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2008 EXPO Accommodations
Texas Parks & Wildlife has arranged for special rates at the following hotels. Be sure to book by 9/12/08 under the group block “Texas Parks & Wildlife Expo.” Come a day early for the TBS Annual Meeting in Mountain City!
Courtyard by Marriott Airport
7809 E. Ben White Blvd.
Austin, TX 78741
Phone: 512‐386‐7464
Rate: $85
Includes: Continental breakfast, Airport Shuttle
www.marriott.com/ausaa
Hampton Inn & Suites Austin Airport
7712 E. Riverside Drive
Austin, TX 78744
Phone: 512‐389‐1616
Rates: $85
Includes: Continental breakfast, Airport Shuttle
www.hampton‐inn.com/hi/austin‐airport
Hawthorn Suites LTD Austin Airport
7800 E. Riverside Drive
Austin, TX 78744
Phone: 512‐247‐6166
Rates: $85
Includes: Continental breakfast, Airport Shuttle
www.hawthorn.com
Hilton Austin Airport
9515 New Airport Drive
Austin, TX 78719
Phone: 512‐385‐6767
Rates: $109
Includes: Airport Shuttle
www.hilton.com
Holiday Inn Austin Town Lake
20 N. IH‐35
Austin, TX 78701
Phone: 888‐615‐0509
Rates: $139
Includes: Airport Shuttle
www.holidayinn.com/austintownlake
La Quinta Inn & Suites Austin Airport
7625 E. Ben White Blvd.
Austin, TX 78741
Phone: 512‐386‐6800
Rates: $85
Includes: Continental breakfast, Airport Shuttle
www.laquinta.com
Albino Bluebird
Albino fledgling - photo by Barbara Parker
Albino female - photo by Leland Carter
On July 14th, TBS heard about an albino Eastern Bluebird female in Fruitdale accompanied by a full-colored male. For over a week, Leland & Nancy Carter spotted the pair investigating a nestbox in their yard.
Earlier in the season, Cliff Shackelford sent word of two albino Eastern Bluebird chicks in Lukfin at the home of John and Barbara Parker. The TPWD Commissioner and his wife love their nesting bluebirds every spring.
Book Review: Bringing Nature Home
Two years ago, while attending an international wildlife conference, I struck up a conversation with the educational director of a state Audubon Society. In the course of the conversation I mentioned the fact that native plants host the insects that support our migratory birds. The young man, a biologist, challenged my statement.
“Do we know that’s true?” he asked.
He needs to pick up a copy of Dr. Douglas Tallamy’s wonderful new book, Bringing Nature Home (Timber Press, Inc., 2007, $27.95), which recently appeared at bookstores across the country. In it, Tallamy, Professor and Chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, demonstrates the importance of native plants to healthy, viable terrestrial ecosystems. I learned about this book last fall, when I emailed Dr. Tallamy and requested permission to quote an article he had written about the relationship between native plants and the insects they host - and their impact on wildlife, particularly birds. He not only granted permission, he generously sent me a disk with the pre-pub galleys of the book and I’ve been anxiously awaiting it since. It was well worth the wait.
The good professor says in his preface, “Occasionally we encounter a concept so obvious and intuitive that we have never thought to articulate it, so close to our noses that we could not see it, so entangled with our everyday experiences that we did not recognize it.” The concept is that because there is too little space left for the wildlife we care about and love to watch, we must make our yards friendlier to the birds, frogs, butterflies and other wild creatures with which we share this planet. With roughly forty million acres of land in American yards, his is a compelling argument. Tallamy appeals to the gardener in all of us to do just that. Although he says that Bringing Nature Home is not a “how-to” book, in a way, it is precisely that. While he does not attempt to instruct us on which plants to use, he takes us step by important step through the crucial reasoning around why we should - indeed, why we must - return as much of our personal property to native plants as possible. We must do that because native plants do (in spite of the above-mentioned biologist’s doubt) support the insects upon which those same birds, frogs, butterflies (and all the rest of us for that matter) depend.
Dr. Tallamy discovered that link when he and his wife purchased 10 acres in southeastern Pennsylvania. The land, previously farmed, was filled with alien plants such as autumn olive, multiflora rose, Bradford pears and others. The vegetation was so dense they had to cut trails through it in order to get inside of it. Then he took a walk along the trails to look for insects. He found virtually none except on the few natives struggling to survive under the stranglehold of invasives. It was a defining moment for him and he began to present programs to educate the general public about his discovery. The pamphlet he made up to hand out at those presentations eventually grew into the book.
Birders who still support the idea that autumn olive is good for birds—and there are a lot of them out there—will gain insight from the following, “the foliage of autumn olive is inedible for almost all native insect herbivores. A field rich in goldenrod, Joe-Pye weed, boneset, milkweed, black-eyed Susan, and dozens of other productive perennials supplies copious amounts of insect biomass for birds to rear their young. After it has been invaded by autumn or Russian olive, that same field is virtually sterile.”
