Buddy Hollis Interview, Part 1 of 2

DT: My name is David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It's March 1st, 2008 and we are in Newton, Texas

and we have the good fortune to be visiting with Buddy Hollis who had a career as an operator of a chemical plant in Deer Park and later in La Porte and subsequent to that, he returned to to Newton where much of his family is from

and has been a nature guide and naturalist of many years here and we look forward to learning more about the habitat and wildlife around this area. Thank you for taking the time.

BH: Thank you.

DT: I thought we might start by visiting about your childhood and if there were some experiences that you can remember of finding out about the outdoors and learning about it. Does anything come back to mind?

BH: Well I can remember things like the first fish I caught. First fish I caught was over in the old river bottom off the Neches River. I remember my dad taught me how to cast a rod and reel.

The first thing I did was cast out; the bass caught it. I started to reel it in and got a big backlash in it, which I don't even know if they still allow to happen anymore these days. But I threw it over my shoulder and I ran back up the bank and I got that fish. That was my first one.

I can remember things like when I was a kid growing up in Deer Park, laying in my bed in the morning when I wake up and hearing the Atwaters Prairie Chickens boom in Dal Park which was a couple of miles away. Its something at the time we never thought of; it wouldn't always be there.

In fact, I think after I got out of high school, after they were probably gone that year the next Prairie Chicken I saw I was probably 45 years old and it was out at Eagle Lake and they're not there anymore.

We just don't seem to realize when we see something today; enjoy it. It may not be there tomorrow. So much of it isn't there anymore.

I can remember my brother coming home from school carrying a Horned Toad. How many people these days have seen Horned Toads? Not many people because they just is something there that's in the past.

We seem to think about it as the good old days. Well they were the good old days I guess. Maybe not as good as ones that came before that but were getting to where nowadays everything is exotic or brought in from someplace else that's not ours anymore.

DT: You mentioned these two creatures; the Atwaters Prairie Chicken and then the Horned Toad that they're no longer common. In fact, quite rare. Why do you think they slipped away?

BH: Well one is a habitat. The Atwater Prairie Chicken needed the I guess you would in their case it would it they needed the prairie. Well where the prairie they needed was normally many, many, years ago was grazed by the buffalo.

Now we don't have that anymore and you start thinking you don't have much prairie at all. In fact, like here in a Big Thicket, we never had prairie here so we didn't have the Atwater Prairie Chicken around here.

The Horned Toad I think there are several reasons why they're not here one is loss of habitat, other is I understand is attributed to fire ants because they seem to be really, really decimating other population of a lot of our wildlife, including quail.

DT: You mentioned that that changes in the habitat have affected both of those creatures and I I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about the habitat in Newton County and more generally about the Big Thicket I've heard known as sort of a biological crossroads a great deal of diversity, richness. How would you describe it?

BH: Well, I think that one of the best examples of an explanation that I've heard was from Geraldine Watson, who's probably the most well known for knowing the flora and the fauna of the Big Thicket when she said Newton County is the ark of the Big Thicket is the treasure trove of the Big Thicket.

We have just about every habitat that the Big Thicket has. Some places we don't have as much, but we've got Sandyland, we've got Bay Gulls, we've got the really have a lot more of the Upland Pine lands than they we

have what is called hanging bogs where pitcher plants and things that are in bogs in pine forests and this is the old pine this is a Southern Yellow Pine, this is not the modern pine, the Slash and the Loblolly that took its place.

But the habitat that we have here, a lot of it in the even in the main units of the Big Thicket. Most people think that the Big Thicket is a particular place. It's not a particular spot. It's you can't say, I'm going to this spot and I'm going to the Big Thicket.

You're going to this spot and you're going to part of the Big Thicket because there are so many different habitats. Actually, the original Big Thickets started around where Interstate 10 crosses the Sabine River at Orange, goes up the almost half over halfway up the TobedaToledo Bend

along the Sabine until it gets almost to Logans Port and back across below Lufkin out west of Huntsville near Roans Prairie back down to Montgomery and back across to Liberty. Its a millions of acres. And a lot of people don't realize that it's actually divided into two sections itself.

It's what's called the Lower Thicket and the Upper Thicket or Stream Thicket. Right here is what we consider the Stream Thicket. We are higher habitat and a lot of the plants of the Big Thicket are down in the lower spots along the streambed. That's why its called the Stream Thicket.

And the Big Thicket is differentiated in into area by not only the plants in it but also by some of the animals.

DT: Can you tell us a little bit about the vegetation that's that's typical of these various ecosystems within the Big Thicket?

BH: Well you your sandy, sandy lands are generally like up north of us, you you start in the northern end of the county, there's a place called Scrapping Valley. It was Temple-Inlands property. They kept it for years and there's fact that now that they've sold they still kept it.

