A Charred Life 
The War on Cedar
It’s greedy and invasive, choking my oaks and killing my soil. It’s all over my land. So what’s stopping me from getting rid of it?
(Page 3 of 4)
The listing of the vireo and the warbler as endangered was no surprise to Sexton, who, as a wildlife biologist with the City of Austin, had previously determined that more identified endangered species exist in and around Austin than any other metropolitan area in the United States. The implementation did not sit well with many landowners, who interpreted the listing as an excuse for government agents to trespass on their land, looking for warblers or vireos, and then tell the owners how to manage it. The landowners got it wrong, according to Sam Hamilton, who was the state administrator of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Austin from 1991 to 1995. “The Endangered Species Act [ESA] is pretty explicit about endangered species and their habitat,” Hamilton told me. “If it can be demonstrated what you’re doing is harming the warbler, you can get in hot water. But there were people out there putting out the lie that you can’t cut cedar because of the ESA, which just isn’t true. What is true is that old-growth cedar, the kind that warblers need to survive, is harder and harder to find. In the past we’d issue bird letters with technical advice on how to manage land if old-growth cedar was found and warblers or vireos were nesting there. But the Texas Farm Bureau thought that was inappropriate, so the service no longer issues letters.” Now it falls on the landowner to do the right thing.
While admitting that the bird letter process was tedious, Sexton said that it wasn’t burdensome. “What landowners need to know is there’s a right way and a wrong way to clear their land,” he said. For example, there’s a limit to how much cedar should be in prime habitat, especially for vireos. “If you get too much juniper, it will shade the shin oak, and without shin oak the vireo will leave.”
Sexton has heard plenty of stories like the one that Dorothy Kerbow told me about a rancher who was clearing cedar along his fence line, only to have a curmudgeonly neighbor call the Environmental Protection Agency on him. Sexton takes them with a grain of salt. “We’ve learned a lot from the ranchers and their land-management techniques,” he said. “It’s when the subdivisions pop up and we have forty houses where we’ve had ten to twenty cattle before that create problems. You can’t do prescribed burns in developed areas. The influences of urbanization are far greater than ranching practices.
“Anything we do,” he added later, “we study to see if our techniques are working. We don’t just make a guess as we go along. We do test plots before we do things large-scale.” Whenever a prescribed burn is applied to the entire Nagel tract, I’ll bet a dollar to a dime it won’t be on a cool, damp day.
‘IF YOU WANT TO SEE HOW CEDAR CAN be managed, go see David Bamberger’s ranch over by Johnson City,” Sexton told me. “He went a little overboard in my opinion, but he’s brought back springs and creeks on his land.” In fact, everyone else I’d spoken with had invoked Bamberger’s name at one time or another, though C. W. Wimberley reckoned he was “in with the endangered species boys.”
A clear-eyed, gray-haired gentleman who acts half his 69 years, J. David Bamberger has emerged as the poster child of the cedar war, the guy who did the right thing, the right way. After 28 years of aggressively using bulldozers, chain saws, and lopping shears on his 5,500-acre Selah Ranch, he can witness firsthand the benefits of cedar removal. “When I moved here, I met a representative of the Soil Conservation Service who said he hoped I didn’t plan on ranching because I’d bought the most worthless piece of land in Blanco County,” he said with a chuckle. Bamberger took the remark as a challenge. After leaving Church’s Fried Chicken, where he had been the chairman of the board, the Ohio native searched for a project that would inspire him in the same way that Louis Bromfield, a Pulitzer prize—winning novelist, had. Bromfield wrote four agricultural testaments during the forties and fifties about restoring land, and the results of his handiwork are still visible at Malabar Farm State Park in Ohio, the site of his experimental farm.
“I wanted to do what Bromfield did,” Bamberger said. The land he purchased was perfect. “It was an abandoned ranch, all eroded and gullied, without a drop of water, and wholly indicative of the poor land-stewardship practices of the country, especially in this part of Texas. There were less than fifty species of birds on the land and the biggest deer on the property was field-dressed at fifty-five pounds. You could’ve stuffed it in an Albertson’s sack.”
Bamberger, rich and eager, got busy and hired a staff that is still with him. Thirty-eight chain saws and 13,000 bulldozer-hours later, his ranch is a Hill Country dream. Streams run year-round. Grasses are tall and lush. Diversity rules. “The count of bird species is up to one hundred and forty-eight. Last year the smallest deer field-dressed at one hundred and five pounds. The evidence is there in every spot.” Bamberger clearly revels in what he has wrought and relishes his emerging role as an evangelist of smart land management. He leads seminars, conducts tours of his land, and speaks out on land-use issues, frequently advocating ideas and concepts that fly in the face of conventional wisdom about property rights. “I’m a smartass and I’m brash,” he admitted. “But I’m right. I’ve improved my quality of life, and I’ve improved my bank account.”
He’s proud of the fact that he’s a private landowner protective of his property rights who nevertheless testified in front of Congress in support of the ESA. “I told them if you don’t reauthorize the act, you’re sending the message that conservation and environment issues are no longer important,” he told me. He has spoken to the Trans-Pecos Heritage Association in far west Texas, arguably the most vehement property-rights advocate group in the state. In his not-so-humble opinion, landowners who fight the ESA or take the attitude that “this is my land, keep off” are just plain misguided, not only because they’re discouraging wildlife diversity but also because they’re losing out on a chance to make some money off their land. “If you are just a greedy robber baron and don’t really care about Mother Nature, you still should encourage endangered species, because ecotourists will pay good money to see them,” Bamberger said. He cited the example of Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, a $4 million business based in Austin that conducts wildlife tours around the world. The only tours Emanuel schedules in Central Texas are those to see the golden-cheeked warbler and the black-capped vireo. “One ranch near Concan made $14,000 last year by hosting a few busloads of tourists,” Bamberger said. “All you do is open the front gate and look at people ranching like you used to look at cattle ranching. The big difference is these folks don’t require feed and, unlike hunters, they don’t shoot.”
Bamberger wants more visitors like that, so he’s working to attract more vireos and warblers by trimming stands of old cedars (making sure there’s plenty of cedar bark for nesting material), fencing off areas to encourage vegetation that provides birdseed, and removing new-growth cedar saplings that compete with the older trees. The process is ongoing. “Go into your cedar-clearing proposition with that in mind,” he said. “Never initiate an action that you don’t intend to sustain. After you cut cedar, don’t burn it; stack the dead wood in windrows on a slope to catch soil and runoff. Keep dead branches around the trunk trimmed back. Cut any new growth that you see.” Bamberger figures he’s kept about three hundred acres of older cedar as wildlife habitat, hoping to attract more warblers and vireos. He knows that neither species can survive in a forest that is exclusively cedar: “They need oaks and grasses and water nearby. The warbler wants cedar for one reason: to build its nests with cedar bark. The warbler flies into Spanish oak, finds a certain web made by a caterpillar, and holds its nest of cedar bark together with the webbing.”
My Library
