The Golden-cheeked Warbler

Of all the birds in North America, one breeds nowhere but Central Texas. The golden-cheeked warbler is a small black and yellow songbird that nests in the juniper and oak woodland on slopes like these and nowhere else on earth. It is particular about the reason. The female builds her nest almost entirely from long strips of bark peeled from mature Ashe juniper, bound together with spider silk, and no other material will do. Junipers do not produce that shaggy, peeling bark until they are roughly fifty years old, and many of the trees being used are a good deal older than that. Estimates of how many warblers are left have varied widely with the survey method, but every one of them depends on the same thing: old juniper still standing where it grew. That single requirement is what ties the bird to old woodland rather than to juniper in general, and it is why clearing young regrowth and clearing a century-old brake are not the same act. The warbler was listed as endangered in 1990. It arrives in March, raises one brood, and is gone by July to wintering grounds in the pine and oak highlands of southern Mexico and Central America, so the entire breeding range of the species sits inside about thirty Texas counties for four months a year. Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge, north of here across the Pedernales, was established largely for this bird. Most of the habitat that actually holds it, though, is on working ranches in country exactly like this, which is why so much of the conservation argument in these counties is about brush and bark rather than about land purchases.