Abilene Trail Chronicles

Oh no! Not another moth to feed!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:53:00 +0000

This beauty showed-up last night just before midnight. According to Audubon, it's an Imperial moth (Eacles imperialis), a pretty common member of the giant silkmoth family.

It's about the same size as the Vine sphynx moth I wrote about earlier.

Some adult moths, such as sphynx moths, drink nectar. This one, in its adult stage, has only vestigal mouth parts and no digestive tract.

Males use their broad antennae to scent pheremones emitted by the females (sometimes a mile or more away). The adults breed, the females lay eggs on the underside of leaves, and then they die. It all happens in about a week.

Imperial moths, so-called for the purple splotches on their wings, are one of about 1,500 described species of the family Saturniidae. They're considered common below the Mason-Dixon line.

TPWD's invertebrate biologist, Mike Quinn, recently posted a photo of an almost identical moth at BugGuide.net.

It might be time to get a visible ultraviolet bulb -- a "blacklight" -- and sheet and hang 'em in the back yard. No telling what else might show-up.

Tiny Bubbles

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:45:00 +0000

About six weeks ago my brother John bestowed upon us a rescued animal, a checkered garter snake (Thamnophis marcianus) my son Patrick promptly dubbed "Mr. Bubbles." John, in the course of his duties as a police officer, had plucked it from a terrified housewife's porch.

The snake readily gobbled goldfish (the $ .12 kind, bred to be fed), was nice to look at and seemed to be doing just fine in a cage in the garage.

I've always been fascinated by snakes; their colorful patterns and glossy keratin-coated skins, their behaviors too, but mostly just the fact that they're here at all.

More than 2,700 species of snakes burst out of the Paleocene about 60 million years ago. Today they range across every continent except Antarctica. Some are marine reptiles, some live in trees, some live nearly their entire lives underground. None have external limbs and that's what I find so fascinating: they're basically bellies with mouths and some highly specialized senses, and they've been incredibly successful.

I fed our newest snake four medium-size goldfish right before we left on vacation last week, checked on her with a cursory glance the night we returned and woke up yesterday to a snake cage crawling with miniature replicas. Fourteen tiny Bubbles, to be exact.

When he dropped her off weeks ago, John mentioned the snake might be gravid, thought she felt heavy. After seeing no eggs for weeks and weeks, I kind of forgot about the possibility.

Just like I forgot that garter snakes are viviparous, meaning they give live birth. Some of the newborns still have tiny threads of placenta attached to their belly buttons (I know, I know ... snakes with belly buttons; crazy, eh?).

What the heck do baby garter snakes eat? Smaller fish, says the man at PetSmart. So we load up on red comet minnows, some bigger fish for mom (Mrs. Bubbles, we now assume) and brought it all home. Bubbles devoured her five big goldfish, but the newborns didn't seem to know quite what to do.

Finally, the first one figured it out. Then another. Now only about six of the minnows are still swimming.

In the wild, checkered garter snakes eat all sorts of things -- amphibians and fish, worms and mice -- whatever they can get to hold still long enough to swallow. They can grow to as long as 4 feet, but 24-inch specimens are much more common. That's about Bubbles' size.

Mrs. Bubbles is still pretty skittish around human hands, and likely will never be entirely tame. The babies, though, have no fear of humans and are perfectly comfortably climbing onto a hand reaching into their enclosure.

Because they're relatively docile -- the captive-born animals, anyway -- and easy to keep, checkered garter snakes are common in the pet trade. A quick Internet search uncovered a handful for sale at $15-$30 apiece.

Patrick's not sure what he wants to do with the little ones. He thinks maybe his friend Spencer will take one, if Spencer's mom says okay. Some will probably be set free to patrol our backyard and greenbelt once they're past Blue jay snack-size.

That's going to leave a lot of tiny Bubbles ... anyone want a snake?

Things that fly at night

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:34:00 +0000

I've been hearing our resident screech owls more often lately, almost always between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. The whinnying "B" song seems to be the preferred call right now, though I sometimes hear the soft, trilling "A" song too.

I'll get my own audio of both sounds one of these nights to throw up here. Maybe even a photo, if I'm lucky.

Sometimes I hear owl sounds that are neither but seem to be from the same birds. Do Western and Eastern Screech Owls hybridize here?

I have no idea what the difference in sounds means, whether one is territorial and the other is a mating call or just what. And I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment.

As I sit and read on the back porch, another flying critter has just dropped in. I noticed because it threw a bat-sized shadow across my page.

It's a huge, resplendent moth that I initially identified as a white-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata), which I've seen here (and afield nearby) before and we call a "hummingbird moth" in these parts.

On second thought, though, I'm going to call this one a Vine sphinx (Eumorpha vitis), a related hawk moth common to the Gulf States. It really is quite striking. The caterpillars eat, well, the leaves of vines -- grape vines, as you might guess from the species name, but also Virginia creeper, seasonvine and grape and oak ivy.

This moth has huge eyes and looks quite fierce, though it's a twilight and night-time nectar feeder. When I approached it with the camera several times, it assumed a defensive stance on each occasion and put one foot forward, as if preparing to box.I like the little feller.

Pretty soon I'll turn that false moon off so he can navigate off into the night.

Listening to the Jays, Again

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:53:00 +0000

One of my very first posts to this blog was about a snake I caught just a glimpse of after belatedly realizing the shrill alarms of the blue jays in the backyard actually signified something.

Today, when jays, wrens and even a few feathered thugs went into a frenzy in the big cedar at the back of the yard, I was a little quicker on the uptake. Grabbed my camera and headed out the back gate and ....

Stood there, looking dumbly around my feet, for whatever was making the birds so nervous. Finally, I turned my eyes skyward, and there it was: a long, shiny, mostly black form draped across several green-needled branches.

The Texas Rat Snake (Elaphe obsoleta lindheimeri), also commonly called a "chicken snake" is quite common through much of the state, and its presence near the top of a tree is explained by a taste for eggs and baby birds. And that, in turn, explains the mobbing behavior of adult birds programmed to protect their nests.

Rat snakes can be quite beneficial, as they are voracious eaters and small rodents feature prominently in their diets. They subdue prey by constriction.

