Blog of the El Camino Real Chapter, Texas Master Naturalists, Milam County, Texas
Author: Sue Ann (Suna) Kendall
The person behind The Hermits' Rest blog and many others. I'm a certified Texas Master Naturalist and love the nature of Milam County. I manage technical writers in Austin, help with Hearts Homes and Hands, a personal assistance service, in Cameron, and serve on three nonprofit boards. You may know me from La Leche League, knitting, iNaturalist, or Facebook. I'm interested in ALL of you!
I got a request for an update on the hawks at my workplace. You know I just love requests. Since the people in our office spend a LOT of of our break time looking at them, there’s no problem with coming up with a report! The raptor couple are the talk of the water cooler, which pleases me a lot. We have a lot of budding birders being developed!
Thinking about sitting on that ledge.
Here are some of the behaviors we’ve observed:
Eating small animals. They like to do that at the parking garage.
Working on the nest. Every so often, a special new stick comes over.
Dealing with windows. There’s a report that one of them went BOOM into a window earlier this week. Both birds seem okay, now.
Dealing with ledges. While I’ve seen one of them successfully land on…
The meeting was held in the chidken building. They did a great job on the projector screen!
Last time, we told you about the Wildscape program at Bird and Bee Farm. They also sponsor educational events, and our members attended a training on raising monarchs for release there on Sunday, March 3. It was presented by Karen and Steve Thier of Plano. We were also joined by monarch expert Bob Mione.
Bob Mione answers a question from the audience.
Bob brought a group of Master Naturalists from the Dallas area, who joined seven El Camino Real members and some curious neighbors for a total of 23 attendees. Catherine Johnson of the El Camino Real chapter served as the host for the event, along with the Reks, who own the farm.
Catherine Johnson introduces Steve Thier
Steve Thier gave a complete overview of the butterfly propagation (if that’s the right word) project that he and Karen have been working on for the past year, which has resulted in them releasing many butterflies, not only monarchs. They have also raised queens, swalllowtails and others.
Our member, Catherine Johnson, visited the Bird and Bee Farm to invite them to speak at a beekeeping workshop last year. There, she met the Reks, who own the farm, and discovered that they were working on making their land a habitat for pollinators, working with the Texas Parks and Wildlife and US Fish and Wildlife Service. Here’s how they tell it:
Bird and Bee Farm is a Conservation Partner in the Pastures for Upland Birds Program. Over the past 150 years, agricultural land has taken over our native prairies. Bird and Bee Farm with the assistance of our new partners are replanting our 100 acre farm to return it to Original Native Prairie-Oak Savannah Habitat.
By establishing native tall-grass and native forbes Bird and Bee Farm will provide an Ecosystem and Habitat for many forms of wildlife including; Eastern Meadowlark, Northern Harrier, Le Conte’s Sparrow, Short-eared Owl, Dickcissel, Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, Mourning Dove, Bobwhite, Wild Turkey, and others. This same habitat will support the Bees, Butterflies (we are on the Monarch Butterfly Migration Path) and other pollinators we so badly need to protect.
The farm also has sheep and donkeys, to help protect the outdoor birrds.
As you could imagine, Catherine realized that working on this project would be great for our chapter. You see, there aren’t any public lands or parks where we can volunteer here in Milam County. Most of the other Master Naturalist groups can log many volunteer hours helping with state or local parks and other nature areas.
Beautiful Rio Grande turkeys. They can fly!
So, Catherine went to work and secured all the permissions needed to allow Master Naturalists to get credit for volunteer work helping set up the plantings, trails, signage, and other aspects of the wildscape project.
Beautiful chicken rearing and sales facility at Bee and Bird Farm.
Since then, the volunteers have helped clear an area for a pollinator garden outside the farm’s chicken house (by the way, the cleanest and happiest chicken world I’ve ever seen; read about it on my blog, if you’d like). They’ve brought in consultants, like Bob Mione, a monarch expert, for advice in soil preparatio, plantings, and fencing (to keep the beautiful guinea fowl from eating the valuable caterpillars that we want to see turn into butterflies).
This turkey would like to eat some caterpillars. But no, not in the special plantings, anyway!
Our next post will be about a wonderful event last Sunday at Bird and Bee Farm, where Master Naturalists from two chapters met to learn more about the life of the monarchs we hope to attract.
