Author: Ted L. Eubanks
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1585445347
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
The Texas coast offers rich avian treasures for expert birders and beginners alike, if only they know where to look. For those familiar with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s maps to the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, this book on the Upper Texas Coast offers more—more information, more convenient and detailed maps, more pictures, more finding tips, and more birding advice from one of the trail’s creators, Ted Lee Eubanks Jr., and trail experts Robert A. Behrstock and Seth Davidson. For those new to the trail, the book is the perfect companion for learning where to find and how to bird the very best venues on this part of the Texas coast. In an opening tutorial on habitat and seasonal strategies for birding the Upper Texas Coast, the authors include tips on how to take advantage of the famous (but elusive) fallouts of birds that happen here. They then briefly discuss the basics of birding by ear and the rewards of passive birding before turning to the trail itself and each of more than 120 birding sites from the Louisiana-Texas border, through Galveston and Houston, to just south of Freeport. Advice oninding bird groups While not intended as a field identification guide, the book contains more than 175 color photographs of birds and their coastal habitat, giving readers an excellent feel for the trail’s diversity and abundance. Whether you are making your annual spring pilgrimage to Texas, leisurely traveling with the family along the coast, or wondering what to do during a layover in Houston, using this book as your guide to the trail will greatly enhance your birding experience.
Author: Ted L. Eubanks
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585445349
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
The Texas coast offers rich avian treasures for expert birders and beginners alike, if only they know where to look. For those familiar with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s maps to the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, this book on the Upper Texas Coast offers more—more information, more convenient and detailed maps, more pictures, more finding tips, and more birding advice from one of the trail’s creators, Ted Lee Eubanks Jr., and trail experts Robert A. Behrstock and Seth Davidson. For those new to the trail, the book is the perfect companion for learning where to find and how to bird the very best venues on this part of the Texas coast. In an opening tutorial on habitat and seasonal strategies for birding the Upper Texas Coast, the authors include tips on how to take advantage of the famous (but elusive) fallouts of birds that happen here. They then briefly discuss the basics of birding by ear and the rewards of passive birding before turning to the trail itself and each of more than 120 birding sites from the Louisiana-Texas border, through Galveston and Houston, to just south of Freeport. Advice oninding bird groups While not intended as a field identification guide, the book contains more than 175 color photographs of birds and their coastal habitat, giving readers an excellent feel for the trail’s diversity and abundance. Whether you are making your annual spring pilgrimage to Texas, leisurely traveling with the family along the coast, or wondering what to do during a layover in Houston, using this book as your guide to the trail will greatly enhance your birding experience.
Author: Ted L. Eubanks
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585445103
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
In the last thirty years, the Upper Texas Coast has become a “must go” destination for birders around the globe. This book will serve as an essential companion to the customary field guide and pair of binoculars for all visitors to Houston, High Island, Galveston, Freeport, or any of the area’s other exciting birding spots. It also places the birdlife of the region, a seven-county area with a larger bird list than forty-three states, into historical and ecological contexts. Authors Eubanks, Behrstock, and Weeks—all recognized authorities on the migrant and resident birds of this region—present a thorough introduction to the area’s history, physiography, and avifauna. Then, in generous discussions of bird families and species, they synthesize years of records, tracking the comings and goings of more than 480 birds and incorporating their own lifetimes of experience to create an “ornithological mosaic” of lasting significance.
Author: Mel Cooksey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781878788474
Category : Bird watching
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
A Birder's Guide to the Texas Coast will be indispensable as your field guide to one of the world's premier birding destinations. The Texas coast is home to an amazing number of migrating and wintering birds, as well as many specialty resident and nesting species. The habitat diversity ranges from the Pineywoods to the Gulf prairies, from the coastal wetlands to the South Texas subtropics. The spring migration of neotropical birds along the coast is one of North America's most remarkable birding spectacles. And the region is host to some of the nation's largest congregations of herons, egrets, rails, shorebirds, gulls, and terns at any season. A Birder's Guide to the Texas Coast includes Species Accounts for over 170 Texas specialties, and more than 70 new sites, for a total of over 200 birding stops, as well as bar-graphs for 388 regularly occurring Texas Coast species.