Unlike the closely related Corn snakes of the North American pet trade, rat snakes are nasty-tempered creatures. Not venomous, but certainly toothy. Even knowing this, today I actually walked back to the house for a rake, thinking I would be able to dislodge the snake and capture it.

My brother, John, who shares my interest in herps -- in fact has taken it much further than I ever did -- says "not a chance."

"I once climbed 25' in an oak tree chasing one," he e-mailed today. "Once you do find one you can catch, you will get bitten, you will bleed and it will shit all over you as it thrashes it's tail."

By the time I returned to the tree, the snake was gone or successfully hidden. Lucky me, eh?

Missing, Presumed Eaten

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:18:00 +0000

I hate to say it, but I don't think Leo is coming back.

Leo's a male Yorkshire terrier, and his name is scrawled on a large, neon poster taped to the streetlight down at the corner. The Yorkie joins a pair of Lhasa apsos and at least a brace of beloved cats in the neighborhood's milk carton gallery. All this in the past couple of weeks.

I'm pretty sure we're not dealing with a ring of sneaky, sadistic pet thieves. What all these animals have in common are two things: size (small, some might even say "snack" size) and proximity to one or or more of the floodplain greenbelts in the area.

While walking Pete over the weekend, Tamara met a neighbor walking her own dog, and she mentioned that she's been hearing coyotes lately.

Lately? I've heard them off and on since we moved in last summer.

A study in Chicago found that domestic cats make up only a bit more than one percent of urban coyotes' diets; small rodents top the list for prairie wolves in the city, just as they do in rural areas, followed by fruit and deer (each coming in at less than a quarter of the food items found in coyote scat). According to this study, coyotes ate more grass than cats.

In Los Angeles County, local authorities warn residents to keep their cats indoors: "Keep small pets (cats, rabbits, small dogs) indoors. Don't allow them to run free at any time. They are easy, favored prey. Some coyotes hunt cats in residential areas. "

What everyone agrees on is that coyotes are among the most adaptable predators in the world, and there are more now -- in more places -- than there were 200 years ago, despite extensive efforts to control the species.

Coyotes breed in Feb. and March, giving birth to litters of 3-12 pups about two months later. So, we're entering the high food demand period for the wild dogs -- a time when kitties and ankle-nippers look particularly tasty.

Pets are definitely on the menu in Austin.

Here's one of my favorite news ledes ever, in a recent Austin American-Statesman story by Claire Osborne:

Thor, a Chihuahua, barked as he charged out to his Shoal Creek backyard about 3 a.m. on a January morning. That was the last time his owner, Kay Aielli, saw him.

Maybe it's just the juxtaposition of that name, Thor, and the word chihuahua.

In the same story, Randy Farrar, a biologist with the Texas Agrilife Extension Service -- Wildlife Services (and all-around okay guy), joined a City of Austin animal services official in blaming an abundance of available pet food for the recent rash of puppy snatchings in central Austin.

Farrar agreed, saying that coyote droppings he recently found in the area were "100 percent pet food."

"The last coyote I caught was a female on Feb. 19 that weighed 33 pounds, which is pretty large," Farrar said. "She looked well-fed."

Well, yeah ... Chihuahuas can go, what, 7-10 pounds apiece? I guess the definition of "pet food" depends on how you parse those sentences.

Rest in peace, little Leo. And Thor. And Mr. Jingles.

But don't blame the coyotes. They're just doing what they do -- what they've always done -- and we've only made it easier for them, bringing the supermarket to their doorsteps.

[Okay, just so you know, I don't really think it's funny that anyone has lost a beloved family pet. The little girl who knocked on our door, passing out flyers asking for information on her cat, was near tears, three days after the feline disappeared. And I love dogs. I love big dogs more, and Pete's a brute so I don't much worry about him getting snatched, but I do love dogs. I do think it's rather amusing that folks are actually shocked that coyotes are prowling our neighborhoods and preying on animals smaller than them. They're, you know, predators. Second photo by Steve Jurvetson. Photos licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License]

Worldwide Celebrity!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:14:00 +0000

So, before I took a weeklong sabbatical from the office to work on my captain's license, I get an e-mail out of the blue (the color of my email background page) from Simon Busch of the Financial Times. Of London.

It's sort of like ... The Wall Street Journal of Europe. Maybe bigger.

Simon writes a column for that paper called "Outside Space," and he'd been reading this blog and wanted to conduct a phone interview for an upcoming article on wildscaping.

Once we finally connected, I think Simon was a bit disappointed the most exotic wildlife we've seen yet was a couple of raccoons. I assured him we've heard coyotes and that a mountain lion is not completely out of the question.

I'm pretty sure he's the first journalist to tell me an article will appear "a fortnight Saturday." That's, um, "two weeks from Saturday" in Texan. This coming Saturday, in fact.

At any rate, it was fun to be on the interviewee end of the arrangement for once, not talking about dead babies or fish kills or boating accidents.

Raptors

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:57:00 +0000

I'm notoriously bad at identifying raptors. Caracaras and the common vultures I get every time. Ospreys, too. Bald eagles -- the adults, at least -- are hard to miss. I can reliably make a kestrel, and I once saw a wild Aplomado falcon.

Many of the others, though, are just a jumble of talons and hooked beaks and barred-striped-spotted underparts. I'm pretty sure I've assigned many birds that didn't belong to the Red-tailed hawk clan, though I've likely misidentified far fewer Red-tailed hawks as something else.

Today at lunch I was sitting quietly at the table on our back porch, reading, when I heard a commotion at the bird feeder. I looked up to see a very noisy male cardinal. Nice. Then, I saw a grayish blur flutter across the back of the yard -- heard it too; White-winged dove, I assumed.

A minute or so later, a chunky bird landed on the fence just a dozen feet away. I glanced up, thought "dove," and went back to my book. Then it dawned on me: that was no dove. I look again, to find a smallish hawk peering back at me. The hawk sat on the fence for more than a minute, then hopped into the neighbor's photina bush, fluttered back to the top, peeked at me again, and then flew off.

The whole while I was intensely cataloguing: dark gray/black head and back, rusty barred chest, wide stripes on tail, dark beak, faint eyebrow stripe ....

