It wasnt before:
You forgot to post the log lines that appear when run above query (after a fresh restart)!
Thats when the recursive action starts.
EDIT:
And please use the --follow instead of above one?
You can even print the date when digging to correlate:
date; dig pi-hole.net @127.0.0.1 -p 5335
Dont mind above, the date/time is already shown in the dig stats: