Sarkar Lab

Mini-Symposium: Research at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge

We are organising a mini-symposium about research at the Balcones Canyonlands NWR on the University of Texas--Austin campus for Friday, 25 January 2008, from 2.30 -6.00 p.m. at the Atrium (FAC 419). There will be 15-minute talks followed by general discussion. All researchers are invited to present their projects and we will try to accommodate as many talks as possible. Even if you do not wish to present a talk, please try to attend.

The audience will include several students who are considering doing research or otherwise volunteering at the Refuge. At the end we will retire to the Scholz Beer Garden.

If you wish to present some work, please send me a title as soon as possible (even if it is tentative). In any case, I would like to hear from everyone who plans to come. It will be a great occasion for those working at the Refuge to interact with each other. With luck, it will spur more research across disciplines and universities.

Bird-Witched

I had somehow missed Marjorie Valentine' Adams 2005 memoirs, Bird-Witched: How Birds Can Change a Life (Austin: University of Texas Press), when it first came out even though the Foreword is by a good acquaintance, Chuck Sexton, the biologist at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge where we do our field work.

It is a marvelous book, replete with anecdotes about Texas birding--and birding here is just about as good as anywhere north of the tropics. Anyone interested in birding, or in nature conservation in general, should take a look at it. I also have to thank her family for giving us access to her famous documentary film, "What Good is a Warbler?"co-directed with her late husband, Red Adams who, unforutnately, passed away while the book was in production. The film deserves even more recognition than it has received--which is a lot.

Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book are the chapters on our endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler (Dendroica chrysoparia) and the efforts to develop the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve and the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge. Finding the details of the bird's winter habitat in Mesoamerica is a wonderful story of luck and perserverance. Being trapped there when the Chiapas revolt broke out just adds to the fun.

The book goes into some detail about the conservation plans for this bird and seven other endangered species in the Balcones Canyonlands which led the formation of the Preserve and the Refuge. It really drives home the old point that trreating habitat well, and protecting species while they are still relatively abundant, is a lot less expensive proposition than allowing it to fall under the purview of the Endangered Species Act. Unfortunately, preventive conservation continues to be hard to sell to the US Congress and State Legislatures and the Democrats are little better than the Republicans.

A Year in Texas: Is the Houston Toad Still at Stengl?

It’s mid-July now, and I might as well admit defeat at finding the Houston Toad at our Stengl Lost Pines Biological Station this year. It is not unheard of for the species to emerge to mate in some areas even in late July but extremely unlikely. The following log, extracted from my field notes tell the story:

A Year in Texas: Santa Ana and the Lower Rio Grande Valley

At the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge we heard this bird long before we saw it. Texans often call it the “Mexican tree pheasant.” The bird that has come to define the Lower Rio Grande Valley for me is more commonly known as the Plain Chachalaca (Ortalis vetula). It is a raucous, ungainly bird with a range that now extends from the Lower Rio Grande Valley to the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica though its ancestors are found in the fossil record as far north as Nebraska. It is an ancient bird: in the fossil record it goes back to the Mesozoic Era. Visually the bird is not particularly impressive. It looks like a pheasant with an abnormally large and stiff tail. The upper parts are brownish olive, the head and neck almost grey. The underparts are paler, and the long tail much darker. The young look like pitiful newly-hatched chickens. Our Texan subspecies is O. vetula mccalli. Other subspecies become progressively darker as you move southwards from the Rio Grande Valley to Central America. The ones from Costa Rica are dark enough to seem like a different species.

A Year in Texas: Laguna Atascosa

An Osprey (Pandeon halieatus) skimmed the water, captured a fish, clutched it fiercely in its talons, and flew off beyond a bush to devour it on a post while we watched. There was power there, if not much grace. A pair of Roseate Spoonbills (Ajaia ajaja) flew by the watchtower off Laguna Madre, brilliant pink in the evening sun, with their spoon-shaped bills occasionally silhouetted against the darkening sky. Later we saw another three of them. There is probably no better end to a long tired afternoon than to see these birds fly by. A Crested Caracara (Caracara plancus) flew ahead of us with its prey, completely ignoring our presence. If only all raptors looked as unique, instead of being unconscionably difficult to identify in flight. Black-bellied Whistling-ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis) were omnipresent—I had seen these earlier this year at Stengl where they were an unexpected rarity. Here they are as common as grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) in Austin. Great and Snowy Egrets (Ardea alba and Egretta thula) fed along the shore. Great Blue and Tricolored Herons (Ardea herodias and Egretta tricolor) were equally common. There were birds everywhere, both exotic and common. And there was virtually no human presence—throughout Friday evening we saw no one else.

