Texas Rat Snake dilemma

Friends on facebook who have been following this adventure know that it started with an update:

BEST HUBBY EVER!! Brought me a Texas Rat Snake =D Yes, Sky, it is has been taken into custody until further notice. My sewing tote will need to be laundered after this, though.

 ...Sky Stevens was tagged in the note because last time the snake - this snake? - was found and identified, there was a bit of hesitance on the actual identification. Texas Rat Snakes (Pantherophis obsoletus lindheimeri) aren't supposed to be here. And they're certainly not supposed to be startling guests around town; that's how they get killed. And we don't want that to happen. They are NOT venomous and they eat House Sparrows among other things, what's not to love?

So Friday morning, when a handsome fellow showed up while I was at work and presented me with a lovely Texas Rat Snake, I was thrilled. It was alive, well fed (check out the lump in its belly!), gorgeous and definitely 100% Texas Rat Snake.

Snapping a few photos, the question soon became: how to keep it until 1) ID is confirmed by someone else, 2) it can be released where it won't return, since returning means eventual death, 3) ???

Not working at a pet store is kind of a down side - we end up with enough birds going to rehab that we probably should have some empty cages around. But while rehab birds can - and should - go into dark cardboard boxes lined with paper towels, well, that sounds like a recipe for escape with a snake. Canvas tote bag, it is! Sewing projects don't need a tote anyway.

Canvas bag courtesy of Irene Trudell, Texas Rat Snake courtesy of Matthew York, hand modeling and identification confirmation courtesy of Craig Trumbower. We have awesome neighbors.

Back to the snake - if it's the same individual that was found a few months ago and released a few blocks from the location... it's still healthy, bright eyed and well fed. Meal favorites are suspected to be House Sparrows, since it was caught among their nests last time.

A few less-than-flattering portraits of the lovely critter, held gently but firmly by Matt:

The patterning is really quite something when the photo is enlarged - most of the scales are edged in a bright, bold orange-red color! This photo also highlights the less-mouthy and more-stinky end of the snake... you can see where the ventral (belly) scales go from being double to single; and the cloaca is right where that transition occurs.

 To keep the discussion brief: these snakes don't belong here. They like to climb trees and eat baby birds... heat and humidity are part of their lifestyle. We're just not in their range. But shipments of plants, trailers of supplies, plenty of trucks and trailers and room for stowaways... most of the traffic out here comes from the direction of Dallas, Austin and/or San Antonio. Prime habitat, really.


 

The blue stripes are Baird's Rat Snake (Pantherophis bairdi) - most of Texas is shaded brown, where Texas Rat Snake is supposed to be found. We're also in the range of the Trans-Pecos Rat Snake (Bogertophis subocularis), but that's another story entirely.


Back to the quandry -
Texas Rat Snake of full-tummy has been upgraded from canvas tote bag to spacious tupperware digs; lovely cavern of overturned dog bowl and deer antler for ambiance. Spinach tub, trimmed down for a pool... filled with roof-caught rainwater. This whole featherless-bird housing issue is strange.

Well, now what? We have neighbors who occasionally head to San Antonio who could release it - but how good are the odds of survival? Better than a bird's would be, I have to assume. If released around here, eventually it will probably be killed by a person. Even if suitable enough habitat - like Post Park - could work, it stands a chance of interbreeding with locals and we have friends doing DNA work on snakes out here that would not be thrilled. A captive life would be cushy but... we like things to be living as naturally as possible. Does it have mites/ticks/other things that it could transmit to other populations? It is already here and probably still has whatever it came with - but is that a big issue with reptiles?

These are the things we are musing over. For now, a large plastic tub on our porch has a fat, healthy Texas Rat Snake as a guest. And it's a safe place until further notice.

BirdTape and why it should be on your windows.

The American Bird Conservancy has produced a fantastic new product: BirdTape.

Ultimately, windows kill more birds in the US than all other forms of human-related bird deaths (cats, cars, wind turbines, etc), combined. Indeed, it is speculated that many cat kills were stunned from hitting windows first. Many stunned birds who are lucky enough to escape cats still fly away and many die later of internal injuries.

Here's their instructional video:



Be sure to check out the video at the bottom of their collisions page!!

Considering that the Germans have been working on this for years because their sound barriers along highways tend to be glass, it has taken quite a while for the idea to spread. Here are a few pictures from my 2008 trip, starting with a shelter at a train station that was built before the idea caught on - but still has falcon silhouette stickers!



Apologies for the quality of these, they're both taken from inside moving trains. This second design would have been more bird friendly if the stripes were vertical instead of horizontal, but the aesthetic appeal would probably have been decreased. For all practical purposes, though, it will do its job far better than the few stickers on the shelter above!



For a reminder: most buildings have this problem to one degree or another. Here's a kindergarten/elementary school that uses bird stickers and big, bright paper cutouts to prevent bird/people window strikes.



