Hello, friends. This blog is where the El Camino Real Chapter, Texas Master Naturalists shares news, articles, and reflections. You’ll find our posts right under this introduction. We encourage your comments and likes, and of course, shares!
Our chapter meets monthly on the second Thursday of the month in the fellowship hall at All Saints Episcopal Church, 200 North Travis Avenue, Cameron, Texas. Presentations begin at 6 pm, after a potluck meal. All are welcome to attend.
Our Mission: To develop a corps of well-informed volunteers to provide education, outreach, and service dedicated to the beneficial management of natural resources and natural areas within their communities for the State of Texas.
I love to trek about my property checking on blooms and animal tracks, listening to the birds and neighboring cows and just mucking about. I was on such a trek about a week ago when I came upon this:
Ugh. Pulled out iNat to discover it was Poison Ivy leaf mites. The mites make little galls on the poison ivy leaf like a protective sleeping bag where they lay eggs that eat the inside of the little bumps once they hatch. The mites are harmless to humans and unfortunately don’t kill the aggressive, hardy perennial vine. Which brings me to the main topic – the poison ivy itself. It could have been lurking deep in that forest patch and I just never encountered it. But this is the path I used to travel back and forth to my bee hives. Since I sold them a couple months ago, I have not walked this route or maintained a clear path like I had for the last 5 years. It was now overgrown and poison ivy was coming out of the woods and crossing toward the fields.
I need to eradicate it! But remember, I am not a country girl. I can tell you all about cautionary things in my world of beaches and oceans, but I have never faced off with poison ivy. So I did my research to find out the urushiol oil from the plant can stay active on the dead plant, your clothes, tools and anything else that comes in contact with it for YEARS! I worry the dogs will be exploring and bring that oil back into the house on their fur. The grandkids will unknowingly make contact.
So last Monday I got up early and dressed defensively with double gloves, glasses, hat, long pants and long sleeve shirt and tall boots. I had read that you should NEVER burn poison ivy: Burning vaporizes the urushiol oil. Inhaling the smoke can cause severe, life-threatening allergic reactions in your lungs and airways. AND DO NOT weed-whack: String trimmers chop the plant into tiny pieces and spray toxic urushiol oil into the air, onto your clothes, and onto your skin. So I chose my tools, set up a big garbage bag and started cutting everything back to clear a path and expose the devil.
But first I took some cool creature pics on the path (as identified by iNat):
Yellow garden spider
Longhorn bee with full pollen saddlebags
Common whitetail dragonfly
tiny Tumbling Ragdoll on Spotted Horsemint flower
I was very careful and purposeful and I worked cutting and bagging for two hours. Then I had to stop. If you ever see me working and I look like this
I need to stop, please make sure I do as this lack of tolerance for heat (the temp was creeping up as usual) was part of why I needed to quit beekeeping. I rested in the shade, drank water and cleaned up. I had worked hard and had cleared the path
I cleaned all my tools and boots with degreasing Dawn soap. I stripped down and washed all my clothes with strong degreasing detergent. Then I showered and washed my skin with dawn and soap.
I knew there really was no way I did not get touched at some point in all that digging and bagging, but no blisters appeared. I read that approximately 15% to 25% of people are not affected by urushiol oil. While the vast majority of the population will experience an allergic reaction, this small minority is genetically resistant because their immune systems do not register the oil as a threat. Maybe I am one of these lucky ones.
BUT then two days later
I eventually ended up with 4 itchy blisters on my forearm that I am treating with hydrocortisone. The worst part is there is still a huge crop of poison ivy there
And it goes deep deep into the tree line. I will need to get something to spray on it. Please share your best treatments and poison ivy tales with me in the comments or at tmbrickey@aol.com.
The heat and weeds are a challenge at the Wildscape now.
Patricia and Rosie accomplished some chores as have the Reks.
When it is cool, more natives will be planted and next year will see a lot of blooms. Birds are enjoying the Wildscape and have been raising their young in mailboxes, bee hotels and native trees. Kim and I recently spent a windy afternoon moving sprinklers and relaxing with sweet drinks, cake and Fritos!
A few weeks ago I showed up at the Milam Wildscape and worked up a sweat pulling weeds and cleaning up the garden beds along with other TMNs. While there, I talked with Ann Collins about the Wild Wings Bird Sanctuary nearby. I had only been there once before and loved the peaceful feel of the area with the fresh running water bird bath and sturdy benches to sit at and admire the many visiting birds. I asked Ann if she needed help with it. Turned out it was both our lucky days. She asked if I could take it on to visit and work on the site regularly and I said yes! Quite a few folks have worked hard to create and then keep the space up since its origin in 2024. I read the past blog posts and heard several events have been hosted there. Gene Rek especially has created so much there and keeps the feeders full and water running. I hoped to take on more responsibility to help manage the space.
Last Thursday morning my husband, Vern and I loaded the van with tools and headed over. He worked the weed whacker, trying to tame a path from the road into the area so that you can easily park and walk to the seating.
I took my tool to the garden beds to remove some grasses and weeds. The Black Eyed Susans were plentiful and we left them intact.
I also saw Lantana and beautiful bunches of sunflowers getting ready to blossom. I filled the seed bird feeders and hung the hummingbird feeders with fresh sugar water.
