When is a Lake not a Lake? – 10,000 Birds

Well, this seems to be our new reality. It may partly be because unusual weather is the only weather that makes it into the news, but it sure does seem that much of the world is now in a never-ending cycle of droughts punctuated by floods. Being a California boy, I closely followed that states historic multi-year drought, followed immediately by last winter’s historic rains. And no sooner had my home state pulled out of its drought, when my current home entered into its worst summer rainy season in decades.

Our rainy season here should begin somewhere between mid-May and Mid-June. It should then rain almost every day, until at least mid-October. And yet, this year, we had almost no rain before June 26th. Things picked up in July, sputtered a bit during August, and then the rains completely stopped after the first year of September.

I have often written about Lake Cuitzeo, the body of water near my city of Morelia, which is, most years, Mexico’s second largest lake. In a somewhat dry year, the western half of Lake Cuitzeo dries up in the spring, just before our summer rains. Two years ago, the lake almost completely disappeared from December through the start of the May rains. But this year, 2023, the lake became mostly dry right in the middle of our supposed rainy season. The photo above this post is of me, standing on the bottom of what should be Lake Cuitzeo.