Take flight into the fascinating world of birding with Jessica Coleman, UT Tyler distinguished teaching professor and avid bird enthusiast. Coleman shares stirring tales of her birding adventures that began as a university undergraduate and have continued to be a major joy in her life. She’ll introduce her favorite birds from the vibrant Cerulean warbler to mighty hawks and even explain the current hawk migration season.
In this journey of feathers and flight, you’ll pick up practical tips for your own bird-watching pursuits. Ever wondered how to attract diverse bird species with the right food or how to keep squirrels away from bird feeders? Coleman has the answers. She also delves into the rhythmic vocal patterns of birds, offering insights into how they change with the time of day, weather and presence of predators. And for those unexpected encounters with an injured bird, she advises the right course of action.
MIKE LANDESS: There are nearly 640 recognized species of Texas birds that can be found in state parks, lakes, wildlife preserves and maybe in your own backyard. For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. UT Tyler Distinguished Teaching Professor and GTA Coordinator Jessica Coleman is an 18-year veteran on campus and an avid birder, and she is our guest today. Welcome.
JESSICA COLEMAN: Hi, thank you.
LANDESS: Did I describe you accurately? An avid birder?
COLEMAN: Yep, pretty much. I’ve been doing it for a very long time.
LANDESS: What got you interested in birds?
COLEMAN: Well, back when I was an undergraduate, I was working with Dr. Neil Ford, and he was taking a vertebrate natural history class and part of it was birding. And it kind of snowballed from there.
LANDESS: Interesting term. Snowballing birds, yes. Well now, even with hundreds of bird species in Texas, you’ve got to have some favorites. What are they and why?
COLEMAN: Oh man, that’s a really hard question for any birder to answer. It depends on what group you’re talking about.
LANDESS: Is it seasonal?
COLEMAN: It can be seasonal because they migrate through. So, if you’re talking about warblers, I have kind of a preference to things like the Cerulean warbler or the Blackburnian warbler because they just have these amazing colors. If you want to talk about raptors, I really love your hawks because of the predatory nature of them coming out. They’re very easy to see, very easy to watch. It’s also really interesting when they nab a squirrel, and you get to watch them chow down. Their behavior is just phenomenal.
LANDESS: Isn’t there a migration going on, or is that already gone?
COLEMAN: Yeah, right now we are currently in hawk migration. It happens fall and spring, so right now, starting about August, goes through about the end of December, and we get a whole bunch of hawks that start to migrate through. So, we’re right now kind of in the middle of prime season–end of September, early October for us here in East Texas is the ideal time to get your eyes to the sky and start looking for them.
LANDESS: I just want to be sure that they’re taking squirrels and maybe bunnies, but not my cat.
COLEMAN: No, they can.
LANDESS: They can. I know I’ve seen some of the videos. They are just remarkable.
COLEMAN: I mean the accuracy at which they can see something for about 15, 20 feet up in the air and then just dive bomb and pretty accurate. I mean you can get about an 80 to 95% return on their attacks.
LANDESS: That’s amazing. Now, we live next to a green belt, my wife and I. We’ve enjoyed having a bird feeder on our back porch. So do the squirrels, unfortunately. Any tips for feeding our fine feathered friends in (spite) of the squirrels?
COLEMAN: You know, they make different types of bird kind of contraptions that are supposedly “squirrel-free.” I put air quotes on that because they’re not really squirrel-proof.
LANDESS: Nothing is really squirrel-proof .
COLEMAN: Yeah, now one way that you can kind of try to eliminate your squirrels from getting into your feeders is by putting treats out for the squirrels. So, putting a corn cob out and or getting a tree bark and drilling holes in it and putting like peanut butter and nuts and put that away from your main feeders. They’ll kind of go after that and then open up the feeders to the squirrels.
LANDESS: You’ve got a couple that just sit in there for the entire day. The other challenge that we have being amateur bird watchers was trying to find out the very best kind of food to give to the birds. I mean like, as a for instance, sunflower seeds or whatever.
