Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Spring Migration summary

This here is a black-throated green warbler, widespread in the Northwoods and across the eastern hardwood forest, a separate population gets here a bit earlier and breeds on the North Carolina coast, but those birds winter in the Carribean.



Turns out there's an earlier window, March through May, when the climate in the Texas Hill Country resembles that further north. The steep hillsides and narrow ravines support bigtooth maple, sycamores and Ashe juniper (AKA cedar), effectively a small area eastern hardwood forest two months ahead of schedule. Over time it is presumed that Texas had its own population of some common ancestor of today's black-throated green. Over the centuries, this population was presumably reproductively isolate by timing and location and became the golden-cheeked warbler



The songs of the two species are similar, and some degree interbreeding with black-throated greens occurs, but golden-cheeked warblers do all their breeding in March and early April, and black-throateds mostly come through after that.

How many golden-cheeked warblers there were "back in the days" is debatable, most of the Hill Country was burned over prairie with just pockets of woodland habitats in the steeper-sided ravines. One limiting factor has been that female golden-cheeks will not built their nests out of anything other than strips of juniper bark, and these shreds of bark do not appear on a juniper tree until the tree is past about 50 years of age.

Not being a prairie species, golden-cheeked warblers were little affected with the passing of the prairie, in fact their habitat expanded. For the first 150 years of Anglo settlement golden-cheeked warblers came and went mostly unnoticed by ranchers. Arrived in early March, bred, headed back to the highlands of Central America beginning in early June. The woodlands in the ravines survived cattle and old Juniper trees offered shade (the warbler has no use for young junipers).

Late 20th Century the Texas Hill Country. one of the most beautiful and unique regions on earth, begins to disappear under a wave of acreage homesites, a thing continuing unabated to this very day. Out of concern for the warbler and also as a strategy to stop this development, the warbler was put on the Endangered Species list in 1990. There is very little public land in Texas, the economic burden for preserving this warbler was gonna land on private landowners and ranchers. In recognition of that, and in recognition that ranching had little or no effect on warbler populations, Texas Parks and Wildlife did nothing, they couldn't have even tried to do anything anyway without stirring up a shidtstorm.

Then came the election year of 1992, Bill Clinton was elected. 1994 his Secretary of the Interior suddenly declares TWENTY-THREE WHOLE COUNTIES of Central Texas as critical habitat for the warbler, meaning in theory a rancher couldn't even cut a tree without Federal permission. Furor erupts, people go out shotgunning for warblers, the Hill Country echoes with chainsaws as ranchers cut down every old cedar tree in sight, lest the Feds come and inventory their land. "Golden-cheeked Warbler Barbecues" are held as part of public protest rallies.

Here in Texas, 1994 was an election year, a newcomer in politics, one George W. Bush, runs against Democrat incumbent Anne Richards for Governor. This was the year of the backlash against everything Bill Clinton, including don't ask don't tell, and here in Texas George W. Bush hung the warbler issue around Ann Richards' neck.
So, the warbler played a significant role in turning Texas Red, where it narrowly remains twenty-six years later.

At the time of its listing an estimated 10,000 pairs of golden-cheeked warblers remained, maybe more than there ever was before Anglo settlement. Putting it on the Endangered Species List may have been the worst thing that ever happened to it. The beautiful Texas Hill Country is still rapidly going under, and all those cut down old cedars are still gone. I dunno that anyone knows how many warblers we got left.