Essays

Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities

Breeding Bird Survey east of Iraan
July 31, 2002

The rules are exact: start exactly thirty minutes before sun-up, for three minutes record every bird heard or observed, then drive exactly one-half mile, stop for three minutes, write down every bird moving and singing, drive one-half mile, stop three minutes, and then drive – stop – drive – stop over a pre-determined course of twenty five miles. It takes almost four hours to complete.

Sounds a little bizarre to do, doesn’t it? During late May and the first half of June, amateur birdwatchers all over the United States contribute to science by making almost 3000 breeding bird censuses. The routes and the method of counting were established by the Migratory Bird and Habitat Research Laboratory, a division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thirty-six years of research has revealed the continually change of bird populations in response to land development, climate variability, and habitat changes.

Midland Naturalists (Midnats) participated the first twenty-five years of the program and then after a nine year hiatus began volunteering again in 2000. In the early years Midnats did as many as eight of the surveys. The routes that have been monitored by Midnats stretch across west Texas, from near Del Rio and all the way to the west of Orla on the way to the Guadalupe Mountains. Midnats members Bill Lupardus and Walt Wigzell did the Frankel City Breeding Bird Survey recently. Rosemarie Stortz and her daughter Mary Frances did a new route in Martin County this year, too.

I joined my folks a number of times in the 1980’s. I would ride the hood of the camper truck, keeping a plant list, while my mom did the bird survey. My dad drove. We would arrive at the starting point of a breeding bird survey the evening before, cook supper, and then take long walks along the sides of the road, before sleeping in the camper. Whenever my folks traveled in the American West and much of northern Mexico, they fearlessly camped in flat places along the sides of the backroads. Nobody ever hassled them.

What follows are selected journal entries that I wrote doing the route along the highway from Iraan to Eldorado in 1986.

Stop one; In the east are three curving rows of puffy cumulus clouds, a soft orange on the sunward side, and lighter pink on what should be the shadowed side. Coyotes are calling from two directions, definitely engaged in a call and response chorus. In the draw ahead of us, a few fireflies are still flickering. Somewhere nearby must be a stock tank that provides a soft moist soil for their larvae. At least six mockingbirds can be heard, tuning up in every direction, while two cardinals whistle “Pret-ty, Pret-ty” from the hackberries in the draw. One cassin’s sparrow skylarks in an arc across the prettiest cloud. Three roadrunner males called, each from a different thicket.
Stop nine; On a rocky slope to our left, a herd of javelinas are browsing among the sacahuista clumps. The biggest leads the band. When we stopped she raised her head and stared at us, but after a minute continued butting the base of one of the plants. They eat cactus, not the stringy blades of “devil’s shoestring.” Nolina is the latin genus name , but it has a number of folk names. Basketgrass is yet another name for it. It has long been used by the Texas Highway Department as a landscape plant at rest stops in west Texas.

When my mom slammed the door in preparation for the next half-mile drive, the old sow must have grunted, for all of the javelinas bolted for twenty or thirty yards. As soon as we began rolling they stopped and stared at us, making sure of our departure. My mom played her bird tapes as we drove. One bird song puzzled her at the stop, and she thinks it may have been a Varied Bunting. She has found them another seventy miles south of here, but never this far north. (JoAnn Merritt would document a nest a few years later on a ranch farther north, up close to Rankin.)

Stop 10; We stopped in the middle of a harvester ant lek. Thousands of flying ants hovered along the low road cut and the short little junipers growing out of the crevices of the rock. At the base of the rocks I found a tiny little Lotus. (In recent years the Llano Estacado Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas sold a similar species at their annual native plant sale at the Sibley Nature Center. It is a deciduous ground cover with bright yellow pea flowers.) This plant was the first I had ever seen, so as we drove to the next stop, I flipped through identification books while sitting on the hood of the truck. A short convoy of army vehicles passed and the soldiers had a good laugh at me.

Stop 19; The puffy clouds coalesced, forming a low cloud ceiling. The humidity causes sweat when the truck is stopped, but while driving my skin goose-pimples. Thunder rumbled, but only as a distant tumbling clatter. Another harvester ant lek, this time around a row of mesquites in the fence line, drew a half-dozen western kingbirds, two scissortail flycatchers, and a dozen nighthawks. My mom picked out both species, the common and lesser nighthawks, as they swirled about catching the ants. Males of this species of ant pick particular places to swirl in great numbers, giving off a concentration of the mating pheromones. Virgin queens from dozens of anthills over the surrounding acreage catch the scent, and as they arrive, males began to fly after them as they soar higher and higher. The strongest males are the only ones to mate.

Stop 50; We tallied up as we ate sandwiches prepared before sunrise. One hundred and forty-three species of blooming plants were identified. My mom recorded eleven hundred and sixty-seven birds of thirty-nine species. Mockingbirds were the most common, present at forty-five of the stops. Mourning dove, horned lark, lark sparrow, and meadowlark numbers were the highest ever recorded in the eight years of this survey. The wet spring brought plenty of seeds, so some of the higher numbers might be young of the year already out of the nest. Shrike numbers were down. The breeding bird survey program has documented this as a permanent trend throughout the loggerhead shrike range.

This information led to a grant funded by the Laboratory, which resulted in a researcher coming to Midland in the mid-1990s as part of research that spanned fifteen states. She collected one feather from each shrike she trapped, from which to later analyze DNA. I am so proud to live in the United States – as a society we truly care about the natural world, with thousands of people volunteering to monitor its well being.