B and B

Tree huggers is rural Texas

Just saw this brief article in the San Antonio Express-News about a beautiful stretch of roadway out in the wilds of the Texas Hill Country, about an hour west of here.

MEDINA — State plans to cut down huge trees beside Texas 16 to permit widening of the highway have drawn the ire of area residents, as well as a court challenge that has idled the chain saws for now.

The public outcry led the Texas Department of Transportation to modify its plans and reduce from seven to two the number of pecan and walnut trees targeted as part of a $4.3 million project designed to enhance safety.

But that hasn't mollified tree lovers who demonstrated Monday at the shady intersection of Texas 16 and Kyle Ranch Road just southeast of Medina with signs that read "Save Our Trees" and "Save The History."

"This is one of the most beautiful sections of Texas 16," said Kathryn Kyle, manager of a local ranch. "If they make the road wider, people are just going to drive faster."

Her mother, Jacquelynn R. Kyle, filed suit Thursday in Bandera against TxDOT and obtained a restraining order to block the removal of any pecan or walnut trees until a 9 a.m. hearing this Thursday in Boerne.

"The grove of trees is a natural resource which needs to be protected and preserved," the lawsuit states.

Rural Texas is apparently full of tree huggers. Who knew?

April Carolinas, May Bewicks

Still alive and kicking here at the B and B hacienda, albeit I've been a bit preoccupied. I plan to resume posting regularly soon, albeit I'm going to have to work up to it.

Meanwhile, a few bird notes: Despite watching birds for several years, I am still enough of a novice to learn something new all the time.

Just last spring, on an volunteer outing at the yet-to-be-opened Crowridge Canyon nature park, charting Golden-cheeked Warbler and Black-capped Vireo habitat, I learned the song of the Bewick's Wren. Once I learned the song, suddenly I heard them everywhere, including in our yard, which previously I had assumed only contained Carolina Wrens.

Fast forward to this year. Earlier this spring, I was wondering why I didn't hear any Bewick's Wrens. Carolinas were still plentiful, but now the Bewick's were apparently missing in action. That was April. Now it's May, and I suddenly hear Bewick's all over, and the Carolinas have gone silent.

Looking back, it was last May when I learned the Bewick's song and heard them all over, so I'm suspecting there's a pattern here that only now have I awoken to.

Educational neglect in Texas

State parks are not the only thing that the Texas legislature has squandered due to neglect—the public education system is another. After innumerable special sessions over the last few years, the legislature still has not been able to figure out how to adequately fund them. And now they are trying again. Well, not really. But they are making a show of it, anyway.

The situation is quite confusing, and I have struggled to make sense of it in the nearly eight years I've lived here. Only recently do I feel I have gained even a rudimentary understanding.

Carlos Guerra, fortunately, provides some helpful background in a column in today's Express-News. He sums up the current special session at the end, writing:

When the Texas Supreme Court [last year] ruled that the local property taxes had become an unconstitutional state property tax, and that school districts had no meaningful discretion in spending local money, many lawmakers cheered that the ruling would force compromise.

So on Monday, lawmakers convened for the sixth time [since 2003] to fix school funding. The governor ordered them to consider legislation "that provides for school district relief" by modifying the franchise tax, the motor vehicle sales tax and the tobacco tax. But all of the modifications will go solely to lowering property taxes.

There also is widespread speculation that with elections looming, lawmakers will dip deeply into the state's surplus to avoid making hard decisions — and the possibility of offending powerful interests.

Worse is that there are no plans for providing the additional state money needed to improve schools to acceptable levels, or even to adequately fund the added costs for schooling Texas' rapidly growing special-needs enrollment.

Worst of all is that the plan is for a quick, short-term solution.

What I still don't understand is how an urgent, court-ordered need to fund schools has been transformed by our do-nothing GOP governor, Rick Perry, into a special session devoted solely to reducing property taxes.