We were at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge (LANWR), once a part of the Rio Grande delta. I doubt that even the river remembers when it had enough water left to flow through this area. Texas has had an unfortunately impressive history of destroying its rivers by excessive unthinking consumption upstream—I’ll have more to say of this later. Even LANWR suffers from chemically contaminated water flowing into it, and from water loss due to flood control upstream. The Refuge was to be our introduction to the birdlife that makes the lower Rio Grande valley the premier birding region in the US. One of our recent philosophy graduates, Antonio Madrid, was with me and we had driven all the way down—almost 400 miles—from Austin last Friday afternoon. It was not a particularly interesting drive, with the landscape strangely bereft of wildflowers. On I-37 south of San Antonio, we had to navigate rainstorms, and south of Corpus Christi, while we drove through eerie mesquite brushland, the road was often flooded in what was often typically semi-desert landscape.

A Year in Texas: St. Edwards Park and the Balcones Canyonland Preserve

This afternoon was spent doing a rapid appraisal of the habitat at St. Edwards Park, slightly west of Austin (Spicewood Springs Road, about two miles west of Loop 360). Heavy rain last night had left the trails muddy and wet. Walking around in the cloudy humid afternoon was not much fun. But the recent rains have been good for our vegetation. The lush green we’re seeing everywhere right now is a welcome change from the dreary brown of last winter. Perhaps our drought has really ended.

About fifty acres of diverse habitat—wetlands, grasslands and woodlands—makes St. Edwards one of the more interesting birding sites in the Austin region. For instance, on 13 May, a solitary Gray-cheeked Thrush (Catharus minimus) was reported here (and another presumably different individual also found at Hornsby Bend.) It was a rare sighting for our area, the bird’s migration (between northern South America and northern Canada) generally taking place along routes much further east. Trevon Fuller was with me today; we didn’t see any thrushes but we saw a lot of warblers that we couldn’t identify to our satisfaction—among birds, we found nothing more exotic than a very loud Green Heron (Butorides striatus). It is a beautiful bird.

Nevertheless the wildlife at St. Edwards was quite amazing. There were rabbits and signs of deer. The most astonishing phenomenon consisted of swarms of juvenile frogs—literally hundreds of them—migrating across trails, jumping like insects and smaller than many of the beetles on the forest floor. Dragonflies and damselflies, as well as an assortment of large butterflies accompanied us throughout our wanderings.

A Year in Texas: Roy Bedichek, 27 June 1878 -21 May 1959

Today is the forty-sixth anniversary of Roy Bedichek’s death, and I dropped by the Barton Springs Pool earlier in the morning to pay respect to the memory of Texas’ first real nature writer. There was nothing before him and there has been little as good since. For those of us who follow in the tradition, Bedichek sets the bar for success in communicating our feel for nature to a broad non-academic audience. I would have preferred to have visited his old home at the corner of 23rd and Oldham, near campus, but the block has long been converted into the ungainly parking lot of the LBJ Library. (I don’t know of any other city with as many ugly downtown parking lots as Austin.) In fact there is precious little at UT that memorializes Bedichek in spite of his long association with the university. Perhaps that’s just as well. There is surprisingly little work done here any more on the ecology of Texas; by and large, we’ve long handed over our native state to Texas A&M.

A Year in Texas: Oyster Reef Restoration in Lavaca Bay

Two Saturdays ago Chris Kelley and I were down on Lavaca Bay trying to get a feel for the area. We are involved in an oyster reef restoration project at the Bay, using our methods of multicriteria analysis to select the best areas to create new oyster reefs for eventual harvesting. Lavaca Bay is a secondary bay of Matagorda Bay, halfway between Corpus Christi and Galveston. Secondary and tertiary bays of Texas are justly famous for being highly productive estuarine systems, and Lavaca has long been known for its harvests of shrimp, blue crabs, oysters, and red and black drum [1]. Jim Simons took us around in a small boat. Jim is a coastal ecologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife (TPWD), and we have been talking about working together on projects ever since my former student, Helen Cortes-Burns, introduced us more than a year ago. Figuring out how to best restore habitats for biodiversity has long been among my goals, but even restoring a commercial fishery has its attractions.