It is a major stand of Longleaf Pine. Well it takes about 75 years for Longleaf Pine to grow. So people generally don't grow Longleaf Pine anymore, they want something like the rest of our population. They want it quicker and faster.

They don't want to let it grow like that, but they took very good care of that and its a marginal land and it grows better on marginal land and it takes time.

That's where you will find such animals as the Louisiana Pine Snake, the Red Cockaded Woodpecker and things like that.

Your Bay Gulls, that's your watery places with the that's mainly known by your Gallberry Holly, Sweet Bay Magnolia and some of the other and some of the other plants like that.

Its usually, as I say, they like their feet to be standing in the water. The Oak Prairies, here you have a few Oak Prairies, you have a few mixed forests, you have the riparian or the stream-side thickets. We have very, very little left that's in one complete unit.

Most of it like, is like the Big Thicket itself. Its was designed is what they call a string of pearls. There would be a spot here, spot a few miles away and another spot that they managed to save.

But there needed a corridor to join them together or the animals going in one wouldn't have much of a chance in another.

You take some poor turtle, he's got trouble crossing an interstate and if he doesn't find a mate, he's going to have to try it anyway. So it's the highways, a lot of people don't realize how much they kill. Hghways are the number one killer of our small animals. And a lot of them go that way and it breaks up a lot of habitat.

I don't care what kind of animal you are, if you need seclusion and you're sitting there trying to sleep or trying to find something to eat and a four-wheeler or truck or jeep comes roaring through, it tends to mess up your day.

DT: You told us about some of the vegetation that is native to these different elements within the Thicket. I was hoping you could talk about some of the wildlife and maybe we can talk first about some of the larger kinds of animals that you've seen and heard about in the Thicket and then go towards the smaller.

BH: Well we still have very few cougars. I guess you could also say we have very few pumas and we have very few mountain lions becalso very few panthers because, all of those are terms people use for the same cat, mountain lion, we have very few of them left and they keep very, very low.

They're very shy because they're going to get shot if they show up. People do not seem to realize that we're sharing the world with something else and they get hungry too. So we have to do something about it.

At one time, there were reports of jaguars in the Big Thicket, and some people are beginning to think that the term black panther, which if you do much reading on the Big Thicket you will always read about black panther, is a term that was picked up because somebody saw the black face of a jaguar.

The cougar doesn't come in black faces the jaguar does. And they were here and, in fact, the biologists had a report that they seem to have, think there's some good fact in, that the last jaguar in Texas was killed in Newton County about 1963-65 along in that area just south of Bleakwood.

And there's some pictures around that they have seen of it. The wild turkey, the wild turkey was one that was exterminated from East Texas and has made a comeback now. And we're real lucky up here because nobody knows how to hunt them so they're fairly safe.

Red Cockaded Woodpecker, Red Cockaded Woodpecker now the people that really deserve the accolades for restoring the Red Cockaded Woodpecker are Parks and Wildlife and Temple-Inland.

I know it seems kind of odd, keep bringing up a timber company but these people actually I'm, we're sorry that they have sold out now because they were our friends. They worked with us and they helped restore things. They would restore the Red Cockaded Woodpecker to their property up at Scrapping Valley.

Now the problem, for those of you that don't know, the Red Cockaded Woodpecker, the Red Cockaded Woodpecker has to have a living tree to make a nest in. Well the only living tree that will work is a tree that has red heart disease, which tends to soften the center of the tree.

So that means first of all, the little guys got to find a sick tree and the second of all, he's got to find one that's old enough to be big enough to have a red heart disease. Now these trees live for don't even really mature good for 60 or 75 years.

And what are the two things that the modern day forester is not going to allow to grow in his woods? Generally, its a sick tree and second, why let that sucker grow to be seventy when you can cut it at 25 and get some money out of it. So they had problems.

Then I believe it was, y'all might remember I'm not sure of the date, but 1988, hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina wiped out hundreds of Red Cockaded Woodpecker cavity trees. Now it takes about two years for them to dig a hole. So here they have hundreds of Red Cockaded Woodpeckers, no nests.

So some guy says why don't we take a common Loblolly Pine, cut a notch in it, make a fake hole in it, stick it up in a tree and see if that will work. And people told him you're crazy man, there's no way that will work, he said, lets try. They did and it worked.

That's what we've got up here in Scrapping Valley now. We've got the artificial nests. Now probably we like to think were going to bring something back and its going to stay there forever on its own.

Probably not, probably that's is the only way well be able to keep the Red Cockaded Woodpecker is to keep providing nests for it. But that's much better than letting it go because extinction is forever.

DT: When we were last speaking you were telling us about the Red Cockaded Woodpecker and, and its life history and the reintroduction here in, in East Texas woods. Do you have any familiarity with the Ivory Bill Woodpecker and the effort to find it now that its become so rare or perhaps extinct?