As soon as the bird flew off, I dashed inside for the books. I turned first to the falcons, because of it's small size and longish tail -- and also the fact that it was hanging around my backyard. Nothing there fit the bill, so I started flipping through the pages.

As best I can tell, our visitor was a Sharp-shinned hawk, which looks much like a Cooper's hawk, only smaller. It's no surprise, then, that Sharp-shinned hawks -- winter visitors in this part of Texas -- primarily eat songbirds. I hope it doesn't too terribly often, but I'd be glad to see it again that close when I have a camera at hand.

Today's hawk was the second bird-eater to visit the neighborhood in recent weeks. Several weeks ago, on several different nights, a pair of Great horned owls held a hoot-off all across the back of the yard and into the greenbelt. It's mating season for Great-horned owls, and mating season is when they are the most vocal.

Great horned owls dine on their little cousins, Eastern screech owls, among other critters.

[Red-tailed hawk in flight, photo ©2006 Walter Siegmund, used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. Illustration of Sharp-shinned hawks in the public domain.]

Habitat #2362

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:00:00 +0000

You probably couldn't tell it by looking at our backyard today, on this shortest day of the year, but the little bit of work we did to modify what we inherited paid off.

In the mail a month or so ago we received a "Texas Wildscapes" Backyard Wildlife Habitat certification, a "Best of Texas Backyard Habitat" certificate of merit, and a National Wildlife Federation "Backyard Wildlife Habitat" certification.

That's a lot of paper.

It was a useful exercise, helping us think-through decisions about what to plant and where; what to take out and what to leave. But to answer my buddy Vince's question: No. There's no tax break, no monetary reward ... just the satisfaction of knowing we are deliberately inviting wildlife into our little patch of Texas.

As the winter here progresses in fits and starts, House sparrows have finally shown-up. My favorite orange-fronted woodpecker has been MIA the past few weeks, but the chickadees and titmice and doves and wrens are still about.

The maple trees dropped their leaves after a short but showy color change. The Red oak is still hanging on to its russet cover.

The newest mammal sighted in the backyard, Canis lupus familiaris (Pete, the dog), apparently has deterred ol' brer' 'possum. Ed and Maria next door are pretty happy about that.

Murder most fowl

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:54:00 +0000

Patrick really wants to believe it was an accident. The evidence says it was not.

There's the blood splatter: a dark stain on weathered wood, and oak leaves speckled with red.

There are the feathers: primary and secondary flight feathers and the sort of small, downy feathers found close to a plump breast.

There are the signs of a struggle: scuffed and gouged leaf litter, near the scene of the crime (Patrick's playhouse).

It appears to me that the victim was a white-winged dove, one of the dozen or so pass through the yard regularly and even roost in our oaks.

I'm no detective, but I've read plenty of mystery novels. I know that to solve this crime, I must consider three things: motive, means and opportunity.

Motive: there are a couple of possible motives; hunger is a good one, and a fat dove is a pretty tempting meal. Doves, as previously noted, also are the thugs of the perching bird world. I suppose it's possible another animal finally just got fed up and extracted bloody revenge. But let's go with the first possibility as the most likely.

Means: Dispatching a dove requires a certain quickness, as well as sharpness of both tooth and claw. It's possible the bird was caught on the roost, in which case some climbing might be involved. It's also possible that the bird was ambushed on the ground, in which case stillness and patience come into play.

Opportunity: Well, the doves are here pretty much 'round-the-clock. When they roost, they are not particularly observant. So it could have happened just about any time, but I'm betting it was under the cover of darkness.

After careful consideration, I'm ruling-out the neighbor cat. He doesn't seem particularly motivated, comes into our backyard only rarely and I've never seen him muster the energy to be interested in a bird.

The possums that visit our backyard certainly have the means and opportunity, but they too seem much more opportunistic than savage. They'd rather grub around in the ground and pick up leavings than actually hunt something.

That leaves the raccoons. Great climbers, and they usually show up in gangs, and they have excellent eyesight, sense of smell and climbing ability.

Opinions?

More cool birds

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:52:00 +0000

I must be getting old. My brother reminded me this past weekend that I'd given him a hard time last year about sitting out back of his new house, drinking coffee and watching the birds.

"You're getting to be just like Dad," I said.

Seems like we're both getting to be just like Dad.

Papa lives in Longview, and from his back porch he watches several varieties of woodpeckers, mockingbirds and thrashers, jays and cardinals, doves and I'm-not-sure-what-else. He is engaged in a running battle with the squirrels. They have their own feeders in the yard, but still try to get to the bird food. His latest ploy is to smear the bird feeder poles with axle grease.

Pineywoods humor, I guess.

Our backyard bird count is up to ... 14 species, now, not counting the vultures that wheel overhead. With the arrival of the first real cold front of the year, I'm looking forward to seeing more northern species push through on their seasonal journey south.

A recent repeat visitor to the yard is a single golden-fronted woodpecker. It's quickly become my favorite, with its bright orange nape patch and finely detailed black-and-white back. It's the only bird in the yard that will take on the thuggish white-winged doves.

The other day, the woodpecker left the suet feeder and flew right at a dove parked on a nearby branch. There was a feathery explosion, the dove departed post-haste, and the woodpecker returned to the feeder.

I quietly applauded.

I often hear the golden-fronted woodpecker before I see him, a soft "churrrr-kek-kek-kek," or sometimes the knocking of his bill as he tests various oak limbs for soft spots and insects.

He's recently discovered the peanut butter I left smeared into the crevices of an oak tree. It was gone after three visits.

TPWD ornithologist Cliff Shackelford recently helped me identify another "new" bird to our backyard -- a pair of Lesser goldfinches. There are lots of small yellow birds in Texas -- finches, warblers, vireos -- and it's going to take me a while to sort them all out, I'm afraid.

Home for lunch one day last week, I counted 10 species of birds in the backyard at the same time. That was not only fun to watch, but pleasant to listen to as well; it was a riot of birdsong.

Another work colleague, Bruce, who produces TPWD's PBS show, suggested a neat trick using the call of the Eastern Screech Owl. Twice I've been able to call one of the resident owls in to the back porch by playing the "A" song (see "The Owl Pages" link in the column to the right).

Bruce suggested playing it during the day, beneath a low-hanging limb.

