June 21, 2026 Deer and Intense Rain
We had a couple of deer, a buck and a doe, up here for hours this afternoon. Then at about 10:00 PM, an incredibly intense thunderstorm hit us. The thunder and lightening had been going on for an hour or so before the rain actually got here.
We first noticed the two deer when they headed underneath Bill’s deck on the west side of the house.
Then Martin noticed them when they wandered onto the front porch, when they stepped in front of the doorbell camera. That’s pretty low resolution, so he shot them through the front door glass with the iPhone 17 camera. They noticed him, but weren’t spooked off.
Still shooting through the glass as they nibble the landscaping.
Ok, just how calm, cool and collected are these deer? Martin opened the door and stepped out and they just looked at him. Of, course, he was so excited that he started shooting before he remembered to close the door.
The doe has wandered off, the buck thinks that at 84°F its too hot to leave the shade!
Just how intense was this rain? At the peak, we were getting a hundredth of an inch (that’s how finely the rain gauge measures) every 5 seconds. When you calculate the rate per hour, that’s over 7” an hour!
We actually only got 0.28 inches of rain in total. Here’s a bit of the weather station’s log:
Date Time Rain(in)
06/21/2026 21:55:38 DST 0.0000
06/21/2026 21:57:02 DST 0.0200
06/21/2026 22:00:00 DST 0.1300
06/21/2026 22:03:10 DST 0.2700
06/21/2026 22:03:22 DST 0.2700
06/21/2026 22:03:35 DST 0.2800
Unfortunately, Martin did not have rain events triggering log events, only wind gusts and the 5 minute log times were creating log events. But as you can see we got the 0.28 inches in less than 8 minutes, with most of it in just a minute or two, the cell wasn’t very big
By the time the internet was working again, at 10:09 PM the cell had moved off of us. The middle yellow above was what hit us. The intense central cell was so small the weather radar couldn’t really see it, so it only colored it a light orange-red instead of black.