BH: A friend of mine that taught me birding had a real good friend. I can't, Paul Sykes was his name, worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service that was over the program back in the 60's trying to relocate the Red Cockaded Woodpecker. And he had been here in this area looking for it.

And I've talked to him several times over the years and personally he didn't believe that there was any around but always hoped, but he was telling me that the, the area that they generally thought was over along the Neches River rather than over this way.

But, he also said that one of the things that you can tell the Red Cockaded Woodpecker, I mean not Red Cockaded, pardon me, but the Ivory Bill is by the trees it uses. It favors Sweet Gum trees, large Sweet Gum trees to feed on. And so I've, I've known I I know that much about it.

And I know that about four years ago, I was at the Whispering Creek Motel and there was a man came in and it was in February, and February is kind of an odd time to be paddling up and down the Sabine River. Its kind of cold.

And he was telling, told me that he was there for a day or two trying to warm up, that he was paddling from the Toledo Bend Dam all the way down to Nibletts Bluff, which is almost on the coastal prairie. And he has his binoculars, I said, What are you doing,he said, birding.

I said, Well you seen any yet? He looked at me real funny and said, Seen what? I said, The Ivory Billed Woodpecker. He said, How do you know I'm looking for the Ivory Bill Woodpecker? I said, Just an educated guess. And he was.

He said that that was one of the, that place and and a lake in Arkansas were the two places that they thought might be the best areas to look for them.

A few years before that, they had a expedition (?) binoculars sponsored went into the Pearl River area of Louisiana looking for it.

Somebody had reported one over there, or several and I knew three of the guys that were on that expedition. And was real funny.

We, we, there was two guys we knew one of them we said if somebody opened a, the book to Ivory Bill Woodpecker and he just happened to be within a hundred yards, he would claim he'd seen one.

And the other guy, Rick Knight, we said hey said if its got 27 points that you've got, got to see to identify them and he's only sees 26 of them he wont even tell you he thought he saw one. But they didn't find anything either.

So I was real skeptical when they said they had found that one up in Arkansas because those things are so big and if you're just around this part of East Texas, you see its little cousin,

the Pileated Woodpecker, he doesn't do much moving or calling without you knowing he's in the area and I find it real hard to believe that for 60 or 70 years nobody has heard or seen an Ivory Bill Woodpecker.

DT: Maybe you can tell us about some other birds that are distinctive to this area, Swallow-tail Kite?

BH: The American Swallow-tail Kite, this, that was one of the main reasons for Newton being on the Texas Coastal Birding Trail. This, at the time, more Swallow-tail Kites were seen along the river here and then just about anywhere else in Texas.

Now they are making a real good comeback. They're seen in bunches along the Neches River. They have nested in downtown Orange, almost downtown Orange, in Liberty, little Cypress-Mauriceville school.

They've nested right by the baseball field and they are getting a little more common. Of course, they're kind of like a lot of other birds, they are maybe a little more common in this area because they're getting so compressed from their other habitats that they have no other place to go

but this few areas that are left here in the area. But I've had some reports talked about seeing 50, 60, 70 of them together at times, especially during migration.

DT: We talked about the Ivory Bill Woodpecker. Maybe you could tell us about another bird that's, that's gone now or the Carolina Parakeet.

BH: Now the Carolina Parakeet is something I basically know nothing about except that it was a pretty little bird and that people used it not only for pets but for eating.

And that and I think probably a lot of passenger pigeons probably came through this area too at one time. But of course, they're gone too. That's the thing about it. We keep looking back; we see more and more that was here that's not here anymore.

DT: Some of these creatures, that were common and scarce seem to be coming back. And, I think you mentioned the black bear as as being seen from time to time in the area.

BH: Its being seen from time to time but not because its coming back from restocking. It, most of the people up in this area don't want the Black Bear back. Its real odd.

They seem to think that if its a Black Bear here, its going to eat the kids. Well you tell them, they're grow, they're all over Tennessee, West Virginia, Maine, up in, well that's a different kind they put these will eat our kids and they, they're scared to death of them.

And most of these Black Bears we get or they have brought they have imported them from Arkansas to Louisiana to try to deepen the gene pool of the Louisiana Black Bear and a lot of them take off and leave and they come to Texas

and that's how we see them and there have been quite a few sightings the last few years but that's what they're all in East Texas are attributed to is I guess you could say roaming animals from Louisiana.

DT: How about another good sized mammal the the Red Wolf. What can you tell us about that?

BH: You know, the Red Wolf was actually, I think was the smallest of the wolves weighed about 35 pounds. I remember when I was a kid duck hunting down on the Coastal Prairie.