Songbirds of all types seem to be powerfully motivated to harass a raptor should they come across one, and owls are frequent targets of this mobbing behavior.

Sure 'nuff, by playing a loop of the owl song on my laptop (strategically placed underneath a low-lying bush), I soon had a dozen birds of half a dozen species lined-up in the vicinity. Pretty cool.

[Top to bottom: Golden-fronted woodpecker, Carolina chickadee, House finch, Lesser goldfhinches (with a female house finch), Carolina wren]

Wildscaping

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:04:00 +0000

Shortly after moving in to our Abilene Trail digs, Tamara and I decided that we would "wildscape" the backyard.

Two programs in Texas provide guidance for wildscaping: the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's "Texas Wildscapes" program, and the National Wildlife Federations "Certified Wildlife Habitat" program.

The programs are similar, in that they seek to promote the use of native and well-adapted plants to provide food and cover for wildlife, and provide guidance on the creation of water sources and space that birds and other animals need.

Or, as the TPWD site says:

Texas Wildscapes provide the essential ingredients for a variety of wildlife – food, water, shelter, and space. This is done by planting and maintaining native vegetation, installing birdbaths and ponds and creating structure. Feeders can supplement native vegetation, but can never replace it. The goal is to provide places for birds, small mammals, and other wildlife to feed and drink, escape from predators and raise their young.

It's possible to get certification from both organizations through the "Best of Texas Backyard Habitat" program. The standards are a bit higher -- requiring evidence of active conservation and environmental protection measures -- but well within reach of just about anyone.

We turned-in our application at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Expo in early October.

The first step was to inventory what we already had. I was surprised to discover that nature had already done most of the work for us. For instance, as I looked more closely at the understory in our live oak groves, I discovered that it consisted mostly of yaupon, netleaf hackberry and Mexican (or Texas) persimmon -- all excellent food sources for birds and mammals.

Trees, Shrubs and Vines of the Texas Hill Country, by Jan Wrede, was a big help in identifying some of the understory. It is hands-down the most informative and useful field guide we've added to our library yet. Not only is it useful for identifying plants, it also goes into great detail about what animals use the plants for food and shelter.

I was able to identify the kind of scary-looking climbing vine with the spikey seed pods as pearl milkweed, a larval food source for the milkweed tiger moth and the monarch butterfly. Good to know. It's the alkaloids in milkweeds that make monarchs unpalatable to birds, by the way, and one reason so many butterflies mimic the monarch's colors and pattern.

For the Best of Texas designation, it's not enough to luck into undisturbed native vegetation that is good for wildlife; the NWF also wants to see some active management.

To that end, and also because our backyard is important to two-legged mammals (people) as well, I cleared the spreading branches of one of our ashe junipers to head-height. That made some room for Patrick's swing (before, he ran the risk of impaling himself on a branch) and gave us space to plant some perennials we like.

The cut branches -- some of them, anyhow -- went into brush piles around the backyad that will provide cover for all sorts of critters.

We opted for Dwarf firebush (a favorite food source for Zebra longwing butterflies), Turk's cap (a native beloved of hummingbirds and butterflies alike) and American beautyberry, a great natural bird feeder.

Along the fence, we planted several varieties of passionflower vine. Within weeks, tiny orange-and-black Gulf fritillary caterpillars appeared on the leaves. The caterpillars are voracious, but the vines seem to keep up.

How to provide water was the first real challenge we faced. Our long-range plan is to build a rock pool with a small waterfall -- providing still and moving water at various depths. In the meantime, we picked-up an extra-large plastic planter dish and nestled it in a jumble of native limestone beneath a Chinese variegated privet that the birds seem to love.

The water dish has been a big hit, and we see more birds in the backyard -- and a greater variety -- than before it was installed. A possum has made the water dish a regular stop on his nocturnal rounds of the yard, and squirrels follow a branch bridge from the neighbor's yard every morning to drink.

Together with a commitment to abstain from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in our yard, a growing compost bin along the back fence and a few other measures, the few improvements we've made appear to qualify us for the "Best of Texas" designation.

The payoff, though, is not the certificates we expect in the mail any day now, nor even the satisfaction of knowing we're being good environmental stewards. It comes every morning as we sip coffee on the back porch and watch the birds, and each evening as we tip back cold beers and reflect on our good fortune in finding a little bit of the country in the city.

Lizards!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 18:32:00 +0000

I worried, shortly after we moved into the new house, that we had neither seen nor heard any lizards or geckos. I've always been fond of lizards, and I had looked forward to the chirping song of the warty little Mediterranean geckos that are so common throughout Central and South Texas.

For the longest time, they eluded us. Then, one day as we were walking out the front door, Tamara knelt and scooped a baby gecko off the floor before gently releasing it in the monkey grass out front.

Only a day later, I heard a rustling in some live oak understory, and looked up to see the little guy pictured here. It's a green anole (properly the "Carolina anole"), the small, native iguanid we called "chameleons" when we were kids, for their ability to change from green to brown and back again.

The geckos are well-established imports, another critter that has raced across the southern U.S. since its accidental introduction at ... Galveston? New Orleans? Miami? I don't know where the first gecko stepped off a ship or out of a shipping container, but I'm not unhapy they're here.

I think they complement, rather than compete directly with, the native anoles.

One of four species of "house geckos," Mediterraneans are another species -- like Great-tailed grackles -- that have a long association with human population centers. They're rarely found very far away from human habitation.

And, unlike green anoles, which are diurnal, Mediterranean geckos hunt primarily at night and in particular around outdoor lights. Where they're prevalent, it's not unusual to see half a dozen or more gathered on a vertical wall or window screen, waiting for moths and other bugs that flutter around the light.

Since the first sighting last week near the front door, we've spotted two more very young geckos on the back porch.

I'm still puzzled why, for nearly a month, we saw no lizards or geckos, and now we've seen four juveniles all in the space of a week. It could be that the snakes, mentioned in another post, have been gobbling the adults or that the chatter of jays that periodically hunt through the backyard have been picking them off.

It could be something else.

Whatever caused their absence, I'm happy to have some here now. Lizards and geckos, like frogs and newts, can be useful barometers of ecological conditions. A happy, healthy lizard population in the backyard might tell us that our backyard is doing okay.