Author: Ted Floyd
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1426220049
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 503
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Book Description
How to Know the Birds introduces a new, holistic approach to bird-watching, by noting how behaviors, settings, and seasonal cycles connect with shape, song, color, gender, age distinctions, and other features traditionally used to identify species. Expert author Ted Floyd begins by evoking a typical bird-watching moment, his entry into a thoughtful discussion of the traditions of field guides and bird identification. Then, with short essays on 200 observable species, he guides us through a year of becoming a better birder, each species representing another useful lesson: from explaining scientific nomenclature to noting how plumage changes with age, from chronicling migration patterns to noting hatchling habits. Pen-and-ink illustrations accompany Floyd's charming prose, making this book a unique blend of narrative and field guide. A pleasure for birders of all ages, this witty book promises solid lessons for the beginner and smiles of recognition for the seasoned nature lover.
Author: John W. Tunnell
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623492750
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
When Harold F. Pape moved to Gregory, Texas, in 1927, he quickly became fascinated by the wealth of Native American artifacts along the nearby shoreline of Corpus Christi Bay and what is now called Port Bay, a southern arm of the larger Copano Bay. A lifelong natural history enthusiast and collector, Pape met and married Lucile H. Tunnell, a widow with three young sons. Before long, John W. Tunnell, Lucile’s oldest son, was accompanying Pape on his field studies in surrounding areas and the wider Texas Coastal Bend. Working in the days before much of the development that now covers the region, Pape and Tunnell studied more than two hundred sites throughout the Coastal Bend, making meticulous logs, maps, and notes of their discoveries. John W. (Wes) Tunnell Jr. and Jace Tunnell have organized and documented their family collection and present it, along with brief biographies of the two collectors, as a survey of the state of knowledge in the late 1920s and 1930s, as well as a tribute to these two important early researchers and their body of work.
Author: John Whorff
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603442251
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
“Few experiences compare with navigating a sea kayak through a large sandy bay lined with oyster-shell beaches, past golden sand dunes into rough ocean waters, then surfing back onto a wind-swept beach at sunset.”—from the Introduction Half of the nearly 400-mile Texas coastline is flanked by barrier islands. Behind them, large and small bays shelter estuarine marshes, oyster-reef communities, and sea grass meadows that teem with wildlife, creating a bird watcher's and angler's paradise. For an intimate encounter with these natural treasures, no other water craft can compare to a kayak. Veteran kayaker John Whorff’s Kayaking the Texas Coast is an essential guide for beginning and experienced kayakers to the many miles of shoreline that surround the shallow bays, lagoons, and islands of the Texas coast. Novices will appreciate this book’s detailed information about where to paddle and camp, what to see, and where to obtain additional information about safety and route planning. Accomplished kayakers will enjoy Whorff’s enticing route descriptions and other pertinent details on paddling the Texas coastline. Opening with an extended introductory text that covers kayaks and equipment, safety considerations and emergencies, camping dos and don’ts, and helpful resources, Kayaking the Texas Coast also lists useful websites and guidebooks. In the main portion of the text, the coast is organized into ten destinations, from the Galveston Bay complex in the north to Boca Chica State Park in the south. For each of these destinations, Whorff provides information on navigational aids, planning considerations, accommodations, and directions to launch sites before describing various paddling routes within each destination—around seventy routes in all. Each route is ranked for difficulty as “beginner,” “intermediate,” or “advanced.” Detailed maps and vivid photographs by the author complete the package. "Kayaking the Texas Coast is your must-have guidebook to the coastline and bays of the Lone Star State. Many miles of sea kayaking adventure are described, along with maps and discussion of the natural world encountered along the way. My copy will be riding in car and kayak with me. I look forward to seeing with my own eyes what the author has described and mapped."-- Natalie Wiest, founder and director, Galveston Bay Information
Author: James B. Blackburn
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623495784
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
