Interesting foot note in History of TX Wildlife Mgt. I remember it well. Thanks for posting that Mike.
Well, on the plus side, I made quite a lot of free money every year for ten years counting the warblers for the DoD, the Military really is a good land steward. Can't believe I eventually quit it, but at the time it was taking up every weekend from March through July 4th, all time I could not spend with my wife and son.
The other bird I made a lot of free money off of became almost equally infamous in Texas; the black-capped vireo.
![[Linked Image from live.staticflickr.com]](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49934297653_a8596c9524_z.jpg)
Actually this one HAD been hammered by the passing of the prairie, it breeds in the succession scrubby oak that hangs in there after fires and back in the prairie days was presumably found over large areas clear up to Nebraska. Studies of the few pairs remaining in the Austin area indicated that they experienced almost no nesting success, largely due to getting hammered by cowbirds, said vulnerability to cowbirds being sorta odd in a prairie species.
Nobody seems to have asked where the vireos in the Austin area were coming from if they weren't able to replace themselves, three to five years being a long life for a songbird. Out in the Kerrville Wildlife Management Area until at least recently they trapped and killed cowbirds by the hundreds and do prescribed burns and IIRC have about fifty pairs of successfully reproducing vireos. Admirable as that is, fifty pairs does not a population make.
Things started tipping the other way when in the late 80's, a college professor at A&M who I used to count red-cockaded woodpeckers and the warblers for on the side, traveled to the Burro Mts of Northern Mexico and found breeding black-capped vireos all over. Turns out that the vireo is found sparsely but regularly distributed across much of West Texas on hot, arid slopes that support scrub oak. Ironically, the reason we did not know this is that, almost all of Texas being private land, nobody who would have known was ever able to get out there and look. The Austin area birds were and are on the very eastern fringes of the vireo's range, where conditions for it are marginal and recruitment comes from the main population further west.
Ironically, a local stronghold of the black-capped vireo is on Fort Hood, an armor/artillery training base. This county-sized installation is basically shaped like a large donut with the impact zone in the middle. Everybody shoots towards the middle of the base from the edges (with the unfortunate exception of one Junior Officer one night who got his directions 180 degrees wrong and ended up dropping some howitzer rounds into some guy's acreage homesite a couple of miles off-base
). When you drive on Fort Hood its just hill country juniper scrub, hill country juniper scrub, hill country junipers scrub......
....and then suddenly you arrive at the impact zone and.... cue in Dances With Wolves..... reasonably accurate original-style Texas prairie stretches for miles
There is so much unexploded ordnance in there that when it burns they just let it, hence the fire climax grasslands and oak scrub.... and black-capped vireos
So anyways, IIRC they finally de-listed the vireo a few years back, so I dunno if Kerrville WMA still gets the funds to trap all them cowbirds. I hope so.