Filled with beautiful photographs of insects, plants, birds, and hard data presented in an easy to read style, Bringing Nature Home is a book every conservationist should read carefully. And every conservation educator must, as Tallamy himself has done, incorporate its message into his or her material and presentations.
From the Mailbag
We ran out of room to include these in our last issue, but we always love to hear from our members and see their photos! Please send your questions, comments, and photos to Pauline Tom (PTom5678@gmail.com).
From Jamie Murphy
Last summer I had my yard re‐sodded. When the landscapers
came in and dumped tons of dirt all over the
yard, all of these little birds showed up on my window
sills making quite a racket. They are a beautiful indigo
color. I’m not from Texas and had never seen these birds
before, but I believe they could be eastern blue birds. I'd
like to attract them again by possibly putting out feeders,
nestboxes, or baths. Any info you could provide would be
much appreciated.
Thank you,
Jamie Murphy
January 22, 2008
Barn swallows making themselves at home.
Photo by Jamie Murphy
What a gorgeous picture! These are beautiful
Barn Swallows. They build their nests of mud, so the
tons of dirt furnished just what they needed.
This publication gives plans for a Barn Swallow shelf:
www.extension.umd.edu/publications/PDFs/FS798.pdf.
Take care where you place such a shelf because the birds
and the nestlings produce a lot of fecal matter and it
drops to the ground or pavement below the nest. They
often nest on front porches, and folks end up using an
alternate door during the nesting.
As with all wildlife, furnish water. Barn Swallows will
use it to make mud. Barn Swallows also eat flies and
mosquitoes—quite a help in Texas!
If you have a somewhat open space with short grass, you
might want to install a nestbox on a pole to help attract
Eastern Bluebirds.
The resource section
of our website has
several helpful files,
particularly the nestbox
manual “Homeowner’s
Guide.”
You don’t say where
you are in Texas. You
might check our
website to see if you’re near one of the cities where we’ll
have an event in the coming months. We offer a free nestbox
with a $15 membership at these events.
Yours,
Pauline
From Jan Bills
I am overjoyed that I have bluebirds in my backyard.
I put up the birdhouse last fall in hopes they would
come. I am in a new subdivision, so didn't expect them
to make their home with me!!!
Jan Bills (Keller, TX)
February 4, 2008
Jan learned about TBS through our friends at the Wild Bird Center in Watauga. She assists Barb Ohlman, TBS Ambassador in Keller, with monitoring nestboxes and stuffing new member packets.
Special Thanks to...
Janet & Donald Frick, Ed Melson, Joyce Valdez, and Ann Reed for their donations.
Ricky Walker for volunteering to sell TBS nestboxes, placing an ad for the nestboxes in her local newspaper, and donating to our Special Projects Fund.
Norm Shoemaker (coordinator), Barb Ohlman, Ron Tom and Pauline Tom for serving at the Blueberry Festival in Nacogdoches.
Schulz Printing for quality service and discount pricing on Texas Blues.
Sharon Kersten for volunteering to sell TBS nestboxes and checking out the “Start With Five” trail in Groesbeck City Park.
Jennnifer Fleming for preparing 150 renewal letters.
Yoshi Beal for serving as production editor for Texas Blues and helping with many other graphics‐ and computer‐related tasks.
The Dangers of Supplemental Feeding
The following was posted by Pauline Tom on Bluebird-L, June 29, 2008.
Reading through the Bluebird-L digest from Saturday (with several posts about 4th nestings), Julie Zickefoose’s presentation at NABS 2008 in Kearney came to mind. I emailed Julie for clarification, and she very graciously responded with detailed words of the ill-effects of excessive supplemental feeding (shared with her permission):
It was not only the female who got worn out; both male and female bluebirds failed to molt on time and were nearly naked by late August—tailless, with featherless heads and sparsely‐feathered bodies. It was awful, but it woke me up to the reality that my feeding program had overtaxed them. I feel bad that I learned at their expense, but the suet dough experience this spring shows that I still hadn’t learned my lesson.
…Four broods for a passerine that lays three to five eggs per clutch doesn’t make biological sense. If the first clutch is five, the second clutch four, and subsequent clutches are three each, that means 15–18 eggs in a single season from a single female bluebird.
…Without supplementation, the bluebirds on my trail usually stop at two broods. Birds in my yard, which receive some supplementation over the winter and during cold rainy periods in the nesting season, often go for three. There is a contrast between the birds in my yard and the birds out on my trail, and I believe it’s because I help the birds in my yard when it’s rainy and cold, and because the yard is large, stays mown, and has a lot of things like mulberries and sumac.
Feeding mealworms to bluebirds helps us develop a bond with them, but moderation is important.
Photo by Patrick Jedamzik (http://www.flickr.com/photos/patjede/)
What people who enthusiastically feed bluebirds may not understand is that neither suet dough nor mealworms are a balanced, or particularly good, food for them. Mealworms are low in phosphorus and high in fat and protein; and lard is solid fat and loaded with purines, which cause excessive production of uric acid. Rehabbers who raise baby birds and maintain adult birds, including me, avoid mealworms as a staple diet; crickets are much better.