I did not realize at the time, I realized years later that that was, had to be Red Wolves we were looking at because these dogs, or they weren't dogs, I I they had to be the Red Wolves. I thought at the time they were coyotes were crossing a a dike in the rice fields and doing their little yipping racket.

And there was, oh, 8 or 10 of them. And that was supposedly the last area where they looked for them and they were estimating at the time there were about 3000 left and they found three. So that was a pretty bad guess.

And then after I got out of the Navy this must have been in 1968. It was, I think it was the year I went to work for Diamond Shamrock.

I was up hunting north of of Moss Hill in the Big Thicket and we were trying a squirrel dog out in, I wasn't hunting, we were trying the squirrel dog.

We didn't even have any guns because it was April didn't have a squirrel season in the Spring that back then.

And one of the squirrel dogs came running back with his tail between his legs and this wolf-looking animal, which definitely wasn't a coyote, followed him up right in front of us, stood there and looked at us and turned around and ran off.

And I'm pretty sure that was a only close-up that I ever got of what I think was a Red Wolf.

Now coyotes are all over the place now. They used to not be but especially the last 10 or 12 years they've, they've filled the gap.

DT: That the Red Wolf had left behind?

BH: That the Red Wolf l left that the larger wolf left anything, they are opportunists.

DT: Lets look at at aquatic creatures. You you had mentioned earlier that your dad had seen Paddlefish as a young man. Tell us about that.

BH: Well my dad talked about catching Paddlefish when he was a kid. I believe it was probably over in the Neches River area because that's where he did most of his fishing.

And of course, now all of that, I think what happened was that the Paddlefish needed a sort of a, I think a gravel bed to spawn in and with the slowing down of most of these rivers by dams, they silt falls out and covers the spawning bed.

And there are several other fish that are hurt, the Appaloosas or Yellow Cat they used to be real, real common and its not too common anymore.

DT: Well what can you tell us about the, I guess, the waxing and waning of the the alligator. I imagine one time they were quite rare and now they're they're back.

BH: Boy that alligators a tough critter. They, I don't, I don't think too many people up in this area hunted them. You get down around the coast and over in Louisiana, they really hunted them heavy.

But up up here its not quite as easy to get to them. I have up here I can remember the first alligators that I saw must have been about 9 or 10 years old and it was the year that they started putting in B.C. Steinhagen Lake and it was back up the Neches River,

and we were going swimming and my dad took us down to a sand bar and we came out on a bank and he stopped and (whispering) said, Come here and look.

Come here and there was two big alligators on the sand bar. That's the first ones I've remember seeing.

Then about 7 or 8 years later, I remember fishing up on the up on Lake B.C. Steinhagen, which was called Dam B then and I remember there was a commercial fisherman that we got to know that camped with us

and he went to take us out to run our trot lines and we ran ours and caught some fish and we went to run his and there were a couple of alligators around. He wouldn't even go near the trot lines.

But I, as far as the area, if they're doing near as well as theyre doing down on the coast, they're doing fine because I can remember on the, oh, I forget, not Offatts Bayou, but Onion Bayou

between the Anahuac, Anahuac Wildlife Refuge and the mouth in East Bay which is probably about 8 or 10 miles going down there and counting a hundred, a hundred and fifty on the bank.

DT: Maybe while were talking about water borne creatures, talk a little bit about beaver and otter. I understand that they've made a recovery in there.

BH: They have made a recovery. They are actually, the otters not so much, the they prob a lot of people otters a problem because it gets their fish. It eats their fish.

You try to raise fish commercially and an otter gets in there. Its like a kid breaking into a candy store. I mean, hey, why should I go?, when I can just lay on the bank a while and go get me another fish, that's the way they are.

The beaver has a bad habit of damming up culverts and things, the of lakes and stuff and creating their own wetlands. Now the timber companies don't like that.

They don't mind too much them keeping their own wetlands but they don't like them establishing wetlands in the middle of theirs. And they're, they're doing real well.

DT: And what about, I guess, a couple of birds that I think you, you discussed in the past, one is the Wood Duck and the other is the Eastern Bluebird.

BH: Now the Eastern Bluebird and the Wood Duck, now, the Wood Duck, one, one of the problems other than over-hunting was the fact I I would equate the Wood Duck with the, like your Red Cockaded Woodpecker.

The fact that their nesting facilities disappeared because you've cut down a tree with a hole in it, that's a potential nest. Same way with Bluebirds, that's a potential nest.

That's why people building the artificial nest boxes are having so much success bringing the birds back. And it doesn't have to be. I I I've got to tell you this, this story because to me its just kind of funny, it shows you you don't have to be rich or you don't have to be poor to to get out and help.