We started early, and it was a relatively quiet morning on the bay, mercifully with very little wind. The water was virtually still in the northern half, and only slightly choppier towards the southern end which is closest to Matagorda and the Gulf of Mexico. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) swam along the boat during several stretches. Recent work from the University of St. Andrews suggests that these animals know how to distinguish between individuals based on the sounds they make—in other words, they have names for themselves. Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) were everywhere, on channel markers, platforms—wherever there were places to perch. A few terns were around, though keeping too much distance for reliable identification to be possible. There was plenty of fish but it was mainly a morning for basking in the weak sun, still not strong enough to make you uncomfortable.

The task at hand was simple enough. We were trying to digitize a paper map of the areas recommended for oyster farming within the bay and the areas that are excluded. All we had to do was to get to the various markers and take GPS readings. What made it all more interesting is that some of the shore markers had peculiar descriptions: “Calhoun Easternmost house,” “Brown house with blue roof,” “East end of crabbing bridge.” Wonder what will happen if a local builder changes a few structures here and there? Markers on the water were also occasionally mismarked but, over a few hours, we managed to sort these out. (Later we discovered that accurate longitude-latitude data were already available for at least half of the markers we’d surveyed. It was wasted workj—but, then, that’s what you often expect with ecological fieldwork.) The next step will be to gather data, model the criteria, and select areas which optimize depth, flow, salinity, and hardness for the establishment of new oyster reefs. Luckily, TPWD already has most of the data we need, and many of the models have already been run.

People have been eating oysters along the Texas coast at least since the time of the Karankawas. The species in question is the Eastern Oyster (Crassotrea virginica), quite common to the American coast (though, bizarrely, there was an attempt to list it as an endangered or threatened species last year). The harvesting season is from 1 November to 1 May. During the open season anyone with a TPWD harvester’s license may harvest oysters but can only sell to dealers certified by the Texas Department of Health (TDH). During the rest of the year harvesting occurs on private leases, mainly in Galveston Bay, which produces 60 -70 % of the state’s oyster catch. By and large, until recently, the state seems to have managed its harvest well. It is the only state in the country that has maintained its harvest without significant planting [2]. But all that has changed during the last decade. The large number of fishermen who have entered the industry is putting serious pressure on stocks. In 2005 the Legislature established a commercial moratorium on oyster and gulf shrimp licenses, hoping to decrease the number of fishing boats by gradual attrition. It is probably a wise move.

Historically, harvesting oysters for food is not the only factor to take its toll on Texas oyster reefs. Between  1922 and 1983 almost 270 million cubic meters of reef material was taken from Texas bays by shell dredging operations for use as roadbed material and in the manufacture of concrete [3]. Most of this was probably buried shell, not living communities but, nevertheless, large quantities of exposed shell (cultch) was also removed. In 1953 shell dredging was banned within 457.2 meters of living reef but, in 1963, this distance was decreased to 91.4 meters. This practice probably explains why reefs have not regenerated as fast as they should have—hence, come projects such as our own to encourage regeneration.

Completing the rather limited scientific component of our project—the multicriteria analysis on depth, flow, salinity, and hardness—will  not be that difficult. The next stage, incorporating the population biology of oysters will be more challenging. And interesting. However, the issue that I could not remove from the back of my mind that Saturday morning was that Lavaca Bay is home to what is arguably the worst environmental disaster on the Texas Gulf Coast [4]. Two corporations have contributed to this distinction, Formosa Plastics, and the world’s largest aluminum company, Alcoa. In the mid-1980s, Formosa planned a $ 2 billion expansion of its plant in the northeast of the bay, and attempted to do so (with the EPA’s agreement) without an environmental impact statement (EIS). This led to a series of confrontations with local environmentalists, led by the redoubtable Diane Wilson [5]. Ultimately, a compromise was worked out that was grudgingly accepted by most environmentalists: it included independent monitoring of air and water quality, hazardous waste, emergency planning, and worker safety. Formosa presumably constructed the plastic birdwatching boardwalk in Lighthouse Beach (Port Lavaca), made to look like wood, because of this compromise. However, I strongly suspect it is toxic—when Chris caught a splinter in his arm, it bothered him for the rest of the night. By and large, Formosa is believed to have lived up to its commitments.

