Yes, the above flute is made from cedar, but he makes them from all different kinds of wood.
Here is another one that he made from maple, the manta ray is made from black walnut.

Those are sooooooo cool!

BEAUTIFUL Lynn

I have not learned to play it yet (I'm not very musically talented though), but it is beautiful just to look at!

Beautiful pics of trees dusted in snow!

Nice pics! Texas has lost a lot of trees because of development, sustained drought and of course, the recent wildfires. The state parks are in crisis mode now. Their budget is very limited these days and the damages from the wildfires were just terrible in some parks. It has brought them to the point of begging for contributions this year. I plan to help as much as I can, but these are hard times and can't do very much.

I have relatives who live in E Texas and I'm hearing the same from them about the loss of trees.
It's a sad plight in a lot of places.

How sad Linda

Last years extreme drought impacted the entire state of Texas; we lost trees too, hardwoods. Very sad. We won't know for sure how many until spring when the leaves reappear.

I enjoyed all the pics.

Lynn, that is a beautiful flute.

Yes, we are worried about the 2 pecans and 2 magnolias in our backyard. The magnolias lost their leaves LONG before they should have. We have 3 crape myrtles, a rose of sharon and a hackberry, too. I'm hoping they will all recover. The Texas Mountain Laurels and Texas Sage are fine, at least so far, but they are all in the garden beds and got watered more often than the big trees did.

In our drought, a little over ten years ago, it sometimes took 2 or 3 years to see the full extent of damage or death of the tree

The rose of sharon and the hackberry should be fine. Not so sure about the crepe myrtles, though. I have a little trouble with them here, but I think it's the soil where I tried to plant them. I am a myrtle murderer, three times. *Sigh*
Even so, I have one more that finally looked good at the end of last summer. If I lose it, I give up.

Hoping for y'all a much better and drought free summer, Marylyn.

Thanks! We hope so, too. It's raining right now, which is very welcome. At some point we will probably become blasé about rain again, but right now it is still a gift. We're slowly moving our way up the drought scale. We were at an "Exceptional drought", but we've made our way through "Extreme drought" to merely a "Severe drought" over the past month. Hopefully this trend will continue!

I hope it does too Marylyn. and I doubt that you'll ever take rain for granted again. Even when it rains here for days on end, I'm so afraid to complain because the memory of the drought is so vivid. I remember being asked what I wanted for my birthday in 2000 which was year two of the drought and I said RAIN

I lived in TX from 1989-2001 and swore I would never complain about rain again. That vow lasted through the summer of five hurricanes that drenched the ATL area, but in 2009 I found myself reluctantly complaining. That was the year my area got 10" of rain in 2 days, and I have a septic system. Saturated septic fields are not fun. I think it was 3 days before the septic field dried out enough for me to be able to have fully functioning plumbing again.

Hoping for real drought relief for you, Marilyn.

I've seen quite a few weather reports of rain in eastern Texas, but has the western part seen much relief?

Karen

We once had a foot of rain in one day here. We have a septic system, but we live on the side of a hill, so water just runs downhill. A lot of the gravel from our hillside gravel driveway ended up in street...and the dry creek became a raging torrent that flash flooded, keeping people from driving the road that crosses it for a while. Then more rain in the week that followed. That was the year (2002) that they actually thought that Medina Lake's dam might fail and evacuated some people downstream on the river from the dam. Medina Lake is about 10 miles away from us, I think, but we're up on the hilly side in that area.

Were you there for the 18" of rain in one weekend? I want to say it was 1997 or 98...gonna go with 1998, based on which job I was working at hte time -- September-ish as I recall. I was flying out that morning, and had to drive myself to the airport cause no taxis could get to where I was.

You can see how the whole country is doing here: http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/... Click on a state and it will show that region, and you can select just a state from there with the county borders showing. They update the map every Tuesday.

Oops.. they update it on Thursdays. Sorry.

Marylyn, thanks. Good to know!