Poopy bird of paradise

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:17:00 +0000

In the last decade of the last century, I recall being excited about my first trip to Panama: Birds!, I thought. I'll see lots and lots of cool, exotic birds.

And it's true that there were noisy flocks of parakeets, usually moving too fast and too high to see clearly; an elegant trogan showed itself on a nature trail at Howard Air Force Base. And the pendulous, woven nests of orioles were abundant.

Some native Panamanians proudly pointed out the Brown pelicans in the canal, and bird books spoke glowingly of the prolific black vultures. But I grew up with both in Texas.

Mostly what I saw were grackles. Lots and lots of raucous, strutting, crapping grackles. Just like the ones we have at home.

In Panama, though, they somehow took on a more exotic, tropical cast. Male Great-tailed grackles are, without a doubt, handsome birds. With their flamboyantly long, keeled tail feathers, irridescent black plumage and piercing golden eyes, they look like something from far away.

I grew up with both the golden-eyed Great-tailed grackle and the dark-eyed Boat-tailed grackle on the middle Texas coast. The Boat-taileds prefer the marshy, coastal areas, and are common along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic seaboards. The Great-taileds frequented the ferry landing and beaches and the Whataburger and Dairy Queen parking lots.

Cliff Shackleford, TPWD's resident ornithologist, refers to the slightly smaller Boat-tailed grackles as "the good grackle."

"Boat-taileds are never the nuisance like the great-tailed ... they stick to natural habitat and aren't interested in eating discarded french fries in a fast food parking lot like great-taileds," he wrote to me in an e-mail. "One of the only times, however, that I've seen boat-taileds feed on pavement was shortly after Hurricane Rita in Sabine Pass when the local marshes were all flattened by the storm."

Recently I've seen small flocks of Great-tailed grackles -- usually mixed with another imimigrant, the European starling -- moving through the back yard on Abilene Trail, but none have yet come home to roost or nest.

Great-tailed grackles are fairly recent arrivals in Central Texas. Unlike starlings, famously introduced by a Shakespeare buff in Central Park, and unlike Austin's Monk parakeets (a breeding population was established by escapees), grackles appear to have gotten here on their own.

Their natural range expansion has been astonishing. In the 20th century, the species exploded out of its sub-tropical toehold in extreme South Texas and by 1920 was resident in Austin. In 1938 it was recorded in Waco, and by the 1950s it was established in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

By 2000, Great-tailed grackles had established breeding populations in Wyoming and Oregon. Oddly, the birds' movement has been mostly north and west; it still hasn't moved much farther east than Arkansas or Louisiana.

Many theories -- including global warming -- have been advanced as reasons for the species' amazing range expansion. The availability of food in both agricultural and urban settings no doubt contributes to the birds' success.

Historical accounts link grackles to Aztec communities in the 1500s; they still seem to find human population centers convenient for all sorts of things.

The birds are highly social, and typically roost and nest in large flocks. Trees in parking lots are particularly popular evening refuges, and a common sight in Austin is a cloud of the large, black birds descending noisily on a parking lot live oak. They just keep coming and coming, until one wonders how there can possibly be room for even one more bird.

Which brings me back around to the title of this post: savvy shoppers avoid parking late in the day beneath the trees that dot our appealingly landscaped shopping centers in Central Texas. To do so is to invite a certain trip to the car wash.

[Wiki Commons photo taken by Patrick Coin]

Mother of Thousands

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 18:20:00 +0000

It is a succulent driven to succeed, and for the longest time, we just called it "the alien plant." In fact, we didn't know what it was. We did know that the plant thrives in the King William District of San Antonio.

It thrives just about anywhere it is set down for more than four or five minutes. One gardening forum poster wrote that the plant took over a soil-less cement patio in Florida. I believe it.

Kalanchoe daigremontiana, also called "Mother of Thousands," "Pregnant Plant," "Devil's Backbone" and "Mexican Hat," is native to Madagascar.

Drought-tolerant, the plant is sometimes touted as a candidate for xeriscapes. The green leaves are often mottled with a darker -- almost reptilian -- pattern on the undersides. The plant blooms ... well, it could be just about anytime: ours bloomed in the spring, but others claim winter and even summer. The blooms themselves are showy, usually red or orange or purple, and last quite a while.

Why it has blooms at all is another question. It's not like the Mother of Thousands needs them. The common name of the plant refers to the fact that it is viviparous. It has a remarkable habit of forming "plantlets" (technically, "bulbils") at the margins of its leaves. These baby plants will develop roots and, when they're ready, separate from the mother ship and colonize wherever they happen to land.

Here's what the literature says about propogation methods for this plant: By dividing rhizomes, tubers, cormsor bulbs; from leaf cuttings; from herbaceous stem cuttings; from softwood cuttings; from seed; by simple layering; from bulbils.

In other words, just about any way you care to try will likely produce more plants.

One tradition, reported from both the American South and from Cuba, is to pin a leaf to a window curtain where it will live in near-perpetuity and produce plantlets ready for transplantation.

The incredible "life force" (as one of Tam's friends aptly put it) of this plant is the primary reason we decided this week that it does not have a place in our planned succulent garden. It wasn't hard to envision ranks of alien plants spreading across the greenbelt.

It's just not safe to keep them outside. In fact, the plant is highly toxic to all sorts of critters, including humans.

Australia has reportedly banned the propogation of "Mother of Thousands" because it is so invasive, and the government there is on a mission to eradicate it from the landscape.

But we do think it's an awfully cool plant. One will live on as a house plant upstairs. And if anyone wants some plantlets, just let us know.

'Bird of Peace' my shiny, white hiney ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 02:28:00 +0000

Doves are thugs. No kidding.

My dad had told me some stories of the Eurasian collared doves that regularly beat-up on everything from grackles to jays at his backyard feeders when my folks lived in West Texas.

Turns out our native white-winged doves are just punks with plumage as well. Dove hunting season in Texas starts in about two weeks, by the way. I'm just sayin' ....

I've noticed over the past couple of weeks that when our resident white-wingeds fly down to the feeder, other birds take off. Titmice and chickadees are tiny, and commensurately skittish. But jays and cardinals also give way.