I was given a program up in Palestine on birds of East Texas. It was through a garden club. And this little old lady, she says, You know, she says, I have been raising Bluebirds for years, she told how many she's got,

she says, I've got one little box out there, and she says, I take it down every year and I scrub it and every, everything, and she says, It's just, she says, its so much fun. Now, she she said, It makes me want to get up in the morning. I said, Well good.

And the this this other lady came up and she says, You know, she says, we have a Bluebird trail, says, we've got 400 boxes on the Bluebird trail. I said, Well that's real nice.

I said, That's a lot of boxes. She says, Oh yes, she says, it's it's a lot of boxes, but said, its worth it, like the lady said, its really worth it. And I said, That's nice. I said, How many people do you have helping you?

And, she says, Uh, four or five. And I said, Well how many different peoples land is it on? Just, just ours and on our ranch. So that shows you you can go from the small end or the big end and you can still do good on it.

My jaw must have dropped, she looked at me real funny after that, but I never expected somebody to have go out and just stick up 400 Bluebird boxes on their own property.

But the Bluebirds are doing real well and you see them here especially in the wintertime.

DT: We've talked about some of the the native animals around here and and native plants. I guess everything changes over time. In recent years, there have been a lot of exotics that have been seen and become more common in the area.

I think Chinese Tallow and feral hogs and so on. What do you see in that regard as far as these animals and plants from other areas that are...?

BH: Well the Chinese Tallow is is a huge problem. I don't think well ever I think its more or less naturalized now.

The fire ant, oh the fire ant is a terrible problem. I don't think well ever see the end of that. And the fire ant is really, to me, causing more problems than the Chinese Tallow because there are a lot of animals that it is disrupted

and it's one of the one that a lot of people are blaming for the loss of the quail because they're getting on the young quail and killing the young quail.

There's a plant starting up now on, I I've seen it mostly at Village Creek State Park. Its called Coral Ardisia. It is a plant with red berries, beautiful landscaping plant that has gotten away and come down on the floods of growing all over the woods.

Problem with most of these things is they have no natural enemy. So where birds will eat something else, they probably wont eat that. A lot of times they plant with red berries is bad tasting to birds.

Well if they've been around enough plants with red berries that have good taste, if they eat them and then they get mixed up with the other ones and they don't know what they eat.

There's a Japanese Fern climbing fern, that's beginning to take over big time in the Big Thicket. There are several, I forget weird clams that are beginning to really cause problems around.

DT: Do you have feral hogs?

BH: Feral hogs? Everybody's got feral hogs. I I think that one of the things that has that caused a lot of the problems more recently with feral hogs is up to not too many years ago, they could sell the feral hogs that they caught to at auction barns.

And they would go into the food chain. Now they cant do that, so there's not much incentive for people to go out and hunt feral hogs unless they want to eat a hog

and if you want to eat a wild hog, you probably not going to want to eat it all the time so you not going to put much of a dent in the property.

But especially now around here, where they're doing so much clear-cutting lately, it's compressing them from the woods where they used to be out into peoples pastures and things.

And you see more and more of them dead on side of the highway where for years, you didn't see one.

DT: What about Kudzu and Hydrilla, do you get... (talking over each other)

BH: Hydrilla there's some Hydrilla in Toledo Bend, Kudzu I understand there's Kudzu in a couple of spots but not really bad yet like it is further east, but I think they've pretty well tried to clamp down on Kudzu sales,

especially they were finding there were some people selling it in nurseries. And there is a giant, I forget what the last name of the plant is. It's beginning to really take this area over too in a water plant.

DT: You briefly mentioned that feral hogs, for example, fluctuate with the kind of land use the fact that there's more clear-cutting.

I was hoping that you could could walk us through how land use has changed over the years in Newton County from when the settlers first came or actually before that when the the natives were here.

BH: Well there is a book...

DT: (talking over each other) BH: ...book in here somewhereI dont know where it is, I found when my aunt died she had it was doing the family history and she left the book and it was an interesting book here from 1888 Texas Almanac.

The two most common plants growing for money in Newton County at the time were cotton and sugarcane. That was it.

Most of the back then the timber had been cut the first time. That was easier to get to and the the land that was good for farming and it was subsistence farming. There was a lot of farming.

In fact I think Newton only got back into where it was in 1940, about the year 2000. That's how our population fell off.

People began moving to the city, companies began buying up all the land and planting timber. So we went from timber to subsistence farming back to timber.

The only problem is we went from mixed forests and Longleaf Pine forests to subsistence farming, back to mono-culture and not mixed forest, even age forest and that's what we've got now. And that's why there's so much clear-cutting.

Back in the old, old times, they would go in and cut this big tree because it was big enough to cut, leave this one over here, and now they're all the same age so they cut them all.