And for grown-ups, here's the airport in Koln: the main building is huge glass panels without any visible sign of stickers or fritting or bird-friendly modifications. Yet the air vents near the parking lot are surrounded by glass panels as well, and they have designs that are about as effective as bird stickers (read: better than nothing, but not by much).



So if you have issues with your windows, don't waste your effort on band-aid fixes like one or two stickers per window - you will have bird prints between the stickers:



Related links:
Problems with Windows
10 Things You Can Do To Reduce Bird vs. Window Collisions
A window into the perils of migration
Seetrail links:
Tis the season; a bird is trying to get into my house
When birds hit windows

Another option: shade structures. A bit more expensive than tape.



Conclusion? My name is Heidi, and I am a window tourist.



(x-posted at Big Bend Birds & Nature)

The "why" of window monitoring

Birds hit windows. It's pretty much impossible to overstate the  extent of the issue. Pretty much everyone knows that it happens but very few people look beyond face value of the smudge on glass.

This is more eloquent than anything I've seen yet, so please take a look at
Tim O'Connell's piece: A window into the perils of migration. He beautifully outlines the "how" and "why" of dead birds as educational tools, as well as one example of the mind boggling architecture that causes such high mortality rates. Flat-sided buildings are bad enough, but a horseshoe with a 'corridor effect' cluster at one end? Yikes!

On a coincidental note, I'm about half way into a paper on the complexities of North American window collisions - they've been my constant companion since 2003 and I need to get my thoughts out of my head and into writing. Unfortunately it's a rather dry, sciency sort of writing, but I think the discussion will be helpful. It's just terribly difficult to keep citations sorted out since there are about 20 papers that cite each other ad infinitum and the resulting citation loop is frustrating. One paper that I criticize lists my paper in its citations, too, for that matter!

Anyway, here are some lovelies - Tennessee Warblers - from Principia, circa 2004-2005 (a tiny fraction of the actual species diversity and even fewer of the overall body count.)



External link: dead bird album


This is also cross-posted over at Big Bend Birds & Nature.

August update

Last week we were asked to speak about the impact of drought on birds and other wildlife on Marfa Public Radio; the audio has been archived and can now be accessed anywhere, at any time, should you feel the urge.

Photo/permalink via Marfa Public Radio:


Handy links from previous posts on the Big Bend Birds & Nature blog:
the drying, the drought (a bit heavy, but eye-opening)
in the meantime, pictures
freezer catch-up
and an optimistic final note: drought?

...in the meantime, things are keeping a hectic pace that neither blog quite reflects. We'd promise more updates if we knew there would be any soonish, but that's a long shot! Perhaps photos of some furniture projects one of these days, though...

Bike Tire Flip Flops

Back in 2004 I fell in love with a pair of flip flops, $20 from the REI in St. Louis. By the following summer, they were pretty well worn through. So another $20 and voila, another pair (sadly, the store was out of black, so they weren't an exact replacement). By the following summer, the new pair was almost worn through. The first pair - by then house flops - were REALLY worn through. So, knowing that Teva would re-sole some of their models, I dropped an e-mail to see if their flops were among the re-soleable shoes... the predecessor of this is what I have. No luck. No love for the cushy foam-soles. I was out of luck.

Now, add 8 hrs of a drive to the nearest REI. Ignore that; pretend shipping was free. How to face the guilt of retiring a perfectly reasonable TWO PAIRS of some of the fondest foot-memories I have ('flopping 2 months in CA, 'flopping through streams in IL, 'flopping across two college campuses and countless birding trips, the list goes on!) ...when only the soles were a problem? Every walking-of-the-dogs was a new thorn poking through the soles, a new bur jabbing up from the heel, a fresh reminder of what, unfortunately, needed to be replaced.

How do you re-sole a flip flop? Easy. You admit defeat and call yourself a waste of resources and wish that shoe repair places actually existed or maybe that things were made to last (good-old-days syndrome).

But then, a glimmer of hope: Bike Man is a friend of ours. Matt's bike is from Bike Man (can we call him John yet?) and I have a new set of tires from him and I thought, just maybe, if WWII era 'flops were made out of stamped tires, where could I find a lighter, thinner substitute? Perhaps an old bike tire? John had a pile out back, and soon I was merrily chopping a tire into Heidi-foot long segments. Two pairs of flops, 6 or 7 Heidi-foot-lengths in one tire, plenty of room to experiment!

You can see where this is going:

For those interested in flops with awesome tread*:

1) Cut up tires
2) Trim off wire-reinforced edge of tire (thankfully I have narrow feet, so it worked nicely)
3) Clean inside of tire, bottom of flop
4) Apply Goop with abandon; smush together for ~48 hrs
5) Trim excess tire
6) Run around like a madman and brag about it all over the internet ;-)

* These treads are GRIPPY, it's awesome! Because the tread on a bike tire is only in the middle, though, it's taking a bit of adjusting - there's less support under my big toe. For less grippy tires, or really worn treads, I think it'd work out more smoothly. Just depends on how/where you want to use them.

So go forth and don't give up on your beloved flops! Reduce, reuse, re-flop!