Yesterday, the Environment and Recycling Ad-hoc Committee’s Earth Day subcommittee met to continue to work out plans. I was glad I could finally attend a meeting, because it was fun to see the team at work. I was joined by Ann Collins, Linda Jo Conn, Joyce Conner, Catherine Johnson, Rosie Johnson (guest and helper), Larry Kocian, Kathy Lester, and Donna Lewis (the leader of the bunch).
Nandina and Texas mountain laurel added beauty and scent too the meetiing.
What’s going on with Earth Day?
The El Camino Real Master Naturalist Chapter’s biggest outreach project each year is to host an Earth Day event, to share ways to protect the planet with the community. This year it will be at:
Rockdale Community Center, 109 N. Main, on Saturday, April 20, 10 am – 2 pm.
We were excited to learn about all the planned activities and tables. Our team leader, Donna Lewis, went over all the topics and who was planned to staff them, and we settled on where a lot of the tables would be. For example, the recycled tote bag giveaway will be at the entrance, so attendees can use the totes to gather information they want to take home. And the seedling giveaway will be at the exit, to keep those baby plants happy.
Donna Llewis explains something to Kathy Lester, while Linda Jo Con looks on. Joyce Connner, Ann Collins and Cathy Johnson study notes.
It’s great news that the local Girl Scouts plan to join us, as well as our friends at the USDA, who had a great display last year.
We have lots to share already, andwere thrilled to see some beautiful models of the lifecycles of insects and other organisms that had been donated by our Master Naturalist friends in Temple. We will get so much use out of them, including at Earth Day.
A silly selfie shows that Larry Kocian and I were also in attendance.
Whenever there’s an event like this, there are a lot of little details to attend to, such as advertising and signage. We’re grateful to have Larry Kocian to get us on the radio, and Cathy Johnson to contact all the newspapers and other media outlets. Donna is goining to check signage regulations and see if the city will make us a banner!
By meeting’s end the team was feeling pretty confident that we will have a great deal of interesting information at our event.
Storage needs
All the lovely supplies we have for our outreach projects are scattered at members’ homes, and we realized it’s a bit risky to do that, because the items might end up being irretrievable. I offered to store things in my company’s soon-to-be renovated church building, and suggested that the facility would be a nice, central location for future trainings and meetings.
Mmm
We shared a wonderful meal, and are very grateful to Cathy Johnson for doing most of the cooking, as well as to everyone who brought additional food. That kept us going!
Earth Day is officially April 22 this year. Join us April 20 in Rockdale! (image source Earth Day Clip Art)
How can you help?
Fellow Milam County Master Naturalists, please let Donna Lewis know if you’ll be helping out, because we still need folks to staff the tables and generally be friendly. And if you have made tote bags, make sure to get them to someone on the committee. We can use more.
Also, the entire report of the meeting will be available in the members’ area of our website. There’s not enough blog space to include all the details from the meeting!
Everybody else, mark your calendars for April 20, and be sure to join us in downtown Rockdale for the event. There are new restaurants, fun shops and lots more that you may not even realize are in the area, so make a day of it!
by Joyce Conner, Catherine Johnson, Kathy Lester, and Donna Lewis
On Sunday, February 24, 2019, four El Camino Real Chapter members attended three hours of volunteer training at the new All Things Wild Rehabilitation Center in Georgetown, TX. It was difficult to find the first time out, but was found on a hill in a clean, large facility.
You may have seen their March 2019 newsletter, Paws N’ Claws, that went out to all of our members. If you missed it, email info@allthingswildrehab.org.
During this three-hour training, we met many of their highly skilled and compassionate workers and covered so many topics about the center and care of the animals that it would be impossible to repeat everything here. So, instead, we have tried to distill the information into a few topic categories.
Here’s their neat and simple entrance
Mission
The All Things Wild Rehabilitation (ATW) 501c(3) organization started in 2012 with a small group of dedicated rehabilitators who wanted to combine their expertise, effort, and time to help more of the wild animals who were being increasingly negatively impacted by humans. From their Facebook page, the mission of ATW is “to promote respect and compassion for all wildlife though public education and awareness; to rescue, rehabilitate and release sick, injured, orphaned, and displaced wildlife back into the appropriate habitat; and to provide sanctuary for those in need.”
Their new facility 15-minutes north of downtown Georgetown
officially opens March 11, 2019, and the public is invited.
Nature Along the El Camino Real 