And we've, we're pretty much, there's very little farming done in Newton County now. At one time about 7 miles north of here in a little community called Liberty, they even had a canning plant where they canned beans and tomatoes and stuff like that.

You can't even hardly grow tomatoes and beans up here anymore. The weather has changed, the diseases that they get and lack of water, uneven watering. This used to be the wettest county in Texas. And used to get sometimes up to about 65 inches of rain here.

DT: Is there is there a way to sort of correlate these, these land use changes with how habitat and wildlife have fared in Newton County?

What does it mean when you've got, say, selected management of of trees versus even age and clear-cutting? What does that do to the wildlife in your experience?

BH: Okay, select selective management, all right now let let lets say for instance were talking just pine, pretty well pine, like your, well the only pure pine you would have had originally would have been your Longleaf Pine.

It was in more of a poor habitat but it was open where and got fire pretty regular so the sun would reach the ground and there was a lot of grass. So you had grazing as well.

Now you have a mixed forest you have oaks, you have hickories, you have things like that they produce nuts. That's food for the animals thats browse.

You have just straight even age pine trees. Animals don't like to eat pine needles. In fact, most of thems systems wont handle it. So that cuts out a big section right there.

And we have seen time, I remember I was on a hunting lease back in the early 70's. I remember the company that owned it came in and cut almost 6000 acres of hardwoods and just let it lay there to rot.

They wouldn't even let people come in to get firewood. They said that well its extremely dry now. By the time, we get ready to plant it will be rotted. So it it was wasted.

And that that's basically what has happened. We we keep taking more and more of the land that will support other things and putting it into the pure pine forest.

DT: Has there been a change in in the habitat and the wildlife as as more of the chip mills have been built and and they're producing less dimensional wood?

BH: Well, they don't have to they don't have to wait till the the they don't have to let the logs go through the complete cycle. Before if you had to go 20, 25 years to cycle pine,

you don't have to do that now if you get if you get chips. A lot of a lot of them are using chips, I understand, chips is real, real high now.

And I know that when they took up about four miles south of here, when they they cleared out all the most of the oaks down one section of Cow Creek, they chipped a large part of it. Used to they didn't do that. They used it for either ties or crossties or or some or furniture.

At one time, we had a lot of of companies come from the east coast to get certain logs out of the forest here because that was the only place they could still find them. Now they're, most of them are gone.

DT: Well you've talked about how the the management of the woods around here has changed. It seems that the species have changed along with it.

I think you at one point had said that there were the old Yellow Pine and and Longleaf Pine were pretty common and now its more, I think you said Slash and Loblolly?

BH: Loblolly. Slash didn't really work out too good, but Loblolly is the most co- hybrid usually Loblolly. And the Longleaf is that pretty, beautiful, I say beautiful pinewood

that you see specially in old schools, churches and furniture and it's like I say it takes 60, 75 years for it to mature where they can get in 20, 25 years get the Loblolly.

DT: And and are these modern Loblollies are they genetically similar to one another?

BH: I don't exactly how far they are, I know they doing a lot of cloning on on them so that there I've been at the Clyde Thompson Nursery over in Jasper, which was Temple's old nursery, and there was a program over there on cloning the trees.

DT: It's clear you know a lot of this of flora and fauna of this area. I'm curious, how you learn these things and and if there are any other naturalists in the area that that you might have learned from or heard of who are active here?

BH: Well I learned a lot from my dad. I learned a lot from books, which I always loved to read so I found a lot from books. And one guy that, you know, I guess people always say all your heroes, have to be old, they don't have to be old.

There's a manager at Village Creek State Park, Jerry Rashall, he's 37 years old. Me and him got together and we would take a hike in the woods.

He'd take half of it and he would teach me things and I'd take the other half and teach him things and you'd be surprised how much you can learn that way. And that, that's the way we learned a lot.

He learned a lot about birds and I learned a lot about trees and we both learned a lot about flowers. That's, that, that's one way we did it. And then there was, I met a man named Howard Langridge, H.P.Langridge,

who is a teacher from Florida and Tennessee, and I guess you could say he was my mentor in birding. He was the best birder I have ever met and birded with and I met and birded with some, some good ones.

But he was kind of like that. He would walk along and look for birds and stop and he'd see a flower. He reached down and he'd, he would know something about the flower. Best man on butterflies I have ever seen. And he got me interested into doing that.

And when we go on for, see I think we started in '86 and we ended in, right before he died in 2001. Every year we went three or four weeks, went all over Texas, maybe to Arizona and we birded and were in nature and I learned so much from him.

That's and that's, he was the kind of man that you might know, might not know much about what he knows about, but you know something that he wants to know. He doesn't know what it is, but hell find out.

DT: You mentioned that that you've gone birding. I understand that you've you've got over 700 bird species on your black list?

BH: Been real lucky birding with Howard Langridge.