This afternoon, one dove (I'm pretty sure he was a gang member) beat the bird snot out of two others. He left one of the other birds in serious (if not critical condition). It hunkered down next to the English ivy near our fence. When the bully bird approached it again it -- I kid you not -- tried to limp away.

Doves have hackles, too, like dogs. And when they're upset, they raise them. At least today's bully did.

Papa described to me the way a collared dove would sidle up to a feeder and then: "thwack!" with its wing, pummel some other poor bird out of the way. The dove would do this repeatedly until the other bird left.

What I saw today was one particular bird who was not content to intimidate others away from an easy meal, but actually pursued them -- in the air and on the ground. After one particularly violent tussle beneath our oaks that featured multiple wing batterings, the other two birds did their best to stay out of the batterer's way.

Historically, white-winged doves were endemic to the Lower Rio Grande Valley and points south. After killer freezes in the 1980s that destroyed the citrus groves they had colonized, they expanded their range northward. In 10 of the past 11 years, there have been more white-winged doves in upper South Texas than in the Valley.

In 2000, Travis County (which is outside the South Texas ecological zone) had more than a quarter million of the birds, while all of West Texas had only a bit more than 30,000.

According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the majority of nesting occurs within urban and suburban environments.

"The nesting white-winged doves seem to prefer the older more established residential neighborhoods with large live oak, pecan, and ashe trees. This may be due to better protection from predators and a consistent food and water sources due to watering of lawns and bird feeders," opines the fact sheet on the department's Web site.

I guess that's us.

For my part, I'd be happy to see fewer white-winged doves and more mourning doves, the latter native to all 254 Texas counties and an altogether gentler animal.

So, how did the dove come to symbolize peace? The Azerbaijanis have a charming legend to the point, but in Western culture it's probably due to the story in which a dove was released by Noah after the great flood.

In the Bible story, Noah first set loose a raven, which flew back and forth, back and forth. There is no mention of the raven returning. He then loosed a dove, which returned to the ark.

"And having waited yet seven other days, he again sent forth the dove out of the ark. And she came to him in the evening, carrying a bough of an olive tree, with green leaves, in her mouth. Noe therefore understood that the waters were ceased upon the earth." (Gen. 8:10-11)

So here we have the answer to two longstanding metaphors: the olive branch as peace offering (as in "He extended an olive branch.") and the dove as the symbol of God's cessation of hostilities against mankind.

But I think there's more to this story. Remember the raven that didn't come back? I'll betcha anything the raven found the olive branch and the dove mugged him.

Even as I write ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:03:00 +0000

Even as I sit outside and write, wildlife happens.

Earlier, as I was busy moving old blog posts over to this site I heard the distinctive "B" song of an eastern screech owl, Megascops asio. It's a haunting, falling tone; really, quite unmistakable and a little bit spooky. Then, I heard the "A" song, a melodious trilling.

These (relatively) little owls (8-9 inches long with wingspans of 21-22 inches) are quite common in central and southeast Texas, and their range overlaps with the western screech owl subspecies through the middle and southern parts of the state.

Screech owls are active only after sunset and eat the usual owl fare: rodents like shrews, mice and rats, but also bats and birds. They'll even snag large insects on the wing, and have been known to eat fish, crawdads and scorpions.

At a work gathering at the Parrie Haynes Ranch the year before last, one of our video producers took a recording of screech owl calls and a PA system into the woods.

Some of my colleagues who accompanied him told me that half a dozen of the small owls flew down around them and perched in trees around the clearing in which they stood.

Clever boy that I am, tonight I hopped right over to The Owl Pages, scrolled down to the eastern screech owl recordings, and started playing them on my computer. After about two minutes, Tam stuck her head out to tell me dinner was ready.

As I got up to go inside, I heard a clatter above my head. It sounded as if something was running across our patio roof. I looked up in time to see a large, brownish bird flying back into the yard.

A screech owl had flown under the porch, into the light, and then circled back into the night. The clattering I heard was its wingtips beating against the underside of the roof.

Cool.

I sense a fun evening coming on in a week or so ... something that involves sitting out by the fire ring with red lights and a laptop and my 8-year-old.

In other news

In other news we've had buckets of rain, again. This time it was courtesy of Tropical Storm Erin, which made landfall just north of Rockport early Thurs. morning. The creek is flowing, and -- I couldn't help noticing today -- it's awfully pretty as it sparkles beneath the junipers and oaks in the late afternoon sun.

What is a "wet-weather creek?" Well, it's an intermittent stream. A sometimes -its-there, sometimes-its-not watercourse. The Edwards Plateau is a karsty kind of place, and a lot of our streams sink right through the porous limestone (and through caves and crevasses) into the Edwards Aquifer. Our neighborhood is smack-dab in the recharge zone for the aquifer, so it's no surprise that some of our creeks disappear almost as fast they appear.

This phenomenon makes for some lovely juxtapositons, like the prickly-pear cactus in the middle of the stream pictured above.

As I was leaving my office this afternoon I walked over to the wildscape garden that grows just outside the entrance to my building. There I was startled to find a grasshopper roughly the size and color of a canary.

It was clutching the stalk of a Turk's cap and it was so large, and so bright, that at first I thought someone had put a toy there as a joke. And then it moved.

Naturally I had to get pictures. I've posted them to BugGuide.net -- a fabulous site -- and so far have this educated guess as to what it is: "One of the bird grasshoppers in the genus Schistocerca."*

Speaking of wildscapes, that's something Tamara and I are giving some thought to. As I'm fond of mentioning, we have a great backyard.

There are a couple -- three -- non-native shrubs I'd like to see gone, but the laurel and oaks and ashe juniper are all healthy and beautiful. The oaks have a nice understory of brush that the birds really appreciate.

Oh -- the owl's back. Two yards over it sounds like. Time to crank up the owl song. I'll just let it play as I type ... see what happens.

Anyhow. Wildscapes. Yeah, so we're studying-up on what we can do to make our yard even more wildlife friendly. A water garden is a sure thing. But does the English Ivy really have to come out?

A couple of nights ago we had our biggest backyard visitor to date: ol' brer 'possum. I surprised him, he surprised me. He fled up an oak tree and I grabbed the camera (see the second photo on the page).