Texas Observer on the State Parks crisis

The Texas Observer has an excellent article on the Texas state park system's legislature-induced crisis. It's the same story I've been relaying for several months now, but with further details filled in. It's well worth a read, if only to remind ourselves of what needs to be done.

Here is an excerpt:

Quality-of-life factors, such as parks and amenities, are second only to an educated work force as the top criteria companies use when evaluating locations, Dabney said. In 2001, when Dallas-Fort Worth was one of three finalists for Boeing’s new corporate headquarters, DFW and Texas offered more tax breaks and incentives than Chicago and Illinois did. But Boeing ended up going to Chicago, which includes 87,000 acres of open space, parks, and forests in Cook County in its quality-of-life portfolio. Instead of increasing funding of parks to make Texas more attractive, Texas leaders responded with cutbacks. [Walt] Dabney [director of state parks for Texas Parks and Wildlife] says that’s a dumb way to operate a government, especially if you’re trying to operate it like a business. “Tourism is the second or third component of the Texas economy and parks are the biggest component of the tourism segment,” he said. “If you’re not taking care of that, that’s bad economics.”

“What we’ve been doing is very parochial,” admitted [Parks and Wildlife Commission Chairman Joseph] Fitzsimons. “It’s ad hoc. There’s still not a plan to say how are we going to acquire new land, how are we going to tie the demand and the constituency to the service. The fish and wildlife constituency stay drilled into the department on a daily basis, from the squirrel hunters to the catfishermen to the bowhunters. They know their money [from hunting and fishing licenses] is going to the fish and wildlife division. They’re making sure they’re represented. But when you buy a canoe or a kayak or a mountain bike, you don’t have any expectations the sales tax from that is going to a place where you can use it. The sporting goods tax is a joke. It’s essentially GR [general revenue]. The sales of paddle craft have quintupled in the past 10 years. But I don’t have any more kayak trails to offer.”

...

The solutions are simple. Raise the cap on the sporting goods tax from $35 million to $85 million, as Rep. Harvey Hilderbran (R-Kerrville) has proposed. Better yet, eliminate the cap on the sporting goods tax altogether, as [former Parks and Wildlife Commissioner Bob] Armstrong suggests. Make it an honest user tax. Last year’s take of more than $100 million is more than enough to operate the parks division and to launch a program to buy more parkland for future generations. And the governor would do well to occasionally appoint a member to the Parks and Wildlife Commission who is a parks-first advocate. If nothing else, that would bring a different point of view to the table.

Will Texans save their parks for their children and grandchildren? If so, we had better get busy.

Back from the Valley

Posting has been slow lately obviously. One reason is we just returned from several days on a birding adventure a few hours south of here—near the southern tip of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. In three days, we saw seventy-some species (not counting most gulls or shorebirds), nearly twenty of which were life birds for us.

Yes, somehow we managed to live the last seven-plus years in south central Texas without yet visiting the birding mecca of the Rio Grande Valley.

There is so much to see in the Valley, and we only covered a very small portion of it—toward the eastern end. We spent a day at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge near the coast and the better part of another day at Brownsville's Audubon Sabal Palm Sanctuary, one of the last remnants of the extensive palm forests that once lined the Rio Grande near its mouth. We'll have to devote more trips to see other birding hot spots, such as the particularly famous Bentsen-Rio Grande State Park, which is several dozen miles west of where we were.

One bird we saw that wasn't a life bird was the blazingly colorful Green Jay. We managed to get a couple fleeting glances of some on one trip to Choke Canyon State Park a couple years ago. But in the Valley, they are impossible to miss.

DeLay surprises me and quits

I must admit that I did not see this coming. One thing I didn't figure Tom DeLay for was a quitter. Yet it turns out he is.

Rep. Tom DeLay will announce on Tuesday that he will not seek re-election and will leave Congress within months, according to congressional aides.

The aides said that Mr. DeLay, who has been swept into an election-year lobbying scandal, was calling congressional leaders Monday night to inform them of his plans.