DT: Well how did you get started birding and and where is, has birding taken you in the world?

BH: Well about, I guess about 25 miles north of here back that way down the woods on the Sabine River, there's a little lake called Wood Lake. You couldn't get into it. You couldn't get into it with a four-wheel drive even. You had to go across some slushy, mud holes.

Well I managed to get in there. My dad and my uncle in a four-wheel drive truck with a winch on it. We spent most of the day winching in and out.

We were in there fishing in that lake for some white perch and this little yellow bird flew up and set on the end of my pole started whistling. And I said, I wonder what this bird is?

My dad looked at it and said, That's a Woods Canary. I don't know what a Woods Canary is. So when I got back home, I went and bought a bird book. I found out it was a Prothonotary Warbler. It was the first bird on my list Prothonotary Warbler.

And then when I was married about, oh, probably about 7 or 8 years after that, my wife bought me a pair of binoculars and I said, Bird book, binoculars, there's got to be some way this goes together. Well they did, all over North America.

I have birded from the dry Tortugas off of Florida, up to the Labrador where the trees are about six inches high, to the Salton Sea, up to the islands off of Siberia in Alaska, you could see Siberia on a clear day.

My luck was we were there for three, for four days and the first three days, I just gawked at Siberia over there and the next day I got my camcorder out and I was going to take my picture and Is looked and it was foggy.

And so we were staying with an Eskimo whaler, so I said, "Hey Tim," I said, "Yeah?"

I said, "How long does the fog..how how how long is it, how many days you get that are clear up here? " He says, "Oh, about three." So so that was it. I never got a picture of Siberia.

DT: Tell us about birding in Texas.

BH: Birding in Texas. Its the best place there is. I have birded from the Rio Grande, I I from the mouth of the river, which I understand has trouble finding a little flow anymore, all the way up through Presidio, all over Central Texas.

By the way, you've been from the Austin area, one of my, one of my favorite spots is that famous Hornsby Bend Sewage Treatment Plant there at Dell Valley.

Surprisingly, some of the oddest birds in Texas have shown up there.

And we use, we usually camp, tent camped and we would, Howard had a lot of people when they go birding, theythey keep a list. Well, I kept a list but his pursuit of it was not just to go out and find a bird you havent seen, spend all your time looking for it.

It was to get up in the morning, see how many different birds you can see that day, even if it was the same ones you seeing every day and you would be surprised how many different birds you see that way.

We usually ended up seeing more different birds than anybody else because we went to every habitat looking for the common birds and if the other ones were there, we'd usually see them too.

So we, we spent time down in Santa Anna National Wildlife Refuge, Bentsen Rio Grande State Park, Laguna Madre, Laguna Atascosa, all over.

And surprisingly, with me being up here in the Big Thicket, the Big Thicket is probably the hardest place in Texas to bird because of the fact that there are so many trees out there,

you generally hear them before you see them and its hard to, hard to find a lot of the birds. In other places where you just have very few trees, you can see them moving around but you might have noticed up here, there's not a place with very few trees.

DT: Have you birded much on the Bolivar Peninsula or..

BH: Oh yes.

DT: ...on High Island? BH: Yes. Birded a lot down there. And I have seen big changes down there, especially on High Island. When the birds come across and they hit a norther, they stop at the first place they can without getting wet, which is usually High Island. Made it perfect.

Ive seen, years ago at High Island, four or five hours when you could not move your car because the birds were so thick on the ground you would run over some of them.

What we used to call a good day in those days, I understand nowadays, they call a fallout and they get real excited over it. Thats how few birds there are still there.

DT: What, what do you attribute the change to?

BH: The change is to habitat. Probably in their case, extremely, lot of the habitat change is Central and South America where they winter.

DT: I guess you could consider the, the book learning and the binocular learning something that that you've in turn, given back to other people through your nature guiding.

And I was wondering if you could talk about the guide services that you have, and also the interpreting that you provide at some of the local parks.

BH: Well the guide service I had, I guess you'd have to call a flop, because I'm mister nice guy. Somebody would call me up and say can you tell me where to find a Swainsons Warbler.

Now a good guide said, "Well it'd be kind of hard to get there, for me to tell you how to get there, but if you want to pay thirty-five dollars, I'll take you." Not Buddy.

You go to such and such a place, take a left, look for this post, look for a certain tree, and look right behind that tree down there in that wet spot, you'll probably find it.

And I had people call me back all the time. You're right, that's where they were. So I kind of good-guyed myself out of business.

As far as training, there is training people, there is nothing as enjoyable as to show somebody nature and have them really see it. So many people look at nature but don't see it.

But especially kids, they they don't get the chance anymore. Their parents don't take them out.