This morning as I was waiting on the cable guy, a brilliantly striped butterfly fluttered by. Turns out it was a zebra longwing (Heliconius charithonia). One of the fascinating habits of these butteflies, also called zebra heliconians, is that they tend to travel a circuit or "trapline," following a particular route again and again as they gather food.

I found a red spiny orb weaver in the oak grove at the back of the yard two days ago. I think it must be that connection to my childhood, when I found these spiders so fascinating, but I just can't get over how cool it is to have three different color phases of this animal in the yard.

For the birds

I think I mentioned that we put two bird feeders up. The one with the mix of seeds has been quite popular, and not just with the birds. The suet/peanut mixture (probably the wrong time of year) has been visited infrequently, mostly by titmice and chickadees.

Jays, cardinals, Carolina chickadees, black-crested titmice, white-winged doves and wrens all come through daily. A particularly enterprising squirrel also has made a couple of runs at the feeder.

On day three, I took it down and swapped out the sturdy rope it was hanging from with 30-lb. monofilament. I also hung it farther out on a limb and away from the trunk of the tree.

The squirrel has been pretty frustrated since then.

I wrote "Carolina chickadee," (Poecile carolinensis) but the birds I see here may in fact be black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla), or hybrids of the two. They all look about the same. One way to tell them apart is by their songs. Carolina chickadees have a four-note song, black-capped chickadees a two-note song.

The hybrids -- you guessed it -- invariably sing a three-note song.
These birds often will pick up a seed from the feeder and fly with it up to a nearby branch. "Tap-tap-tap-tap-taptaptap ..." the bird will hammer it open, then flit back down for another.

We'll call them Carolina chickadees for now. We're a bit south of the range of the black-capped, and smack-dab in the middle of the Carolina's summer range.

The cardinals have been fascinating to watch. There is one male adult and a fledgling that visit together fairly regularly. The fledgling, which will feed itself when dad's not around, will cheep "feed me" noises and shiver his feathers from a nearby branch when dad's on the feeder. The adult male dutifully takes him cracked seeds and puts them in his beak.

Cardinals are monogamous and typically mate for life. Males actually take on the majority of parental care, at least when it comes to foraging for the youngsters.

One theory is that because there is a sex bias among cardinals -- there are more males than females -- the males who have mated have to work hard to avoid "divorce." Does this mean China is in for a period of doting dads?

The owl, apparently, has thought better of a repeat visit to the porch. Oh well, another evening perhaps.

[I've since discovered this grasshopper is an Alutacea Bird Grasshopper, Schistocerca alutacea.]

Dragonflies are cool

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 02:15:00 +0000

Dragonflies are cool because they come in jewel tones and earth tones. Dragonflies are cool because they hover and swivel like little helicopter gunships. Mostly, though, dragonflies are cool because they eat mosquitoes.

I hate mosquitoes.

We have plenty here at the new place; big ones, little ones ... nighttime biters, daytime biters. I think I'm getting more allergic, too. I came in from a brief photo foray with my legs covered in welts.

I hate mosquitoes.

Our very wet spring has been a boon to the mozzy population around here. In turn, dragonflies are thronging our backyard. It's some mighty crowded airspace, between the birds, butterflies, dragonflies, mosquitoes and wasps.

I suspect one of the spiny orb weavers is providing air traffic control.

Twice today, cicadas bounced off the patio roof with a startled buzz. Either their Terrain Avoidance Warning Systems are on the fritz, or they're not on the right frequency.

I don't have the foggiest idea what species these dragonflies are. They're either darners, or clubtails, or spiketails, or petaltails or skimmers or emeralds. I think that about covers the possibilities here in Texas.

I hung two bird feeders yesterday, but so far the birds haven't found them. Bet they do sometime this week.

Tam had the only snake sighting today. She got up from her chair on the porch and uttered a rapid succession of "Ooh, ooh, ooh ..."

"What?" I asked. She just pointed to the ground at the edge of the deck.

I looked down to see the tail of the Texas garter snake, probably the same one I saw yesterday, disappearing into the recesses of some pretty good cover. We've agreed that she will try to use more descriptive language in the future.

Our excellent neighbors said they haven't seen many snakes, but they did have a raccoon on the back fence the other day. Deer have mosied up to their back yard. And bobcats, but that was a while ago, before the other side of the creek was developed.

Still, almost anything could show up. Streams -- even mostly dry ones -- are like that. They serve as both habitat and corridors for wildlife. I'm glad we have one in the backyard.

[Ah, but I do know what these dragonflies are! Some of them, anyhow. The first two dragonfly photos are of a male and female band-winged dragonlet, Erythrodiplax umbrata. The male is the one with the banded wings and has not yet developed mature coloration The female has the plain wings. The third photo is of a dragonfly I still have not identified. The lavendar-colored dragonfly at bottom right is a male roseate skimmer, Orthemis ferruginea. "They are pretty common in central Texas, but even so I still have people who sidle up and whisper 'I saw a pink dragonfly' as though I would think they had been sampling the home brew before it was ready," said Forrest Mitchell, co-author of A Dazzle of Dragonflies. Forrest was kind enough to help me with the identification of three of these photos. For high-resolution scans of live dragonflies, visit his site: The Digital Dragonfly Museum.]

More backyard wildlife

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 02:14:00 +0000

As I sat down on the back porch to write this, I heard rustling in the bushes. I looked up in time to see a shiny tail disappearing beneath a low-lying hawthorne bush near the fence on one side of the yard.

I ran over to see if, today, I could catch the big mystery snake in our back yard and identify it. It was gone. I looked up. I looked down. I looked everywhere. Nuthin'.

I am flummoxed. That's one very sneaky snake. So long as he leaves my root beer alone, though, I won't worry about it too much.

But I will just point out: any snake big enough to make noise is pretty big.

As I wrote yesterday, our back yard goes on for a ways. Actually, it doesn't, but the property backs to a greenbelt. That's a fancy word for a wet weather creek and flood zone that nobody can build on.

And that suits us just fine. It's a football field-and-a-half, maybe two football fields, to the luxury condominiums on the other side of the creek. We can't see them at all from the back porch, and only a hint of a roof from the back gate. The greenbelt runs for miles, and widens just to the east of us.

In addition to the creek, we have lots of oaks and some ashe juniper (which we all call "cedar" around here). The creek bed is limestone, of course, and there are reportedly a number of caves in the area.

