Passport to Texas

This is Passport to Texas

Some bird species in Texas are ubiquitous – but that doesn’t mean we notice them.

17—Ubiquitous simply means they’re all over the place. We might tune them out as just like background noise; we don’t really look at them. But once you start tuning in and really looking at them you’re like, what is that? I’ve never seen that. But, you know, it was always there. You just didn’t look.

Non-game ornithologist, Cliff Shackelford, compiled a list of 12 such species he says every Texan should know.

19—This arose from questions over the years that I’ve received about, “Hey, what’s that dark duck we see when we drive over the ridge?” Or, “What’s this weird striped bird at our bird feeder?” And when you get that kind of call over and over and over, you realize there are some really common birds that people don’t know what they are. So, that’s kind of how I generated that list of twelve.

Find the list in the August/September issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine. And while Cliff says there’s no order to the list, a special species takes the number one spot.

05—I had to start the list with our state bird of Texas, which is the mockingbird.

Find the article Twelve Birds Every Texan Should Know by Cliff Shackelford in the August/September issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

Tomorrow, some of our other feathered friends that made the list…and why.

Funding for our series provided in part by Ram Trucks: Guts. Glory. Ram

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2014 at 12:00 am and is filed under Birding, TPW Mag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.