Alcoa’s involvement in Lavaca Bay, in contrast, is a complete disaster. In 1970, the TDH found elevated levels of mercury in oysters, crabs, and finfish from the bay, and immediately notified the public that levels were much higher than the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permitted guidelines [1]. The reason for the mercury contamination was that, between 1966 and 1970, Alcoa’s Point Comfort plant legally released mercury into Lavaca Bay. Even conservative estimates put the amount at about 67 pounds a day. Unlike much of the pollution along the Texas coast, this mercury contamination did not get flushed out into the ocean. Rather, it settled into the sediment, increasing in concentration, and remaining at dangerous levels even today.

Following the TDH finding, state officials ordered Alcoa to stop dumping mercury. By 1971, at least in oysters, the mercury level fell below the then legal 1.0 ppm (parts per million) level and is now consistently below 0.5 ppm which is the new FDA guideline. Oysters have continued to be harvested from the region. One nagging question is whether the FDA guideline is sufficiently strict, especially given that it has already required downward revision once. Beyond oysters, in 1988 a section of the bay was completely closed off to fish and crab harvesting and part of it remains so to this day (though the extent of the area was decreased in 2000). Mercury concentrations in the Blue Crab (Callinectes sapidas) continued to be unacceptably high into the late 1990s [1]. (Shrimp harvesting has never been banned—apparently shrimp do not accumulate mercury very well.)

Alcoa’s Point Comfort plant continues to dominate the skyline northeast coast of the bay, a continutal reminder of environmental degradation. In 1994, thanks to Alcoa’s activities, Lavaca Bay became a federally designated Superfund site. Alcoa then became legally responsible for paying for the cleanup of mercury and other dangerous pollutants originating its plant. So far it is believed to have spent about $ 40 million [4]. In December 2004, after years of negotiation, federal and state agencies reached a settlement with Alcoa that will require to spend at least another $ 11.4 million to restore the bay and to reimburse government agencies. Alcoa also agreed to donate 729 acres of adjoining land to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (just a few miles south of Lavaca Bay), create 70 acres of intertidal salt marsh within the refuge, create 11 acres of oyster reefs in Lavaca Bay, and build boat ramps and fishing piers to compensate recreational users.

The trouble is that these actions do not even address prehaps the most crucial ethical issue created by Alcoa’s misbehavior: health problems that local residents are facing presumably because of eating contaminated seafood. Many of those who live around the bay have continued to eat catch from all parts of the bay irrespective of the ban. Fish, also, are not stationary organisms, and a ban cannot preclude contaminated fist from being caught elsewhere in the bay. There has been an explosion of health problems in the region which are widely believed to be mercury-related, especially autism. (Strangely, even though Alcoa and other entities have occasionally monitored mercury levels in the food, no one seems to have tested mercury levels in the affected humans! At leas, even if some such tests may have been done, I have so far found no data anywhere.) In 2005, with the assistance of two south Texas law firms, all three fishing communities from the region, Anglo, Hispanic, and Vietnamese, normally separated by racial tensions, decided to take on Alcoa jointly. With luck they will prevail, and we will finally get some environmental justice in Texas.

What worries me most is that the areas recommended for the new oyster reefs include those immediately adjacent to the area that continues to be closed to fishing and crab harvesting, even after the reduced boundary of 2000. I just hope that the data on mercury accumulation in oysters is accurate and FDA level has been set properly. Perhaps, before plans are implemented in the field, we’ll have to do our own measurements.

[1] Sager, D. R. 2002. “Long-Term Variation in Mercury Concentrations in Estuarine Organisms with Changes in Releases into Lavaca Bay, Texas.” Marine Pollution Bulletin 44: 807 -815.

[2] MacKenzie Jr., C. L. 1996 “Management of Natural Populations.” In Kennedy, V. S., Newell, R. I. E., and Eble, A. F. Eds. The Eastern Oyster: Crassotrea virginica. College Park: Maryland Sea Grant College, pp. 707 -721.