One of them -- just about a mile from the house -- is Whirlpool Cave. I visited with Patrick and family and friends back in Christmas.

Cicadas are buzzing in the trees just now, and this morning we surprised a couple of white-winged dove on Patrick's playhouse; they were engaging in the birds part of "the birds and the bees."

Earlier today we took a little hike out behind the fire ring, which is just beyond our back gate. We found a surprising number of wildflowers, including morning glory, lantana (my mom's favorite), verbena and cat-claw sensitive briar.

This last plant is a ground-hugging member of the mimosa family with a blossom that looks like one of those fiber optic nightlights. It's also one of the first plants I remember my father showing me: stroke the leaves gently, and they'll fold right up.

We saw a young Gulf coast toad, some raccoon scat (er, poop) and some holes that looked to me like the work of an armadillo. I've left the back gate open to see what wanders in.

We also saw a yellow garden spider (also called the "letter-writing" spider, black-and-yellow orb weaver or black-and-yellow argiope). Orb weavers (Family Arneidae) comprise the third-largest family of spiders in the world. Charlotte, with the famous web, was a barn orb weaver.

Some orb weavers, including the black-and-yellow species common here, create zig-zag designs in their webs. There's a name for this interesting feature: stabilmentum. Scientists don't really know what purpose it serves, though it may help camouflage the spider in its web

The argiope on the other side of our fence is one of the largest and most conspicuous in this large family. We also have another conspicuous, though diminutive, orb weaver here.

I mentioned yesterday the spiny orb weaver I found in the back yard. These spiders were common around our home in Rockport when I was a child, and I loved to watch them. I recall seeing all the color phases -- red/orange, yellow, and black and white.

On a roadtrip back from Rockport early last month, Tam and I discovered a spiny orb weaver had hitched a ride on her hood. We pulled over and, after taking some pictures, set it free on the roadside. It was the first "crab spider" I'd seen in years.

So, I was excited to find one, then two, in our new back yard in South Austin. Today I noticed they're pretty much everywhere.

Spiny orb weavers (also called spiny-backed orb weavers and "crab spiders") are short-lived but prolific. The females die after laying an egg mass (from which more than 100 spiderlings will emerge) in the fall. Males, which are much smaller than their mates, die about six days after depositing sperm in the female.

They eat flying insects -- wasps, moths, flies ... and, I'm hoping, mosquitoes. They rarely come inside a house, and their bites are not known to be dangerous to humans.

In the photo above you can see the little tufts of silk that often are found in crab spider webs. Some people think they serve as a "flag" to birds, who otherwise might fly through the web and destroy it.

A woodpecker visited today, too. I wasn't able to get a clear shot, but I think it was a ladder-backed woodpecker, though it may have been a red-bellied. If anyone can tell from this photo, leave a comment.

One thing I haven't seen yet is any geckos or lizards, which is a bit of a puzzle. I would have expected to find them congregated around the porch light at night. I'll keep watching.

In the meantime, I'll be keeping a keen lookout for that snake and any other critters that decide to pay us a visit.

Listening to the jays

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 01:58:00 +0000

Home for lunch today, I enjoyed the view of our back yard from the dining room table. The back yard was the number-one selling point for our new house: it's lush and a little wild and goes on forever.

Well ... it goes on for several hundred yards, anyhow. Tam and I haven't put up bird feeders yet, but we have been on the lookout for wildlife. After a week at the new place I was beginning to feel a bit cheated; not much to report.

Last weekend we transplanted a couple of fat Canyon Springs toads. Canyon Springs is the name of an apartment complex, not the species. Yesterday I saw a young toad hopping across the yard from the direction of the creek, which is dry again.

Several days before, I had noted the web of a spiny orb weaver strung between two cedar trees near the back gate. These curious little critters are my favorites among the arachnids. They have shells with spiky points arrayed around the perimeters.

Typically the shells are white with black polka-dots. This one featured a yellow carapace with black dots and red spikes.

Today, as I was enjoying the view, a blue jay flew to a low oak and began shrilling an alarm. Soon he was joined by another jay, and another. Pretty soon there were four jays and a cardinal, making a racket.

Usually, blue jays gathered and cussing means something evil (by their lights) is afoot, or more properly, a-slither. I walked outside to see what it might be, but could see nothing unusual on the ground.

The birds scattered at my approach, but quickly flew back into the yard, perched in a different tree, eyeing the ground and making a fuss. I looked up in time to see a VLS making its way toward our thick cover of English ivy beneath the trees on one side of the yard.

When I say Very Large Snake, I mean a four-footer. Big for our backyard. I only got a fleeting glance -- definitely a colubrid (it had that friendly, innocent face), but thick-bodied with a light pattern on a dark background. My first thought was -- because of its size -- "bullsnake!"

My next thought, because it was shiny (not dull or rough like a bullsnake) was: "kingsnake!"I didn't get a good look, and it could have been any of a half dozen or more native non-venomous snakes.

I beat the bushes for about 10 minutes, but it was gone or successfully hidden. As I walked back to the porch -- actually a covered deck -- I noticed, peaking from beneath the trim, the dinstinctive, bright orange dorsal stripe of a Texas garter snake. I made a quick grab for the tail, but the snake was too fast and crawled deeper beneath the porch.

I'm cheered by these encounters with backyard wildlife, and I'll be on the lookout for more. In fact, I might even snip a couple of holes in the wire fence between our property and the greenbelt, just to see what quadrapeds might wander through.

And, for sure, I'll be listening to what the jays have to say.

About this blog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 01:57:00 +0000

This is the story of two nearly-40-year-olds who fell in love and decided to share a life, and a home, together. One of the individuals in this story comes with an 8-year-old, who also shares the home on a part-time basis.

But it’s really the story of our backyard in the Oak Hill area of South Austin. The backyard is the number-one reason we chose this house; it’s lush and woody and wild and backs to a wet-weather creek and greenbelt.

Here we'll chronicle the wildlife that wanders into, flies through and slithers and crawls around our backyard. We'll look at and learn about the plants that grow here. We'll also figure out how to "wildscape" our small, already largely natural plot of land.

Please join us as we discover nature at our doorstep.