Texas Backyard Wildlife Visit
- discoverwildlifesc
- Sep 30
- 3 min read
A few weeks ago I was given an opportunity to visit with Dan Ballard and Jane Hunter at their Austin home that is the setting for Texas Backyard Wildlife. Many of you have enjoyed seeing Dan and Jane do a presentation at Living of Wildlife or viewing their videos online. One of the members of our group was Linda Dwyer, who wrote an article about Dan and Jane for the Williamson County Sun. These are my personal comments about the day.
They live on a busy street in Austin. Across from them are a grocery store, drugstore, restaurants, etc. You enter their gate and their property is pretty much a Level 4/5 environment. They even have a large tree growing in their driveway, so they have to swerve around it when they back out of their garage.
Dan bought the house/property 30 years ago, and from what is left of the landscaping, he left the yard alone for the next 30 years. There are large trees, and underbrush which they do not water or groom. They have several persimmon trees that the wildlife just love. There are also lots of oaks and acorns are everywhere.
Remember the 65+ cameras? They have made rough trails to the camera sites and they use hard wired cameras. There are lots of cables on the ground. There are also cameras up high in trees and they also have wiring connected.
We toured their property first, then sat in their kitchen having coffee and cookies and we learned about their videos. We could even see live activity in areas we had just examined during our walk around. The animals did not like having us there, so we did not see any wildlife while we were outside. But we could see them coming to the sites with cameras once we went inside.
Their story is interesting. They were a couple in the 1980's, but they did not marry. Dan married someone else and bought this house. He got divorced, they met for a drink and Jane never left, she said.
What you see there is a couple 100 per cent dedicated to recording the wildlife and sending it out to the world. They are investing most of their time and money in this. They have 48K You Tube followers, they told us.
Linda and I are actually contacting movie producers to see if someone wants to do a documentary on them. Their story and their mission needs to be told.
They have inspired me to look into creating wildlife spots in Sun City. I'm not sure yet how to proceed. The Nature Club has invested in bird houses and a few bat houses. But we have never built shelter or spots for mammals and larger birds.
Dan has created spots for animals to build their nests in burrows using tree limbs, and tree stumps. The other thing he has done is to create perches for larger birds and actually playgrounds for squirrels, skunks, racoons and foxes. His structures are so simple and would be easy to do in SC. We have long been aware we should leave brush and dead trees for animals, but we have never tried to designate them as wildlife preservation areas. I think this would be a good project for the Nature Club.
I do not think we should install the wiring, etc. that Dan uses, but there is talk about using Starlink to give us cameras in the natural areas. So, if we could create a fox playground, we might be able to watch them without disturbing them.
If you are interested in seeing what Dan and Jane are doing, here is their website. Home | Texas Backyard Wildlife
This video shows a fox playground Dan constructed. Notice how simple it is and how it uses tree debris that might just be wasted.
Comments