[3] Quast, W. D., Johns, M. A., Pitts Jr., D. E., Matlock, G. C., and Clark, J. E. 1988. Texas Oyster Fishery Management Plan. Austin: Texas Parks and Wildlife Deparment.

[4] Claitor, D. 2005. “Letter from Lavaca Bay.” Texas Observer, 7 August 2005.

[5] Blackburn, J. 2004. The Book of Texas Bays. College Station: Texas A&M Press.

A Year in Texas: A Bird Sanctuary at Port Lavaca

It takes about three hours to drive to Port Lavaca from Austin, provided that you don’t get lost when Route 183 winds about in Lockhart. Chris Kelley (a student in my lab.) and I did that drive yesterday with wildflowers blooming all along the route. The flowers were especially abundant around Luling (on Route 183) and along Route 87 after Cuero. As is often the case, the dominant May color was yellow, with daisies (Amblyolepis setigera and Engelmannia peristenia) making way for Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) further south. There were more than a few sunflowers (Helianthus annus) as well as Pink  Evening Primrose (Oenothera speciosa) and Texas Prickly Pear (Opuntia lindheimeri), besides dozens of species that were beyond my rather limited plant identification skills. The recent rains have led to a welcome extravagance of wildflowers throughout the region. The rain has brought some relief to the area but no one on the coast seems to think that our drought has finally broken.

We were on our way to work on a project to restore oyster beds in Lavaca Bay—there will be much more on that later. We had to spend the night in Lavaca Bay and chose to stay at the Lighthouse Beach Campground. It was an interesting experience. Chris was driven around in a golf cart to inspect the available sites—it would have fit well into a remake of Patton directed by Andy Warhol. For once, the campground was populated mainly by Latinos though most of our neighbors were out for a barbecue and didn’t stay for the night. After dark, while we were assembling our tents, and aging white prostitute drove in and delighted us with cheerful insults and only departed when neither of us expressed much interest in her other wares. The bathrooms were filthy enough to make a Greek youth hotel jealous. These included one that was allegedly kept clean by requiring a $ 5 deposit to have access to it. All night, traffic drove along Route 35, right next to the campground, and mosquitoes feasted on our blood. The bright light of a Motel 6 sign across the highway made flashlights irrelevant. Over all, it was more of a homeless shelter than a campground. Comparatively, all our other camping trips this year have been unbelievably dreary.

Earlier, we quite impressed the owners of Gordon’s Seafood Grill and Tequila Bay Bar across Route 35. Georgie, the daughter had claims of being an artist—she had huge black-and-white renditions of film stars on the walls. The Lucille Ball and James Dean pieces were quite good but the Marilyn Monroe impression left much to be desired. Her mother was quite ecstatic at meeting us—all her life she had been wanting to meet a biologist. Her husband had suggested that the ones she saw on the National Geographic Channel were enough but, now, for the first time she was laying her eyes on one in flesh and blood (the last due to the mosquitoes). I hadn’t realized that we’re such a rare form of life. Perhaps we are, at least in Port Lavaca.

We woke up today to the sound of Laughing Gulls (Larus atricilla) which I, at least, find pleasant. But what had saved last evening—besides the friendliness and good humor of everyone we met—was a bird walk at the campsite. Attached to Lighthouse Beach is a Bird Sanctuary with a three-quarter mile boardwalk over marshy wetlands, and including a pavilion that almost jutted into the bay. The boardwalk, made to look like wood, was actually made of Formosa plastic and donated by the Formosa Corporation. Chris caught a splinter in his arm that bothered him for the rest of the night. Formosa is a local company with operations just across the bay. The pavilion was contributed by Alcoa, also across the bay. I will have much to say on Formosa and Alcoa later, when I get to the degradation of Lavaca Bay and our oyster restoration project.

The finds of the night were Franklin’s Gulls (Larus pipixcan) and the Clapper Rails (Rallus longirostris). There were only a few individuals of the former, with pink legs, among the flocks of Laughing Gulls, otherwise identical but with black legs. These are known for their incredible migrations. They nest primarily along lakes and marshes in the northern prairies in central Canada and north-central US. They then completely molt their feathers and fly south in the Fall, to the Texas coast, and continue south to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (in Mexico). From there they fly overland to the Pacific coast which they then follow to southern Peru and northern Chile. After wintering there, they have another complete feather molt and return to their nesting grounds backtracking along the same route. Most ornithologists believe that the two complete feather molts, unique among gulls, must be an adaptation for their long-distance migration. Strong new feathers are of obvious value during a 5000 mile flight. The species was once threatened due to habitat loss but seems to have increased in abundance lately, probably because of the creation of large wetlands in many refuges along its migratory route. Though the species is not supposed to be uncommon during its migration, I have rarely seen more than a few individuals at a time.

