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Photos courtesy of GCBO staff. February 2008 GCBO has a New Entrance Garden
Members of the Lake Jackson Garden Club graciously donated their time and expertise to make over our entrance garden and sign to make it more visible from Highway 332. They repainted the sign and added some wooden birds as well as landscaped the area around the sign to make it look much nicer. They hope to put in more landscaping in the future. Thanks everyone!
GTBC Registration is Open
Become a part of
one of the most effective conservation initiatives on the Texas
coast. The twelfth annual Great Texas Birding Classic is just around
the corner and you can be a part of this program as it surpasses
granting $600,000 for habitat conservation. This year you can again
register your team on-line, or if you choose, by the traditional
paper route. Go to
www.birdingclassic.org to find the Official Entry Agreement and Registration form. Complete both
parts of the form and then mail your
check to the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory. This year the tournaments
will be the same as last year with the exception that we have added
a sub-category in the One-Day Sectional tournaments. It is the
“Energy Saver” tournament and the rules are provided in the
Registration booklet (posted on-line). If you can’t be on a team,
please consider making a tax deductible contribution.
Another Great GCBO Habitat Restoration Workday
On Tuesday, January 15, and Monday,
January 21, our dedicated group of Cradle of Texas Master Naturalist
volunteers continued making progress on our habitat restoration
project here at our Lake Jackson sanctuary. We gratefully
acknowledge habitat restoration project funders: ConocoPhillips and
US Fish and Wildlife Coastal Program. We rented a
Powerhouse Pro and, as shown above, the guys had fun drilling holes to
make our tree planting efforts much easier. As a result we
were able to plant 71 trees of various native species in our effort
to reforest some of the cleared areas on the property. Exotic
and invasive plant removal continued in the forest where we removed
another 515 trees, shrubs, and vines of unwanted species.
Finally, we were able to fill in forest gaps created by the invasive
removals with Rough-leafed Dogwood, Mexican Plum, and Red Mulberry.
What an effort! Once again, the
birds and GCBO staff THANK YOU. For further
information, talk to Sue at GCBO. Sand Plover Study Begins
Benjamin Wardwell, an Endangered Species Biologist from Black Mountain, North Carolina, will be working with GCBO’s ornithologists as a field researcher on a 12-month study of the Gulf Coast’s plovers. The study is funded by a grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Ben will help determine the habitat characteristics preferred by plovers, any threats to those habitats, and plover population size on the Upper Texas Coast in winter.
In the coming weeks the GCBO staff will be on the road participating in a number of conferences and events. We’ll start off with the Fourth International Partners in Flight conference in McAllen, Feb. 13-16. There we will have the opportunity to hear about current work from scientists and conservationists in both North and South America. We in turn will have the opportunity to talk about our conservation and research initiatives and hope to form some synergistic relationships. We will also hold a meeting with many of our Site Partners to get updates on their projects. The following weekend, Feb. 22-24, we will participate in the Whooping Crane Festival in Port Aransas. Then the first week in March we will take part in the 2nd Ranching & Wildlife EXPO during the Houston Rodeo. If you are in one of these areas, we hope you will stop by to visit with us and hear about our current and on-going programs.
Big Changes Planned for XHX This Year We are making significant changes to the Xtreme Hummingbird Xtravagana this year, and are still working out the details. However, we can tell you that we are expanding the event to cover the full migration of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird and that means the entire month of September! So rather than hosting a one-day event, we will be holding a Hummer Open House every Saturday in September from 8 am until noon. During each Hummer Open House, we will be conducting hummingbird banding, offering banded hummingbirds up for "virtual" adoptions (to raise funds for continued conservation efforts for the birds), selling attractive hummingbird and butterfly plants, opening our fabulous Nature Store for shopping, and presenting informal hummingbird ecology lectures given by our science staff.
Mark your calendars now and join us for several Hummer Open Houses in September! GCBO Receives $25,000 Challenge Grant In late 1998, GCBO received it's first gift of permanent funds from member Craig Damuth, thus establishing the Land Acquisition Fund (LAF). As contributions to the fund have grown, our policy has been to carefully invest all of the principal and use only the proceeds to make contributions toward the purchase of critical bird habitat in and around the Gulf of Mexico. Our LAF is slowly growing but this year we have a new opportunity that will serve to grow this fund substantially. The Malcolm C. Damuth Foundation has awarded the GCBO a Challenge Grant of $25,000 a year for the next three years. Of course, this means we need to raise $25,000 per year to match the grant. So if land acquisition is your passion, there is no better time than now to make a contribution as we can double your investment! Our first challenge deadline is October 31, 2008. Contact Cecilia (criley@gcbo.org) for details or questions. |
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| www.gcbo.org | Telephone 979-480-0999 | Contact Us |
103 W. Hwy 332, Lake Jackson, TX 77566
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