COLEMAN: Yeah, usually what I would tell you is to get a mixture of seed, because that’s going to help kind of broaden the type of birds that you’re going to see. We have a lot of resident birds here, so Northern Cardinals, your blue jays and your Carolina chickadees — they’re pretty much the ones that are going to be eating those sunflower seeds. But if you put like a mixture of like millet and sunflower and a whole bunch of other kind of wild bird mixture, you’re going to get a little bit more diversity within your songbirds that will come up to the feeders.
LANDESS: That is interesting, too. It seems like there are times when they are very vocal and there are other times where you see a lot of activity, but they’re not quite as vocal. Is that an unusual phenomenon?
COLEMAN: No, I mean there’s a lot of reasons for that. Birds tend to be really active in the morning. So, if you want to be a birder, you tend to become a morning person, which a lot of people are like, “oh no.” But they’re most active first thing in the morning, when they’re starting to get up, starting their feeding, starting to kind of do their rituals. So usually about 30 minutes around sunrise they’ll start becoming active and calling, and then about noon they kind of go down. Weather will also influence the amount of birds that you’re going to be hearing and seeing. If it’s a little windy, they tend to kind of hunker down a little bit. If it’s a big thunderstorm, they’re hiding in the trees, just like us hiding in our homes. So, and if there’s a predator around, they’ll quiet down pretty quickly. So, if they’re calling and all of a sudden things start to get quiet, start looking for those hawks, start looking for some of those predators that are going to come and want to eat on them.
LANDESS: They look over at my cat, and the cat just looks back at them, and they just decide to feed anyway because they figure he’s fat and lazy. And he is.
COLEMAN: That’s what they think about my cats, too.
LANDESS: Exactly. Tell us about your birding adventures. What’s been the most exciting and fun thing that you’ve done in your history of following birds?
COLEMAN: You know I’ve done a lot of crazy things. When you’re a birder you get those e-bird alerts that are saying a rare bird has been seen.
LANDESS: There’s such a thing as an e-bird alert?
COLEMAN: There is! Cornell runs a website called “e-bird” and they actually will send out kind of weekly or monthly reports of the birds that have been seen in areas they’re not normally seen. And crazy birders will sometimes just be like, “You know what? I haven’t seen that.” They hop in the car, and they’ll drive 5, 6 hours to go see a bird, and so recently there was a brown booby that was seen up…
LANDESS: What was that again?
COLEMAN: A brown booby.
LANDESS: Booby, OK.
COLEMAN: Yeah, birds have phenomenal names.
LANDESS: They do.
COLEMAN: But yeah, it was only the third time it’s ever been reported in East Texas, and it was up near Dangerfield in Ellis Creek Reservoir off of Lake O’ the Pines. So, I hopped in the car — a friend of mine– and we drove an hour and a half up there and got to see it putting on a little show.
LANDESS: Amazing. What should someone do if they come across a bird that’s injured? And you see that they can’t really, well, it appears that they can’t take care of themselves.
COLEMAN: You know, there’s things that you can do. You can–if it just hit a bird, if it hit a window, then it’s probably stunned, and it may recover on its own. Just kind of let, watch it. Maybe you move it into a box and kind of get it a little quiet. Call a rehabilitator. That’s the number one thing that you should do is not take care of it on your own, simply because there are migratory laws out there that you really can’t do it unless you’re certified as a rehabilitator. And we do have some decent rehabilitators. Texas Parks and Wildlife has a list that you can go online, and you can find a list of local rehabilitators. And you can take it in, and they will take care of it if they can and then release it back to the wild if they are able to.
LANDESS: Any final thoughts you’d like to share?
COLEMAN: You know, birding is just such a wonderful pastime. It’s a way to release stress. I mean, just here in East Texas, we can get upwards of a couple hundred species, especially during migration. So, it’s something that just going outside and enjoying nature and listening to everything that it has to offer because there’s so much out there, and all you have to do is just sit there and listen.
LANDESS: Our guest has been UT Tyler Distinguished Teaching Professor and GTA Coordinator, Jessica Coleman. To hear this conversation again or to share it, go to KVUT.org. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)