In this powerful call to action, conservationist and environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn offers an unconventional yet feasible plan to protect the Texas coast. The coast is in danger of being damaged beyond repair due to the gradual starvation of freshwater inflows to its bays, the fragmentation of large tracts of land, and general public neglect. Most importantly, it is threatened by our denial that the coast faces major threats and that its long-term health provides significant economic benefits. To save coastal resources, a successful plan needs to address the realities of our current world. The challenge is to sustain an economy that creates optimism and entrepreneurship while considering finite natural resources. In other words, a successful plan to save the Texas coast needs to be about making money. Whether visiting with farmers and ranchers or oil and chemical producers, Blackburn recognizes that when talking about the natural environment in monetary terms, people listen. Many of the services we get from the coast are beginning to be studied for their dollar values, a trend that might offer Texas farms and ranches the potential for cash flow, which may in turn alter conservation practices throughout Texas and the United States. Money alone cannot be the only motivation for caring about the Texas coast, though. Blackburn encourages Texans to get to know this landscape better. Beautifully illustrated and accessibly written, A Texan Plan for the Texas Coast weaves together a challenging but promising plan to protect the coast through economic motivation, thoughtful litigation, informed appreciation, and simple affection for the beauty and life found on the Texas coast.
Author: R. K. Sawyer
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623490111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
From its earliest days of human habitation, the Texas coast was home to seemingly endless clouds of ducks, geese, swans, and shorebirds. By the 1880s Texas huntsmen, or market hunters, as they came to be called, began providing meat and plumage for the restaurant tables and millinery salons of a rapidly growing nation. A network of suppliers, packers, distribution centers, and shipping hubs efficiently handled their immense harvest. At the peak of Texas market hunting in the late 1890s, Rockport merchants shipped an average of 600 ducks a day in a five-month shooting season, and in the last year of legal market hunting, an estimated 60,000 ducks and geese were shipped from Corpus Christi alone. Market men employed efficient methods to harvest nature’s bounty. They commonly hunted at night, often using bait to concentrate large numbers of waterfowl. The effectiveness of the hunt was improved when side-by-side double barrel shotguns and large-gauge swivel guns gave way to repeating firearms, with some capable of discharging as many as eleven shells in a single volley. Their methods were so efficient that, by the late 1800s, Texas sportsmen and others blamed the alarming decline of coastal waterfowl populations on the market hunter’s occupation. In 1903, after a long fight and many failures, the first migratory bird game law passed the Texas legislature. Though the fight would continue, it was the beginning of the end of the year-round slaughter. Most market hunters quit, and those who didn’t became outlaws. In this book, R. K. Sawyer chronicles the days of market hunting along the Texas coast and the showdown between the early game wardens and those who persisted in commercial waterfowl hunting. Containing an abundance of rare historical photographs and oral history, Texas Market Hunting: Stories of Waterfowl, Game Laws, and Outlaws provides a comprehensive and colorful account of this bygone period.
Author: Jesse Cancelmo
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623493749
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Stunned by widespread ignorance about the Gulf of Mexico following the 2010 Macondo oil spill, underwater photographer Jesse Cancelmo decided to turn his camera on the marine life of this 600,000 square mile international sea that connects five US states, six Mexican states, and the island nation of Cuba. With the goal of countering dismissive descriptions of a Gulf plagued with dead zones and overrun by oil rigs, Cancelmo set out to capture a world rarely acknowledged, let alone seen. Between the Gulf's rich shoreline habitats and its prolific oceanic communities, thriving amid dazzling coral reefs, brine seeps, canyons, salt domes, and hard bottom banks, are more than 15,000 species, including an iconic cast of sea animals: sperm whales, manta rays, whale sharks, manatees, spotted dolphins, and more. Capturing images from locations all around the Gulf, Cancelmo reveals the beauty and glory of these diverse habitats and species. Although this is a book of sensational underwater photography, Cancelmo intends it to be more than a celebration of oceanic beauty. He also hopes to inspire better understanding and appreciation of the natural marine habitats in the Gulf and to strengthen support for their protection and sustainment.