Besides general maintenance, I hope to add a few improvements. That’s where all you come in. Anyone have any bird feeders to donate? Want to create some bird houses to hang? How about a few Five gallon buckets of small and medium rock to put on the ground around the water bath to help contain the mud area.
And of course I will appreciate help with decisions and work on adding a bunch of seeds to the beds now so that we get a great turn out of flowering plants next spring. I am working with Linda Burgess to collect seed packets to use.
If you have donations or want to help, reach out to me at tmbrickey@aol.com.
Today was a happy day for this blog. We have a new member of the blogging crew. Let’s welcome Terri Brickey to the team! She’s an experienced blogger who just needed a refresher course in how WordPress has changed since she last worked on her own blog. Now when I’m unavailable, we have a helper! And she’s going to contribute more blogs of her own nature observations. We had a fun afternoon looking at the nature where I live and planning future activities.
Terri is also a fan of iNaturalist observations
In nature news, I saw a spider today. It was one of the largest bold jumping spiders (Phidippus audax) I ever saw! Look at those charming green eyes!
a cutie pie
These spiders are often kept as pets, but I enjoy them in the wild. They have nested in our mailbox many times. They’re solitary and carnivorous. Their ability to move quickly and see extremely well makes them quite successful native species. They have iridescent chelicerae, which is one reason I enjoy them so much.
Earlier this week, I worked on adding up how many bird species I observed at our Milam County property, the Hermits’ Rest last month. I keep notebooks that record the species I see and/or hear with help from Merlin Bird ID every day I’m at home. I was happy to have seen 126 different species as the migration season drew to a close. I was wondering if there was a seasonal pattern, because I intuited that the spring and autumn migration seasons would bring in more species.
Speaking of birds, I’m not sure if this sparrow nest addendum was on purpose.
I don’t remember exactly what I did, but somehow Excel asked me if I wanted an analysis of the data. Well, yes, I did, because data analysis using spreadsheets is not one of my skill sets. I had all kinds of questions that I’d like answered, like what were the most common species, which species have been here every month, etc.
Like, am I a bird?
Suddenly, BOOM. a new tab opened on the spreadsheet. It had all the answers. Something had analyzed my spreadsheet. Oh no, I found a use for AI! Damn! I couldn’t not look at the results. I really wanted to know.
Right on top, there was a summary of my ranch bird data:
The sheet is a month-by-species presence matrix: an X means a bird was recorded in that month. Coverage spans Dec-23 through May-26, with 2,804 total monthly presence marks. May-25 is the richest month (129 species); Jul-24 is the quietest (60 species). 18 species appear in every month, suggesting reliable year-round residents. 30 species appear in only one month, highlighting possible migrants, one-off observations, or rare sightings.
That’s all the stuff I wanted to know! To top it all off, there were tables and charts! Look at this.
I was wrong about the seasons. Winter, with all those sparrows, has the second most sightings, after what I expected…that spring gets the most.
This one is probably my favorite. I wonder, though, how we got so many species last June, when the previous June, July, and August were so low (and this June is starting off pretty slow). What I really think is that I need another couple of years of data to see these patterns better. Here’s another graph:
These are the 18 birds we see every month, with two that occur almost every month. I am not at all surprised at the species I see here. I wasn’t sure that Eastern Bluebirds were here every month. I don’t see them every day, but I guess they are here. Okay, one final fascinating thing.
These are supposedly the birds we’ve only seen once. That’s pretty interesting, but look! There are weird spellings on the birds, which I assure you are spelled correctly on the original spreadsheet. I probably shouldn’t have asked for a red border. I wonder what a Swalver is? And I think those last two are both Virginia Rails. But it appears only once on my list. I went too far and AI mauled my data.
What are my conclusions? In summary, AI is helpful upon occasion, but AI also is inclined to do weird stuff to the data. You have to keep your eyes open. Here’s the actual data of birds that were only seen or heard by Merlin Bird ID once. (This does not include a couple of obvious errors where the location got messed up or some other Merlin glitch happened; you’ve got to keep an eye on Merlin, too.)
American Golden-plover
American Tree Sparrow
Barn Owl
Bay-breasted Warbler
Black Capped Chickadee
Black Tern
Black-and-white Warbler
Black-necked Stilt
Boat-tailed Grackle
Canada Warbler
Caspian Tern
Chestnut-collared Longspur
Chuck-Will’s Widow
Common Raven
Crested Lark
Greater White-fronted Goose
Hooded Warbler
Indian Peafowl
Lark Bunting
Olive-sided Flycatcher
Pyrrhuloxia
Rough-winged Swallow
Semi-palmated Plover
Semi-palmated Sandpiper
Spotless Starling
Thick-billed Longspur
Tricolored Heron
Virginia Rail
Western Wood Pewee
Yellow-green Vireo
Dang, I’m ambivalent. But now I have some helpful insights about my bird data. I am pleased about that and look forward to continuing with monthly analysis and getting more information.
I was not quite so pleased when I sleepily ventured onto the screened porch to guzzle some coffee before my 8 am standup (once again it went 30 minutes over). I went to set my coffee down and spotted a snakeskin on the arm of my chair. You know I’ve lived here a while, because all I did was ask Lee if he put it there. Nope. I set the skin on my big turtle shell where it looks quite decorative.
It wasn’t a big one.
I guess the rat snake left the way it came in when it realized there were no birds or rodents to snack on. Ah, it’s always something!
Nature Along the El Camino Real 