They don't get, one thing that, to me, is I guess you could say symptomatic of the whole problem is is something I once heard about hunting and I can see it happening now, not just hunting, but kids in general, in nature, it was said that a lot of kids don't hunt anymore,

not because they don't have a spot to hunt, because their parents have broken up and they don't have a father to take them hunting. And the mother, well, lets face it, she does, she's working all the time, she doesn't know anything about hunting. She can't take the kids hunting.

So you take one generation like that and you've broken the chain. Well the, I see the same thing a lot of time in kids in the outdoors too. It's not just the one parent or anything.

It's the other things that are pulling and tugging at them like computers, like television and stuff like like that. All of this is taking away from them. They don't get outside. And I love to take kids out in the woods and show them.

Fact, I tell them like, I tell them about, ask them how many people in Texas they think got killed by snakes last year. Now that is really a good way to tell roughly what the kids read. You'd be surprised. One million? Two million? 750,000?

That's what they say, wasnt anybody. And you tell them that and tell them all those ambulances running up and down the hospital are not taking snake bite victims in the hospital.

And you can almost see, almost like a shroud falling off of off scales off their eyes. Hey, I don't, I'm not going to get snake-bit. The teachers, a lot of the teachers are afraid they're going to get bit by a mosquito carrying West Nile Virus.

There is more things that they are taught to be afraid of in the woods than they are to enjoy. And it's, it's, it's getting real bad. That and the fact that were getting a culture of people that think that they don't care what the rules say, they should be allowed to do what they want to.

They want to drive through the woods, they should be able to drive through the woods and we don't have many people that are examples for their own kids anymore.

DT: Perhaps you can tell us about some of the places that you do guide and interpret, and I think you take people to Village Creek and to the Big Thicket National Preserve.

BH: Yes, havent done too much since the hurricane. The hurricane pretty well, Hurricane Rita two years ago, pretty well stopped everything in this area, just tore everything down. I I have over the years, I had last five or six years,

I've discovered eight state champion trees in this area down on Hardin, down in Hardin County. And I think the hurricane knocked six of the five of them down. And thats just the way it is with everything.

The schools, with the gas prices, they can't afford the gas to bring their kids. We've had to stop forest awareness.

That was a program we had where we would take a class from school, we'd divide them up into five or six sections, there would be five or six classes that would make a circle, go through a circle in the woods and we'd train them five or six different stations.

I usually taught the wildlife station and we don't have that anymore. And that, that was, that's one thing that's sorely missed. The schools cant afford it anymore.

We had what was called, Robert Ballard had the Jason Project. I don't know if you've heard of that. That was a project that, did now dealt with natural history.

He would be somewhere in the world and he would beam his message to the different schools at different times, not different schools, but different locations, which in our case was Lamar University and the kids would go in there for an hour. They would see him and what all he was doing.

He usually had a bunch of kids and they were doing research on something to do with nature, then they would come through and we would take the, we would have them go around different areas and we would show them what was available in the area and how it tied in. I noticed last year we didn't do that. I think he got out of that.

So a lotta lot of things we've we've got a lot of things that need to be done but we can't do it. And a lot of it of course is money and this is probably where I get crossways with a lot of conservationists not all, people try to blame it on the government. The government has enough to do.

But I know for one, especially birders so I can talk. Thats the cheapest bunch of people. Some of them will donate the biggest part of them try to talk their way into a state park rather than giving some money for it.

But conservationists in my mind don't, they they they talk good but the, I wont say the real dedicated conservationists because real dedicated conservationists, a lot of times, are just about hungry with what they do,

but a lotta lot of the, I guess I'd call them, I'm getting deep into it now, the pseudo-conservationists, they like to see their name with some organization but they don't like to contribute to the overall thing.

DT: Well, given the problems and trying to get kids out to a park and and the problems once they get to the park after the damage from Rita,

maybe you could tell us what it used to be when it was easier to get out to the park and the parks in better condition.

What sort of impression would you give to some of these kids? What kind of reaction would you get from them when you showed them something at your station on one of these field trips?

BH: You get some great reactions when, especially when the park manager would be standing there next to you. He would be giving the program, he'd he'd he'd give part of the program, I'd give the other part of the program.

He'd say, "Take over just a minute," and hed walk off. And I'd be talking, next thing I know, a hand would come over my shoulder with a snake in it. A coachwhip or something and he'd just walk behind us and call it.

And the the kids, you you would be surprised how how many of them, they would clear out when a sn the snake would show, a snake would show up like that,

but we would hold the snake and have them touch the snake, tell us what they thought it would feel like when they touched it and not tell anybody else after they touched it.

And they would slimy, stand they would feel the sn, the snake and it would be cool and it would kind of rough and you'd be surprised.

We had trouble getting away from petting the snake then. And that was real good and then you would...

DT: Lets stop there.