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My
review in Texas Books in Review, Volume XXII, Numbers 1 &
2 Spring/Summer 2002
Birds of Northeast
Texas by Matt White. (College Station: Texas A & M University
Press, 2002,160 pp. 19.95 Paper)
Wildflowers and
Other Plants of Texas Beaches and Islands by Alfred Richardson. (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2002, 271 pp. 29.95 Paper)
The Behavior of
Texas Birds by Kent Rylander. (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2002, 443 pp. 26.95 Paper)
The
university presses in Texas are continuing to publish useful informative
books for all of us interested in the plants and animals of Texas .This
summer Texas A &M University Press and the University of Texas Press
each brought out a book benefiting those who watch birds, either avidly
or casually. The two books complement each other well and work well
with the field guides previously published by these presses. In fact
to get the full benefit from these books, readers will need a more general
field guide since neither’s primary purpose is to help identify
birds. Matt White’s book gives information about where and when
certain birds have been observed in Northeast Texas and where they can
probably be found . White is a contributing editor of Texas Birds, a
magazine published by the Texas Ornithological Society and is a subregional
editor of North American Birds, published by the American Birding Association.
He begins by concisely describing the geography of the area, noting
among other things the change from clay soils of the west to the sandy
ones of the east. He then lists the primary places to observe birds
in Northeast Texas, telling us about what particular species have been
observed in what particular places, mostly parks. He also gives specific
information about access to these areas, even informing us about places
where we are likely to be bogged down following heavy rain. He provides
phone numbers of people to contact to get permission to enter private
land or restricted public land. One particular place he describes sounds
remarkable even without the birds found there. Owned by the Nature Conservancy
of Texas, Lennox Woods is a” 366 acre tract of virgin old growth
pine-oak woodlands in Red River County north of Clarksville.”
He provides one of his few personal responses as he describes its birds:
“They include nine species of breeding warblers—and deep
within the forests, there are no cowbirds!” In the longest part
of the book, he lists the 390 species found in the region and tells
where and when they have been seen. His few photographs are excellent
but not meant to be comprehensive. I particularly like the one of the
Smith’s Longspur blending into the three-awn grass.
Kent
Rylander, Professor of ornithology and comparative neuroanatomy at Texas
Tech University, has not written a book to help us identify birds though
some of the information he provides may do so. Instead, he tells us
about what the birds do, providing information about feeding, mating,
nesting, flocking, and several other things, mostly included under his
subtitle, “other behaviors.” This is the kind of information
many of us have wished we could find in the field guides. Some of it
you can, but there is so much more in this book. I learned that grebes
eat so many of their own feathers that the feathers make up half of
the contents of their stomachs. I learned that Marsh Wrens often destroy
the eggs of other Marsh Wrens and probably as a result that the specie
has unusually hard eggs. I learned that Chuck Will’s Widows pursue
their prey with mouth gaping two-inches wide and that sometimes they
swallow, whole, birds as large as sparrows. I learned that Rock Dove
“signal flight intention by crouching before taking flight and
the other birds ignore the departing bird; however, if this flight intention
movement is not made, the flock quickly takes flight.” I learned
that the Loggerheaded Shrike has keen eyesight, that it “can spot,
pursue, and catch a bumblebee at more than a hundred yards and can identify
another shrike as far as 3,000 feet away.” Indeed, anyone reading
this book will learn of these remarkable behaviors and of many more
ordinary ones. It is a feast of information. My one complaint about
the book is that the table of contents does not have more subdivisions,
having only one entry for the 150 pages on Passerine birds.
The
University of Texas Press also published this summer a field guide to
the flowers and plants of the beaches and islands of Texas. It is a
part of the Treasures of Nature Series supported by the Gorgas Science
Foundation of Brownsville. Author Alfred Richardson, Professor Emeritus
of Botany at the University of Texas at Brownsville, has previously
produced Plants of the Rio Grande Delta for the series. This is a striking
book, full of magnificent pictures of the 275 “common and/or noteworthy
flowering plants of the Texas beaches and islands from the Rio Grande
to the Louisiana border.” Some of the plants I recognized as being
those I see here in central Texas, particularly some of those identified
as being on Goose Island. The author tells us where each plant has been
observed and explains that the plant may be on other beaches or islands,
too. He also gives us information about common and scientific names,
appearance, and bloom period, and he sometimes includes comments. I
enjoyed reading all the common names of the plants, particularly those
of names with weed in them, for example buttonweed, broomweed, sneeze
weed, Roosevelt weed, horse weed, cudweed, camphor weed, sumpweed, and
hempweed. The guide is not just to native plants. It includes Chinaberry
and other such that have escaped from cultivation. In addition to the
close-ups of each variety there are several fine pictures of plants
and beaches taken from a greater distance. It is the most attractive
of the three books, but all provide an abundance of information about
our birds, blooms, and beaches.
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