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Chalk Mountain, between a rock and a nesting place
November 4th, 2008 · 1 Comment
By Barbara Kessler
Every spring, as sure as the sun warms the cedars and the birds flock back from Mexico, Lee Clauser leads a stealth group of intense adults dressed in khakis and boots to the edge of a wild thicket near his house in north central Texas.
They creep into the brush, quietly unloading their weapons of mass observation.
 Putting binoculars to eyes, they look, and listen, for the brilliant Golden-cheeked warbler, and for the reclusive Black-capped vireo. Both songbirds are listed as endangered in the United States, their nesting grounds having been narrowed to a strip of Texas Hill Country that supplies just the right shrubbery and old-growth cedars. The birders, who come from Fort Worth, Dallas, New England, the Pacific Northwest and beyond, know that catching a glimpse of one of these delicate creatures is a rare treat.
“People have come from Europe to see those birds, both species. For birders all over the world, it’s a huge deal,” says Clauser, a retired banker and life-long bird rescue and rehabilitation expert.
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Tags: · Audubon Society, Black-capped vireo, Chalk Mountain Preservation Association, endangered species, Golden-cheek warbler, International Union for Conservation of Nature, Texas, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, World Wildlife Fund
Cleaning up school bus emissions
September 22nd, 2008 · 1 Comment
By Catherine Colbert
When David Kilbourne picked up his 8-year-old son from Lake Travis Elementary in spring 2007, he noticed smoke billowing from idling buses parked in queue behind the school. The exhaust fumes his son was breathing each day as he waited to be picked up, he says, were contributing to his son’s migraine headaches. “My son is the quarterback for his youth football team,” said Kilbourne. “Because there’s only one quarterback, when he gets these headaches, it affects the team.”
Kilbourne remembers noticing the bus exhaust during the school’s bus safety week. “They were talking about how buses are safe when it comes to traffic accidents,” he said, “but there’s more to a bus’s safety than traffic accidents, like having air that’s safe to breathe.”
The coincidence spurred Kilbourne to take action. Not only did he write several letters to his local newspaper, but Kilbourne approached the head of his district’s transportation department to discuss air quality in and around its buses. After he spoke to Rick Walterscheid, the transportation director at the Lake Travis Independent School District, the school system put a no-idling policy into effect.
Walterscheid didn’t stop there, either. Later that year the 79th Texas Legislature adopted House Bill 3469, which established and authorized the formation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to administer a statewide clean school bus program.
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Tags: · Agency, CNG, Diesel, Emissions, Environmental Defense, Environmental Protection Agency, Idling, School Buses, Schools, Texas
Computer recycling becomes law in Texas
September 19th, 2008 · No Comments
By Harriet Blake
Old computers do not have to end up in the landfill and in Texas, they won’t. Thanks to new legislation (House Bill 2714) that took effect Sept. 1, all computer makers are now responsible for recycling their products.
Texas is the fourth state to have such a law, says Jeff Jacoby, staff director with the nonprofit Texas Campaign for the Environment (TCE), which was one of the bill’s main advocates. The other states are Minnesota, Maine and Washington.
Companies such as Dell, Hewlett Packard and Apple, as well as mom-and-pop operations, are required to provide free and convenient recycling to their customers, or they will not be able to sell computers to anyone in Texas, under the law.
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Tags: · Computers, Electronic Waste, Maine, Minnesota, Texas, Washington
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Putting binoculars to eyes, they look, and listen, for the brilliant Golden-cheeked warbler, and for the reclusive Black-capped vireo. Both songbirds are listed as endangered in the United States, their nesting grounds having been narrowed to a strip of Texas Hill Country that supplies just the right shrubbery and old-growth cedars. The birders, who come from Fort Worth, Dallas, New England, the Pacific Northwest and beyond, know that catching a glimpse of one of these delicate creatures is a rare treat.
