80 acres, 8 years, 800 species

[e_moon60]

Well, we made it, in the 8th month, too.   With a comfortable little margin to make up for errors I might've made.  And another four months to add more species in case I've made even more errors.

Of course we didn't personally put every one of those 800 species on the place.  Many were here to start with.  I can say we've seen an increase in every

Comments

[fair_witness]

Congratulations!

[e_moon60]

Thanks! And I think I keyed out (to the genus level anyway) my darkling beetle. Need confirmation by someone who knows more about beetles.

[bosswriter]

Congratulations on hitting 800! Goals are great and give one the feeling of accomplishment. Shooting for 1000 in 10 years?

[e_moon60]

I don't think so...for one thing, I have no idea how many species "should" be here. I don't expect to have as many species as a larger piece of land would have...Fort Hood, for instance, just up the road, has thousands of acres, some of them never plowed and some formerly ag land, and they have 200-odd species of grass listed. They have springs, permanent creeks, reservoirs, steep rocky slopes...lots of habitat I don't, and thus they *would* have more species, both flora and fauna. Nobody so far has been able to tell me what I can expect to find in most taxa. Texas lists are way too broad...even regional lists, because the terrain, elevation, soil types, etc. vary east to west and north to south. On our one piece of land, with minimal elevation change, we have soil depth from zilch (there's a section of hard rock outcrop, just about flat, where someone scraped off the overlying chalky-gravelly strata, probably for road base) to more than four feet of black clay. The terracing done decades ago for agriculture made some soil

Pitted? Punctate?

[e_moon60]

I think it looks like someone blasted it with pebbles (well, sand-grains, given its size.) I'm wondering about Triorophus for the genus (on the basis of p.251 of my beetle book and this image in BugGuide.net: http://bugguide.net/node/view/169234 ) It sure looks much the same to me. According to the book, there are 11 very similar species all over the SW. But mine was bigger (I think--I didn't have a measuring device with me) than the size range given in the book for "most" of them.

Re: Pitted? Punctate?

[e_moon60]

Wow, that one's bigger than mine was.

Have you noticed how unwilling they are to crawl onto a measure and hold still while you read off their length?

[trembling_aspen]

Are there any good books out there on how to do this sort of thing? I'd love to do this someday. :-) If there aren't any good books out there, have you ever thought of writing a book about it?

Delilah

[e_moon60]

There are books for managing larger chunks of land--start with a general introductory ecology book for an overview, then look at applied ecology, water resource management, etc.

There aren't good books for small-scale wildlife management or restoration projects (there are articles here and there in specialist journals--hard to find and I can't afford to subscribe to all of them. We subscribe to NATURE and SCIENCE, the two big fast-publication science journals, and they sometimes have stuff that's relevant, but it's not aimed at landowners.)

None so far deal with the problems of climate change or (very important to small-acreage operations like ours) the effect of neighbors' land-use choices. I want to write a book on this, but so far it's ho-hum for my agent and editor. They know the SF/F will sell; they don't know that there's much market for the other. I'll do it someday but not until the current contract's finished, at least.

[trembling_aspen]

If your not worried about income or marketing (ha ha, right?), you can publish it through a printer like Lulu. The subject is a nitch market, so I don't think any of the big publishing houses would be interested. :-/ I'm not really in any position to know, though, so take that with a grain of salt.

Anyway... If you write a book like that, I will buy it. Sometimes when you talk about land restoration, it sounds really complicated. Like with all the papers needed to file property taxes. Bleh!

Delilah

[e_moon60]

Land management is simple in concept--it's the execution that's tricky, because--as in raising kids--every situation is different. Wildlife management depends on good land management, which depends on good water management

[sunfell]

You might find this article interesting:

Our Good Earth

[e_moon60]

Sigh. Yes, this is stuff that's been known in the land management community for decades.

Depressing.