small engines and a trip to town to refill four gas cans set me back $80.  Heck.  Even I like Trump Gas.  But I digress.  

As a recovering financial guy I am both bemused and chagrined from time-to-time by magical wishful economic thinking that seems to find a home on social media; particularly as it relates to the subject of rising gasoline prices. I have FB friends, a minority of which, believe that If only Donald Trump were in the White House a gallon of gasoline would set you back $2.25, give or take.  I'm not making this up.  It is like an article of faith.

If we go back only a few years the price of crude oil and gasoline tanked in early spring of 2020 as the impact of the pandemic laid waste to the global economy AND PEOPLE STOPPED TRAVELING.  Before the Covid crisis 100 million barrels of oil each day fueled global commerce.  As demand fell off of a cliff that dropped by more than 35 percent. Price followed.

Leading up to this was the Saudi-Russian crude oil price war that began a month earlier on March 6, 2020.  Without knowing it in the moment the decision of these OPEC members to blow the lid-off production levels couldn't have come at a worse time.  It was ominously prescient as a novel virus from Wuhan Province had already quietly infiltrated the world population.

Meanwhile, never one to shrink from taking credit where he didn't earn it, Donald Trump had been boasting that he was giving all Americans a tax break with lower oil prices.  In fairness, this is what Trump does.  Cheap Trump Gas = more money in your pocket!  No disagreement from me but sometimes you need to beware of getting ahead of your skis.

For the energy sector all of the elements for a perfect storm were now in place.

In April 2020 the oversupply of oil led to an unprecedented collapse of oil prices forcing the contract futures price for West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI) to plummet from $18 a barrel to around -$37 a barrel.  

Yes, minus $37.  Prices went negative for a brief period of time.

As the coronavirus recession took hold the oil markets imploded from the Saudi-Russian surge on the supply side and the bottom falling-out of the demand side.  American oil companies were furloughing petroleum engineers at a record pace and thousands of additional jobs were being eliminated.  Facing the worse economic downturn in more than a generation even wells were abandoned.  

While consumers were enjoying savings at the pump with Trump Gas - oil patch states like Texas, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado and Alaska  were staring down a calamity of ginormous job losses along with associated tax revenues.  Faced with a re-election campaign, a teetering economy and a perfectly nasty collapse of the domestic oil industry President Trump made the decision to enter the fray and pull his bacon out of the fire with some sort of deal. 

Trump's deal was for OPEC to scale-back their production that year.  This afforded domestic oil producers some welcome breathing space preventing a wholesale collapse of the industry. 

Here we are today. 

It seems like forever (to me at least) since the shit hit the fan.  A pandemic, a deep self-inflicted recession, bad decisions, an election, vaccines, a recovery, hindsight and a population's desire for a return to normalcy while learning to coexist with viral variants.  Not so surprisingly, US crude production has largely returned to pre-pandemic levels.  We remain a net exporter of crude oil to the world.  What has not changed is OPEC production.    

You don't have to take my word for any of this as there is a terrific summary here at Fortune .com that lays it all out for you. 

Donald Trump's deal got OPEC to slash production.  And for the present, that deal remains in place insofar as OPEC production of crude.  A recovering world economy has brought demand back to pre-Covid levels.  And as a consequence of rising demand; absent a growth in supply, prices have risen.  That is what happens in supply demand markets.  OPEC members are reaping record profits.  Can you blame them?

The war in Ukraine has rattled the world oil market causing global prices for crude to soar further complicating and compounding the situation.

I can appreciate consumer frustrations over soaring energy prices and the desire for simple explanations.  If you are a die-hard Trumper Biden is responsible for this.  Inexplicably, he did it deliberately.  The reality is more nuanced.   

Increased Demand + Restricted Supply = Increased Prices 

Some of you aren't going to like reading this but OPEC continues to hold-up their end of the  Trump-negotiated deal. 

There's probably a wee bit of price gouging going-on.  You read it here first you say?  Ha Ha.  It happens.  Although you'd be hard-pressed to locate an oil company executive willing to admit to it.  Domestic energy producers and refiners are reaping record profits.  Can you blame them?  

Given the market conditions in the spring of 2020 my advice would have been to buy on the dip and in particular to increase positions in struggling energy sector shares.  But what do I know?  I'm just a recovering financial guy.

In current news, on Thursday of last week, following furious lobbying on the part of the administration, the group of oil-producing states known as OPEC+ (13 countries that are members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries plus 10 non-OPEC countries) agreed to boost production by 648,000 barrels a day beginning in July and again in August.  This may seem like a big deal but I'm here to tell you it's lip service.  I could be wrong but I don't believe it will have any meaningful impact on the retail price of gasoline.

During the election campaign Candidate Biden vowed to turn Saudi Arabia into a "pariah state" as a consequence of the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi.  Of course, this was long before rising fuel prices became a contributing factor to soaring inflation and Democratic chances in the midterm elections.

The Saudis are not our friends; nevertheless, President Biden will be paying Mohammed bin Salman a call to smooth things-over.  I wonder if anyone is going to say "pariah" out loud.

In conclusion, we can debate government policy and the impact it has on energy markets all day long.  Everything in the paragraphs above covers a period only slightly longer than a couple of years.  That is very short term in the economic world thereby amplifying the roller coaster effect.  In the financial world I learned that most consumers focus only on the roller coaster ride and sometimes you have to talk them off the ledge.  For the more thoughtful of my readers we need to bridge the over-simplified notion of magic Trump Gas.  A more impactful debate might be the veracity of government intervention in the markets, how loose monetary policy is a primary contributor to inflation, shutdowns, bailouts, handouts, politicizing public health, stimulus and other crazy-ass meddling.  That could take all month long.

Stay-tuned......

Friday Music

Likely best remembered as the Rolling Stones’ first hit single this song was released in 1964. Composed by Buddy Holly it was originally recorded by him and The Crickets in 1957. It is characterized by the distinctive Bo Diddley beat. 

The Crickets' recording never charted – nevertheless in 2004 it was enrolled in position 107 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. 

Covering this tune is part of an all-star lineup (Doyle Bramall, Jimmy Vaughan, Robert Earl Keen, Joe Ely, Bonnie Riatt, Gary Clark, Jr., Jeff Bridges, Sheryl Crowe, Lloyd Maines, David Grissom and Brittany Howard ) celebrating four decades of Austin City Limits. 

Crank-up the volume for Not Fade Away…..