...

The news of Mr. DeLay's decision broke on television stations about 10 p.m. Monday night. An article on the Time magazine Web site, based on an interview with Mr. DeLay, earlier in the day, said that Mr. DeLay "vowed to pursue an aggressive speaking and organizing campaign aimed at promoting foster care, Republican candidates and a closer connection between religion and government."

Good riddance.

Now, what about all the rest of the GOP politicians who have modelled their behavior after his corrupt example?

Spring? Winter? Ask the birds

Spring must really be here. We spotted our yard's first hummingbirds of the year yesterday and again today. (Likely they were either Ruby-throated or Black-chinned; we get both, and I didn't get a good enough look at these yet. Perhaps tomorrow.)

A bit over a week ago, the Nashville Warblers arrived. The first one was almost misidentified as our sole winter warbler, the drab colored and nearly featureless Orange-crowned. I remember a comment along the lines, "That's the most dramatic Orange-crowned Warbler I've ever seen!" when the first Nashville appeared. The Nashvilles will eventually move on to more northerly locales to breed (not Nashville oddly enough), but for now we get to enjoy them.

And we have reliable reports from just down the road, that Golden-cheeked Warblers have arrived and been singing for a couple weeks now. Migration is on!

Or is it still winter? The Chipping Sparrows, American Goldfinches, and Cedar Waxwings are still hanging about in significant numbers. How much longer will they stick with us?

Bush's public land sale sputters along

A feel-good headline from the Rocky Mountain News: "Forest land sale sputters."

The first line isn't bad either.

There's little support for a Bush administration plan to sell 300,000 acres of Forest Service land, federal officials said Wednesday as they extended the public comment period.

The comment period would have expired today, but now we've got until April 30.

Meanwhile, two Democratic western Senators have a solution for Bush's de-funding of rural schools, which, as you may recall, has been the administration's pseudo-rationale for proposing the land sale in the first place.

U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) is introducing legislation today that will fund the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act without selling public lands. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is cosponsoring the measure.

The bill will raise $2.6 billion over the next ten years for the rural schools program, commonly known as the county payments law, by closing a tax loophole that allows some government contractors to avoid their tax obligations.

...

The legislation would provide a steady revenue stream for the county payments law by closing a tax loophole in Federal contracts. Under current law, the Federal government does not withhold taxes owed from government contractors that provide goods and services to the Federal government. As a result, some contractors don’t comply with Federal tax law.

The Baucus proposal will help close the annual "tax gap" by withholding taxes from payments by the Federal government for goods and services delivered by public contractors at a rate of three percent of the payment amount.

While Senators Baucus and Wyden show some leadership, the Bushies, in the person of senior Ag Department official Mark Rey, show none. One of Rey's favorite lines is that there are no alternatives to funding rural schools other than selling off our national heritage, little by little. Just yesterday, he said, ”We're open to alternatives, but nary another alternative has emerged.”

What will his tune be tomorrow?

Crownridge Canyon: a new San Antonio nature park

Thanks to the foresight of the voters of San Antonio back in the year 2000, we all have a new nature park as of this past weekend—Crownridge Canyon Natural Area, 207 acres of Hill Country on the far northwest side, amidst an enveloping sea of fast-growing subdivisions. The grand opening was Saturday morning at 9. Not being much of a morning person, I didn't make that, but we did drop by for a brief visit late that afternoon. As you can see, I got a few pictures.

Compared to the 8,000-plus acres of Government Canyon State Natural Area, the 207 acres of Crownridge may seem like small potatoes. But, like the similarly-sized, twenty-year-old Friedrich Wilderness Park just a couple miles away, Crownridge Canyon will inevitably become a special place in the minds of many San Antonians. As the Friends of Friedrich Wilderness Park website says, these modest-sized parks provide "an opportunity for visitors to experience the sights, sounds, and scents of nature in a landscape of creeks, springs, hilltops, and wooded canyons."

