Backyard Habitats for the Birds

Image via Wikipedia It’s the beginning of the dead of winter for us North Texans. The nip in the air has turned to ice.  Your plants are either dropping leaves, hibernating or at least shivering.  Why would you want to start thinking about reshaping your yard now? Actually this is the best time to plant certain trees and shrubs.  And it is as good a time as any to think through what you would like your yard to become.  So I have some information on Texas Parks and Wildlife’s “Texas Wildscapes Gardening for Wildlife” that I want to share. It’s amazing how this is similar to the first chapter of Scott Edward’s book “Creating a Bird Friendly Backyard Habitat.” The book is published by T.F.H. Publications. Bio-what? First let’s look at what Scott says.  The simple mix of trees and shrubs that accompanies many backyards caters to the needs of a handful of birds, but that’s where the list of needs ends.  Scott wants to eliminate the monoculture of backyards and plan for biodiversity.  This means you increase the odds of attracting many other species that call your piece of property home. Now the word “biodiversity” showed up in one of the articles written by the Texas Parks and Wildlife called “Eye on Nature,” a publication of the Wildlife Diversity Program.  In that article on which I first laid eyes on the word “biodiversity,” the term was used in reference to bugs. Ugh.  But listen to these statistics.  Howell and Webb in 1995 list nearly 1,000 species of birds for Mexico.  Correll and Johnson in 1970 list nearly 5,000 species of plants for Texas.  By contrast, we don’t even know to the nearest thousand how many species of insect reside in Texas.  Drees and Jackman in 1998 estimated around 30,000 species of Texas insects!  I will talk more about insects in another blog post. You don’t want mono- Back to Scott’s book.  A “monoculture” is biased towards one type of grass, tree or shrub (I wonder if that is politically incorrect?).  This doesn’t promote “biodiversity,” which is one of the key concepts of a successful backyard habitat. Biodiversity means that the needs of the birds are as varied as the species of birds that populate the world, each one fitting into a niche in its ecosystem.  The more variety you provide in your habitat, in terms of trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses the more variety of birds and other wildlife, including bugs, you will attract.  And that is a good thing, even with the bugs. So the first step is to look at your property and its existing features.  That’s what the Backyard Wildlife Habitat called step one.  Texas Wildscapes assumes you have done this and goes on to the next step, which is to learn about the plants native to our area.  You need to know this after you learn what is in your yard so you know whether what you have is native or is introduced. Read this as “native and adapted” Texas Wildscapes says that introduced plants are not good substitutes for native plants used by wildlife.  Furthermore, some of the introduced plants require higher maintenance than those that are use to growing under our strange conditions.  High maintenance includes lots of watering, fertilizers and pesticides.  Some of these maintenance items are hard on us and all of them are hard on our environment. As you check your backyard, note your birdfeeders, bird baths, dead and dying trees, brush piles, wood piles, areas of standing or flowing water, soaker watering system, bird houses, compost pile, rock piles or rock walls and the percentage of St. Augustine grass in your yard. All the above, except the St. Augustine, are good things you might already have going for your wildlife habitat.  Birds and animals need food, water, cover and places to raise their young.  If you have some of the things in that list, except the grass, you have much of what you need already.  And if you see that you are missing some of these elements, they are easy to add. New info I know that most of you probably already have much of the makings for a backyard habitat in your backyards besides the plants.  But you also have to know which plants are native or have adapted so well to our area that there is some question about whether they are native or not and which are introduced. To qualify for the Texas Wildscapes, you have to have 50% native plants in your backyard.  That’s quite a lot. On the other hand, I can see getting rid of some of the St. Augustine grass.  Weeds are doing that to me on their own.  I need to find out if the stuff taking it over is native or not.  But in any case, maybe I should allow these lower maintenance weeds to have its way with some of the yard. What do you still need? Scott says that once you have a clear idea of what there is to work with, make a list of any elements of habitat that might be missing or in need of enhancement. When it comes to plants, an idea I’ve mentioned before is creating a multilayered effect.  Offering tall, medium and short plants grouped together in a tiered arrangement are very appealing to wildlife.  To do this you have to know the plant’s height at maturity.  A four-inch potted plant can turn into a ten-foot shrub.  If you know how a plant is going to grow to, you can avoid planting it in the wrong location. Scott adds that when you think about the future, remember that you want to have a good view of what your wildlife is doing.  So plan your plantings accordingly.  Put the low shrubs, vines and ground cover close to where you will be looking and slowly build your way to the tallest trees. A  good book to acquaint yourself with some of the native plants that grow in our area is Texas Wildscapes: Gardening for Wildlife by Noreen Damude and Kelly Conrad Bender. Related articles Building A Back Yard Wildlife Habitat (glenns-garden.com) Creating a Wildlife Bird Garden (brighthub.com) Read more at media-ann-such.com

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Poverty, Age and Suicide

Looking at people dealing with their first cycle in poverty and we see  interesting corrolations between poverty, suicide and age.

