Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

Trends in the Landscape
January 4, 2006

Living outside of the city limits is a choice of people seeking less restrictions and more space for their “patria chica.” A county resident can have livestock and small farm animals, a junkyard, a huge garden, or operate their business out of their home. On the Midland Naturalist Audubon Christmas Bird Count I was, as usual, assigned to patrol the roads south of Midland. I know two gentlemen who are running for County Commissioner, so as I eased down the roads at 15 miles an hour while keeping watch for flocks of birds, I thought about how I perceived the perspective a prospective politician might take.

There is no association of county residents – no unified way for effecting needed changes. As I bounced down the rough southern end of County Road 1180 (which has been a washboarded and pothole-filled horror for years) I wondered why it had remained so for so long. Wouldn’t an association of that County Precinct be able to encourage its commissioner to see to the regular maintenance of the road? As my head thudded into the roof of my little truck, I reflected on the independence of county residents, and decided that such an association would probably never happen. Such an association would make a resident feel like they could have a voice, and less likely to resent a commissioner who did not travel the roads of the precinct and proactively find problems.

Some of the neighborhoods are slowly maturing. Where folks first resided in mobile homes, they later built homes and planted trees and grass. Some people move in old homes from town and spend years fixing them up, while living in mobile homes. The rate of development in each neighborhood is uneven – on some lots old mobile homes with windows broken are surrounded by 5 foot tall dead stalks of kochia. On other lots some folks still remain in rented mobile homes, and then the next few lots would look more like a city street with brick homes and fences, paved driveways, big metal shops, barns, and garages. Most folks prefer a wide-open landscape, with trees planted in geometrically spaced rows, but a small percentage are like me, creating a thickly forested copse that hides the houseand yard. Some folks build a maze of pens, sheds, barns, garages, woodshops, welding shops and more.

As a birdwatcher seeking birds I have learned to look for certain landscapes. Anywhere livestock are kept (and especially with a groundlevel watering facility) blackbirds and sparrows come to pick up scattered fallen grain and pick through the droppings of the animals. If there is a weed and brush choked lot nearby, it is even more likely that I will find a flock of birds. Birders soon learn that in winter birds flock together in multi-species flocks for protection from predators. A birder has to look at every bird to find the more unusual birds. The grackles and blackbirds will be on open ground in the livestock lots, while the sparrows, pyrrhuloxias, cactus wrens, curve billed thrashers will be in the overgrown lots. If every sparrow is examined, then four or five species other than the most common white crowned and English sparrows might be found.

Along Monahans Draw more landowners are carving up the salt cedar thickets that became established in the rainy 1980s. With the planting of grain patches in openings in the thickets, the landowners increase the numbers of dove and quail utilizing the sat cedar habitat. They often leave the bulldozed bushes in big brushpiles.to provide even more cover for wildlife. Monahans Draw is already the home to javelina, deer, and an occasional mountain lion. During the 1980s my annual drive usually produced a porcupine or two, but I saw none this time – which led me to wonder if the increasing visitations of mountain lions are responsible! Prairie dog populations continue to expand, and have taken over at least one area where salt cedars were bulldozed.

For some reason, few farmers planted grain fields in 2005, so the numbers of sandhill cranes in Midland County are much diminished. The birders only found a few more than 600, instead of the thousands that have been here in years past. The playas are full of water, so they do have roosting sites available. Despite the rainy year that produced incredible population explosions of rodents, the hawk numbers were down. (One of the purposes of the bird counts is to monitor bird populations, both locally, and on a national scale.) In town, the numbers of species that spend their summers in the mountains were also down – no cedar waxwings, Townsend’s solitaires, or hermit thrushes were found. I had the only robins on the count – the handful that has been plucking juniper berries for a month in my home landscape in the county.

One segment of the county population continues to increase – that of the Hispanic horseman. My neighbors, who drive vehicles advertising their skilled trades, are out working their horses both morning and evening. As I drove I found more than a dozen such landowners, sometimes with sons as young as six years old astride a pony. If my late father had been along he would have had me stop and watch and chat – my grandfather was a cattle drover and rancher for years, and my father’s most indelible childhood memories were of favorite horses and the rides he shared with them west of Calgary. My grandmother lived with us when I was a child, and she often told similar stories – she spent her teen-age years roaming the Oklahoma countryside on Seminole Indian lands on horseback.

I finally headed to the Sibley Nature Center to meet the rest of the birdwatchers to tally up (we found 107 species!) A bee, probably an Africanized bee, accompanied me. Africanized bees do not like small engine sounds. On a day with 75-degree temperatures it was not too surprising for a bee to be buzzing. Nor was it surprising for a tumbleweed to be rolling along beside me – but it made me wonder about the “launch speed” of a tumbleweed. How brisk does the wind have to be before tumbleweeds begin to roll?