Nearly a year ago, the San Antonio Express-News wrote about a sneak-preview tour of the park given by the city:

The Crownridge Canyon Natural Area is the first preserve resulting from about 6,500 acres funded by a sales tax increase that voters approved in 2000. The tax was meant to protect natural land near the aquifer, San Antonio's primary source of water, from the booming residential development in Northern Bexar County....

Staff provided short tours through the natural area, which is home to the endangered golden-cheeked warbler, white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, butterflies and feral hogs.

The area will provide nature-based recreation including hiking, day camping and wildlife watching.

When completed, there will be about two miles of trails, nearly half paved with pervious material for wheelchairs and strollers and the other half natural.

"It's for people who want to get away from it all. Listen to the birds, hear the wind blow through the trees," said Janis Merritt, a park native plant specialist.

"It's a different experience from our city parks with soccer fields and picnic areas."

Visitors to Crownridge Canyon said they were impressed by the effort to keep the area natural and apart from the high-priced neighborhoods around it.

"You can see what this area was like before the development. We're surrounded by houses, but some places in here you wouldn't know because it's so quiet," said Francine Romero, a supporter of Proposition 1. "San Antonio has so many beautiful areas, and we're losing them so fast. I don't want people to forget."

During our visit, we perused natural history exhibits housed in a large open-air shelter. On the walls and floor of the shelter is a mural with a very watery theme—designed, undoubtedly, to remind visitors of the reasons why this land was spared from development.

News of the park's opening must not have spread very far yet, for, despite the perfect weather, we were one of only a handful of groups at the park. So it was quiet and peaceful. We proceeded up the wide, paved trail, catching glimpses of mansions dotting the hill tops surrounding the park and pausing to snap pictures and enjoy the late afternoon sun shining through the red oak leaves just budding out after a short, dry winter.

We admired the solid trail engineering—far more substantial than anything done by the volunteer trail building crew at Government Canyon State Natural Area of which we had been a part. The city clearly put a premium on accessibility.

As we reached the far point of the loop, a narrower, unpaved trail—more typical of those at Government Canyon—set off into the woods. Leaving that short adventure for another day, we continued following the paved path back towards the park entrance. Along the way, we watched a juvenile Red-shouldered Hawk circle above us before landing in a red oak a couple hundred feet across a meadow.

As we exited the park, we were reminded that what is left of the peace and quiet in this part of the Hill Country is not going to last much longer, apart from a few oases such as Crownridge Canyon. A sign in front of a large, undeveloped grassland advertised the opening of a private high school—coming in summer 2006.

Fortunately, the voters of San Antonio showed further foresight a year ago in extending the aquifer-protection sales tax for another four years. So, while subdivisions and car dealerships eat up our natural landscape more and more every year, more new city nature parks are in the works.

Forum on rescuing Texas' state parks, Houston, April 7

Those interested in solving the legislative neglect of Texas' state parks and who will be in the Houston area on Friday, April 7, take note. On that day, there will be a forum—hosted by the University of Houston-Downtown, the Sierra Club, and the Texas Coalition for Conservation—called 'Concerned Public to the Rescue of Texas State Parks.' It will address plans on where to obtain the necessary money to adequately fund our parks.

From the Houston Chronicle:

"We're hoping to give people the information they need to be effective advocates for the state park system," said Evelyn Merz, who is helping coordinate [the forum] at the University of Houston-Downtown.

...

"How park funding got into this tremendous crisis is much less important than how we solve the problem — how we find a long-term solution to the funding issue," Merz said.

To do that, the public and politicians need to grasp the gravity of parks' problems and see some potential methods of resolving it, she said.

To that end, forum speakers will including Walt Dabney, director of the state parks division of Texas Parks and Wildlife, and Joe Turner, director of the City of Houston's parks and recreation department, to help explain underfunding's impact on parks and the public.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend. But perhaps we can put something like this together in San Antonio, and other cities around Texas, soon.