By G. Frank Oatman, Travis Audubon Board President in the early 60s

I’d like to clarify the beginnings of birding at the Travis County Sewage Ponds at Hornsby’s Bend. I was the first person, as you’ll read, to discover those for birders. My paternal great grandfather, William Jasper Sneed, owned a farm directly across the Colorado from what became the Travis County Sewage Ponds. Sneed relatives of mine still owned land there, and I was ‘arrowhead’ hunting alone there one day, with binoculars as always, when I noticed two hunters with guns upsetting large numbers of ducks from what I thought must be some kind of raised impoundments on land across the Colorado that I knew was part of Hornsby’s Bend. A cousin of mine had married a Hornsby, and so a bit later I took myself off to see relatives I knew slightly and asked about those mysterious ponds. The Hornsbys told me they were sewage settlement ponds built on land they’d sold for that purpose to Travis County. They readily gave me permission to visit the ponds to look at birds, and loaned me a gate key to the fence surrounding the ponds. In those early days one had to drive directly by the ancestral Hornsby home to reach the Ponds, so they were closely impacted by visitors.

Alone, I that day visited the Travis County Sewage Ponds for the first time for any birder. And what I found was amazing – good numbers of several species, for instance, that had been seen only a few times ever in the County, mostly as rare singles or pairs; and that day at the Sewage Ponds to my amazement were flocks of them. (20 Ruddy Ducks, 125 Green-winged Teal, 18 Eared Grebes, 76 Least Sandpipers for instance, plus a Common Merganser not seen in the Austin area since the 1920s). Most notable my first day at the Ponds were 4 Common Goldeneyes, the first ever recorded in Travis County. That was on November 25, 1959 when I was 18 and a freshman at UT Austin. Then presiding experts Edgar B. Kincaid, Jr and Fred S. Webster could barely believe what I told them by phone that night, when we arranged for me to take those two plus John and Rose Ann Rowlett to the Sewage Ponds the next day, when the five of us added Bonaparte’s Gull to the County bird list. The richness of the Ponds for water birds was a revelation to us that day and over the early years of our frequent visits, the Rowletts and I (and others) many times adding new bird species to the County list at the Ponds. For many years in the late 1950s and into the 1970s, the two Rowletts and I were the most active birders in the Austin area, mostly together. Undergraduate Victor Emanuel transferred from Rice to UT Austin early in the 1960s, and for several years he was our fellow Austin area birder, sometimes joining John and Rose Ann Rowlett and me.

This discovery of the Sewage Ponds made necessary a revision of the Travis County bird checklist, showing roughly dates and rarity or levels of abundance seasonally of each species. Travis Audubon published and sold that checklist, and the two young
Rowletts (John still in high school and Rose Ann in junior high in 1959) and I served with Edgar and Fred on the TAS committee to revise that checklist.

I believe this was the first time, or at least one of the first times, birders discovered the richness of bird life at sewage settlement ponds – a first across the U.S. and beyond. In another blog I’ll recount the somewhat infamous story of how fast friends John and Rose Ann Rowlett and I arranged for one of us to swim in one of the Sewage Ponds to capture alive a super rare (anywhere inland in Texas) Red Phalarope, another first for Travis County.

Featured image: Photo taken by Edgar B. Kincaid, Jr. of “The Three Eager Beavers” (as Kincaid dubbed them) taken on Sept. 27, 1959, a couple of months before Oatman’s discovery of the Travis County Sewage Ponds. Left to right are John L. Rowlett, G. Frank Oatman, and Rose Ann Rowlett, all teenagers then.