I think that both mealworms and suet dough have their place in judicious cold weather feeding, but I remain skeptical of the ability of most bird‐loving humans— including myself—to limit their feeding to a level that’s good for the birds. It feels good, so we do it, and many people do it to excess. If we could limit it to maybe five worms per bird once a day, or one small single handful of suet dough once a day, it probably wouldn’t do any harm. But what I see more commonly is people who put out mealworms and suet dough several times a day, as I had been doing. I had thought that suet dough wouldn’t cause the harm that mealworms did, but I found, with two birds in my yard developing severe gout, that I was wrong.
I will add that a month after withdrawing the suet dough, the gout has virtually disappeared in both individuals, and they are no longer favoring feet or legs.
I agree that mealworms and suet dough help us to develop a bond with birds, and that’s a wonderful thing. I’ve written thousands of words on that very subject. But I have to make my point rather strongly in order to get the attention of people who might be inclined to poohpooh it as alarmism. The best way to do that is to expose my own error, because then I can’t be accused of having a hidden agenda. My only agenda is to make people aware that bluebirds can be harmed by excessive feeding of any artificial food, and I include mealworms under that umbrella.
As background, I’ve been feeding mealworms since 1985 and suet dough since 2002, and I’ve run a bluebird trail since 1982. That’s 26 years of watching bluebirds closely, taking notes and sharing my observations with many thousands of people. I haven’t come to these conclusions about artificial feeding lightly or easily. I have had to expose my own bad judgment and errors in order to share what I’ve learned.
—Julie Zickefoose
Welcome New Members!
Gabriel Anderson Edward S. Aycock Nancy J. Batzloff Jake & Kam Brewer R.L. Broadwater Andrea Brown Romelle Cleveland Darlene Cobb Lloyd Cole Nancy Davis Bert Dieringer Bobbie & Russell Doty Richard Dove Thomas Downing Joan & Bob Francis Susan Gallager David Greenup Debbie Highfill Betty Hignite Kris Hoepfner James Johnston Bob & Virginia Knibb Michael Kunk Vicki Lindsay Paul Link Sonja Logan John F. Moss Daniel Naone Robert & Melinda Neblett Jacque Nowels Dawn Pace Kristin Paradis Charlene Payne Stacia Pender Peter & Carol Racheotes Larry Rankin Pierre & Sarah Roberts Dr. Bob Rosebrock Billy Russell Elfriede Russell Rebecca Schultz Nina Seifert Ed & Kay Sones Joyce Starovie Cynthia Taaffe Josephine Taylor David Wallace Jimmie L. Watt Lisa West Julia Williamson
No Violation for Removing Cowbird Eggs from Nests
According to Linda McMurry, Program Specialist with Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD), “Brown-headed cowbirds (BHCB) are one of the exceptions to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and as such not protected under the Act. This means Texans are not in violation of the law when they remove the eggs of the BHCB from songbird nests.
“I would encourage bluebirders (and others!) to keep track of this sort of activity. If parasitism by the BHCB is frequent, then I would suggest that folks participate in the cowbird trapping program. Check the TPWD website ( www.tpwd.state.tx.us ) under Wildlife>Nuisance Wildlife for the cowbird pages. We have plenty of variety when it comes to trap plans! You’ll be amazed at all the other songbirds that you’ll suddenly be seeing!”
Photo by Bill Robinette from a 3rd nesting in Ennis. He and Lois contacted TBS about the odd egg
Brown-headed Cowbird nestling with dead Carolina Wren nestlings
Photo by Keith Kridler
Bewick's Wren nest in Mountain City
Photo by Pauline Tom
Nestwatch
Dear Texas Bluebird Society member:
As a friend of bluebirds and other cavity nesters, you understand the importance of monitoring nestboxes. Now you can help build a legacy of vital scientific data by submitting your observations to NestWatch—a new, free citizen science project developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in collaboration with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and funded by the National Science Foundation. Your valuable nest observations will be permanently stored as legacy data along with hundreds of thousands of other nesting records. When combined, these data will provide a wealth of information about breeding birds and the factors that influence their success across different landscapes.
NestWatch gathers information about not only cavitynesters but all nesting birds. You’re already familiar with the process: just visit nestboxes (and nests) during spring and summer to collect simple information about location, habitat, species, number of eggs, and number of young in the nest. The next step is to submit your observations online at www.nestwatch.org. The NestWatch database makes it easy for you to manage and organize your bird nesting records and to see your data alongside everyone else’s!
With this centralized collection of information from across the continent, NestWatch will be able to track changes in reproductive timing and fledging success. Every observation is important in helping measure the impact of such things as climate change and habitat loss. Without you and other like‐minded citizen scientists gathering this information, it would be impossible to track these large‐scale processes.
For more information, including instructions and worksheets, visit www.nestwatch.org. Monitoring nestboxes and understanding the life cyle in the nest is a critical part of efforts to help conserve our precious birds. Support the spread of bluebirds across Texas by building a legacy… one nestbox at a time.
Sincerely, Tina Phillips
NestWatch Project Leader