January's Public Service Announcement

Admittedly, this PSA would have been fresh off the press in 2007, but the message is timeless. Similar to our water conservation PSA, it's brilliantly inspirational. Since we no longer live in a place with water in the toilet, our water conservation has been pretty easy; our next goal is to balance out our use of plastic bags (we've got canvas bags and used them obsessively in Waco, but here we get them because they double as trash bags...)



Another version of the song with introduction can be found here.

Those of you not familiar with Tim Minchin may think of him as, perhaps, the Weird Al of Australia, but with his own music and heavy eye makeup most of the time.

faces

Here are a few more snippets from yesterday's transfer -



These birds all hatched in the June 1-4 span, so they're almost ready to adventure out and figure out what this life is all about. You can tell from the videos that they really are Not Thrilled about this handling and going from box to box with [un]pleasantries exchanged...




Overall, this is a project that *does* something. Allow me to explain. For example, a baby ocelot or jaguar born in a zoo will stay in a zoo. It will live out its life in relatively crowded conditions (compared to wild ranges), it will be subjected to constant human contact, never be able to roam its own native habitat...



I've worked with Attwater's Prairie Chickens, nearly doomed to extinction by urban sprawl, fencing, overgrazing, and loss of prairie (and trees, among other things). They are essentially found in only 2 places - dedicated preserves where they are heavily repopulated, and captive breeding projects.




So to antagonize young falcons may be temporarily unpleasant for them, but they will live the life of a falcon. Their species still exists in the wild, their habitat still remains. They will not be shuffled off to other captive breeding programs because their survival in the wild is impossible. Yet these are the last of the Endangered falcons in North America - Peregrines were de-listed a while ago.



...ponder these faces and think about how it's easier to save habitat before something is Endangered, because once the habitat and ecology surrounding a critter are gone, you need all of that in place for reintroduction. If that is even possible. Otherwise, if captivity is the last chance for the species, is it really surviving at all? Or are we, as humans in general, simply setting aside a feeling of guilt with captive populations because the critters are not technically Extinct?

the return

As we pack up to leave for west Texas again, here's the last batch of photos from a month ago:



The horizon looks benign until you notice a creeping plague of wind farms...



These areas are poorly studied for overall impact - what we do know about migration would suggest that these dry areas really aren't bird-dense. That does not stop local and migrating birds from being killed, though. We don't really even understand anything about bat migration at this point, so pushing wind farm development without knowing the basic life histories of the critters impacted is a very ill planned scheme. For all of the screaming for "green" energy, very few people are willing to unplug their own habits.



Matt and I added another pile of counties to our ever-growing county courthouse list. Texas has something like 257 counties and we are trying to visit every single one* (except for those in major urban centers, because those are no fun). Upton County's courthouse matched the earth and the sky, and was perched atop a lovely hill.



The design of the building didn't interest Matt too much, though we did have a good chuckle over the cactus growing on the awning over the front door! What struck me about this building is the use of bright colors. They appear to be opaque panels, but window film can certainly be modified in a manner that would make a glass box look identical to this building; it might be a bit extreme to print faux bricks on the film, but you can minimize the reflective surfaces and space them out in ways that would be less susceptible to bird strikes.



For the nephew: there are a ton of "Oliver's" signs in San Saba, TX - and they're not just into pecans! Quite a few signs are for pecan related things though, so we snuck a picture before returning to Waco.

PSA - Water

This is brave new territory for See Trail; Matt and I tend to post about birds and bugs hoping that conservation is adequately addressed. It's hard to save a species when it has no habitat, but it's also important that we're just plain practical in our daily routine.

So here's our first Public Service Announcement - Water

Brain food from GOOD Magazine & Whole Foods:



Water conservation is a beautiful thing. We all know that leaving the water on while brushing teeth is a waste... but it's not often that we look at our food choices for water conservation ideas. As a former vegetarian of five years, I can attest to the difficulty of going veggie in Texas. But simply promoting vegetarian options at a restaurant by ordering something without meat is making a statement; and it supports the demand for fresh, flavorful options that aren't all peanut butter & jelly sandwiches.

Anyway, the above video made me a little bit braver in promoting the following video, which I finally found a translation for:





Since most Americans take one shower a day* (I'm stereotyping without citations here), there's one flush saved per day. That's only a few gallons. One of the comments posted for the video was this, from CraniumOnEmpty:

Brazilians take a lot of showers because of the heat and humidity. It would be hard to get through the day without taking at least two. Granted most showers are very quick so they don't use as much water as the toilet would. Since they are in the shower already, might as well take a leak and conserve a little water.

A simple, elegant solution. I'm still waiting for most residential areas to embrace gray water reuse, but that seems incredibly unlikely, given the stigma that hand-rinsing water is suddenly tarnished and not even the front lawn deserves such impure fare. Given that this is Texas, I'm pretty sure the lawn wouldn't care.

Thanks for braving the videos, we'll return you to your regularly scheduled blog program eventually!