Suicide

On February 19, 2009 The New York Times published an article by Patricia Cohen entitled “Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers.”  Cohen quotes from “a new five-year analysis of the nation’s death rates recently published by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”  The study shows that the suicide rate among 45-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied.  For women in this age bracket the rate rose 31 percent and for men the rate was 15.6 percent

This is a great increase when compared to the less than 2 percent suicide rate for 15-to-19-year-olds, who have been the intense scrutiny of news attention and prevention resources. Cohen said, “For officials it is a surprising and baffling public health mystery. . . .

The question is why.  What happened in 1999 that caused the suicide rate to suddenly rise primarily in midlife?

For health experts it is like discovering the wreckage of a plane crash without finding the little black box that recorded flight data just before the aircraft went down.” I believe that the answer lies in the realm of poverty spells. We have seen that the foreclosure rate began increasing around the year 2001.  This means that economic problems in the home began some time before.  Even though the economy may not have been in cinque with the spell, this is one way to look at the outcomes.  Economic peaks and troughs for the time around 1999 indicated that there was a peak in March 2001 followed by a trough in November 2001, following 9-11.  Standard and Poors  500 had a peak in August 2000 and a trough in September 2001.  While it appears that the state of the economy in 1999 was on an upsurge at that time, let’s look at some poverty figures for 1997-1999.

The U.S. Census Bureau published “Dynamics of Economic Well-Being Moving Up and Down the Income Ladder, 1998-1999,” issued April 2005, using SIPP data.  From  1997 to 1998 32.9 percent of the sample had a decrease in income of 5 percent or more.  In 1998-1999 the percent was 34.4.  Looking at the age groups 45-64 in Table 1 shows that 36.2 percent had an income drop of 5 percent or more.  This is above the average.  Could the major drop in income be the trigger for the rise in suicides? That’s the way it looks

The Elderly

Another area we need to look at historically is poverty spells of the elderly, particularly elderly women, since they live longer than men.  In “Changing Social Security Survivorship Benefits and the Poverty of Widows” by Michael D. Hurd, State University of New York, Stony Brook and NBER and David A. Wise, Harvard University and NBER, publish date unknown but after 1990, Hurd and Wise state that: Social Security is the most important component of the income of most elderly families in the United States.  In 1988 Social Security benefits were 45.9 percent of the income of elderly unmarried women (Grad, 1990).  One-third  of unmarried women relied on Social Security for at least 90 percent of their income; 20 percent had income only from Social Security.  It is not surprising, therefore, that the drop in Social Security benefits at the death of the husband could have large effects on the economic status of the surviving widow, particularly those at the lower end of the income distribution, and that the incidence of poverty would be high among elderly widows (p.1). Hurd and Wise show that the transition to widowhood increases poverty.  Among couples with incomes above the poverty line in 1975, the poverty rate of the surviving widows in 1977 was 37 percent.  Hurd and Wise spent the rest of this article seeing how the lowering the amount of Social Security to couples could positively impact widows.

An article on the AARP website on January 28, 2008 was “Low-Income /Poverty: Older Persons Find it Hardest to Exit Poverty;” Research Report; Ke Bin Wu; AARP Public Policy Institute; May 2001.  Wu used the PSID to track the long-term poverty status of the same individuals over the 1982-1992 period.  Some of his conclusions were that escaping from poverty was more difficult for older than for younger age groups. For example, for an older person who was in a poverty spell of one year, the probability of exiting from poverty was 35.2 percent compared to 40.3 percent for a person under age 65. . . . .over one-third of older persons who were ever poor completed their poverty spell in one year, and about 58 percent of older persons who were ever poor remained in poverty three years of fewer.  On the other hand, nearly 31 percent of completed poverty spells of older persons who were ever poor can be expected to last ten or more years. . . . the exit probability was 44.6 percent for older men but only 32.1 percent for older women who had spent one year in poverty. It readily becomes apparent that there is a link between poverty, age and suicide. For more information, see Amazon.com’s Related articles Faith Leader Says Poverty Fight Overshadowed By Politics (npr.org) USA’s poverty rate reaches highest level in 51 years (usatoday.com) Read more at media-ann-such.com

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