As often happens with rails, we heard the Clapper Rail more often than we saw it though, on one occasion, there was one wandering around a few feet from the boardwalk. It has an uncanny ability to merge with its background. One moment you see it, and the next it’s gone. You never seem to have enough time to focus your lens properly. Some subspecies of Rallus longirostris are endangered but the Atlantic subspecies, which is what we were seeing, is supposed to be fairly abundant. Nevertheless, it rarely seen in Texas, and this cannot be because it is hard to see. In spite of its almost perfect camouflage it routinely gives itself away by its penetrating grating (“kek-kek-kek”) call in the evenings. When you don’t hear it, it probably just isn’t there.

There were also several pairs of White Ibis (Eudocimus albus) foraging around. In flight they were as graceful as any bird I’ve ever seen. Snowy Egrets (Egretta thula) were also plentiful close to the bay as also were several large sandpipers that proved impossible to pin down. A few  Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoenicus) flitted around along with our ubiquitous Great-tailed Grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus). I could have spent a lot more time on that boardwalk. That there were so many birds is not really that surprising, given that we were on the Texas Gulf Coast close to the peak of the Spring migration, and Port Lavaca is a few dozen miles from Aransas. Nevertheless, the Bird Sanctuary made up for what was wanting at the campground.

A Year in Texas: Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve

We discovered Wild Basin last Sunday almost by accident. We had taken Mark Colyvan to the Wildflower Center when he expressed a liking for limestone. So it became incumbent upon us to show him some of the karst of our own Hill Country. One thing led to another, and we drove down to Wild Basin. It is a gem, yet another of Austin’s well-kept secrets with deserted forest trails, some of them quite steep while others are even wheel-chair accessible. Barely six miles west from the center of Austin, and just off the alarmingly busy Capital of Texas Highway, Wild Basin straddles two sides of pleasant Bee Creek. An impressive waterfall forms shallow pools filled with large water beetles and other insects. Sunfish were obviously around but, though it was the evening, the day was too hot to see much other wildlife. We got our fill of Hill Country limestone, at least to the extent it is possible without leaving Austin entirely.

Originally envisioned as a preserve by seven visionary women from “Now or Never” in the 1970s, the preserve finally came into being in the 1980s with largely private money raised and donated to Travis county for this purpose. What’s remarkable about this preserve is the amount of plant diversity in its very modest 227 acres. The landscape has finally turned green as our long drought seems to have finally broken. There was plenty of native Texan grass, including one of my favorites, the Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium)—one of the precious remaining signs that all this used to be Blackland Prairie. Cat’s Claw Mimosa (Mimosa binucifera) were in flower—the first time that I’ve seen these fluffy pink flowers this year. Escarpment Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) were also in flower though to a lesser extent that I would have expected at the beginning of May.

What’s perhaps most impressive about Wild Basin is that the control of invasive species has been quite successful through intrusive management including occasional use of herbicides. Even Ashe Juniper (Juniperus ashei), the bane of the surrounding landscape, has a rather modest presence here. (It just goes to show what the City of Austin Preserves could be if adequate resources were put into their management.) Meanwhile the juniper provides nesting material for our endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler (Dendroica chrysoparia) which we think we heard but cound not spot.

A non-profit group maintains Wild Basin for Travis County. Though there are frequent walks organized by the managers, but leaflets and other information are scanty. (The map they provide is topologically accurate but otherwise only occasionally intersects with features on the ground, in particular, the numbered trail markers.) The trivial $ 2 entrance fee is more than worth its value. Wild Basin is a place to linger, not merely walk through. But, if you have some taxonomic skills, volunteering at Wild Basin would be even more useful—there are no comprehensive plant or animal lists, all of which could be compiled with minimal effort. Any list of this sort would not only add to the educational outreach of the preserve but also contribute to our ongoing project to document the biodiversity of the Austin region.