Hanging beside the work desk of Julie Mattox in her Yantis home is the poem ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ by Wendell Berry. It reads:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The verse is a very apt description of the ethos of Mattox. In a circumstance which is unique to a small East Texas town, Mattox and her husband, Jack, care for 68 acres of native prairieland inside the Yantis city limits.

Julie and Jack Mattox are retired from the fields of surveying and geology. Those careers took the two into untouched places of great natural beauty. It seemed a logical thing that they would become involved in restoring a native prairieland ecosystem. 

In reality, however, the two found their way to Yantis because Jack wanted to fish. 

They bought a home on a single acre just west of the Hwy. 154/17 crossroads in 1996. They began to expand that holding, purchasing neighboring parcels when able.

In 2014 they entered into a contract with the Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Pastures for Upland Bird Program and began converting their holding from hayfields to native grasslands.

In one of the early steps in that process, a purple martin house was erected. A young purple martin found the house straightaway, and the birds staked a claim on the Mattox place. 

As Mattox described, “The purple martins became a hobby, then a passion, an obsession, and now an obligation.”  

They certainly have taken to the houses erected by the Mattoxes. Presently, there are 96 houses available for purple martins, and, based on the numbers swooping around the property recently, there were likely no vacancies.

Julie has become a mainstay in the Purple Martin Conservation Association (PMCA), a group dedicated to preserving the species. 

It is reasonable to ask what is it about the birds which make them the subject of extra effort to preserve them. In addition to being another of God’s creations, the purple martins are ‘navigators extraordinaire.’ 

They breed and summer-over in North America (east of the Rockies from Canada to Texas), then migrate south to the rainforests of Brazil where they spend the winter months feasting on all that the rain forest offers, before heading north again. 

Here is the kicker, however – each migrates individually. That feat of navigation is impressive, even more-so when considering that purple martins return to the same breeding site where they successfully raised their young. 

Yantis is 3,412 miles from Manaus, Brazil. Navigating and flying that distance as a 2-ounce bird with a 15-inch wingspan, and arriving  to the same breeding or wintering spot year after year is quite remarkable. 

It is unknown how the purple martins navigate. Theories include use of the earth’s magnetic field or navigating by the stars or determination by measuring the moment and angle of the sunrise and sunset. 

We may however be getting closer to the answers through the work of the PMCA. They have embarked on an aggressive tagging program to monitor the flight profiles and migratory paths of the birds. 

That tagging program received a huge boost when a large pre-migratory roosting site near Manaus was discovered. Approximately 300,000 purple martins congregate there in a stand of trees in the Amazon basin before departing on their individual flights north.

Mattox, who had the opportunity to travel with a PMCA team to view and conduct research at the site over a 7-day span, was astonished at the experience.

She described, “You could feel the air moving and one is overwhelmed by the rushing sound of thousands of birds passing close-by. It defies description.” 

The PMCA tagging initiative will be coming to Yantis.  This month it will visit the Mattox farm to band martins and install a GPS antenna. It is hoped that the data accumulated may unlock the secrets of the purple martin’s navigational skill.

There are actually three species of martins in North America. The subject of this feature is the Eastern Purple Martin. There is also a Pacific Martin and a Desert Martin. The Desert Martin is well-known for making their nests inside saguaro cactus. They inhabit the American Southwest.

The Eastern Purple Martin population has largely been decimated by two invasive species: the European House Sparrow and the European Starling. It is believed that one-quarter of the native purple martin population has been lost over the past 40 years. Starlings, due to their ability to mimic sounds (and words) had been widely spread around the world as eccentric entertainment in the 19th century. 

Purple martins have developed a strong synanthropic trait – benefiting from close association with humans. There are accounts of native Americans putting up gourds as martin homes to keep crop pests at bay. 

That relationship has resulted in eastern purple martin using human-provided housing almost exclusively.  In addition to a reduction in the flying bug population (including flying ants), other benefits of having purple martins nearby are the wide array of calls they use, especially in the morning, as well as the aerobatics they demonstrate in flight.

Joe Seachrist, president of the PMCA hopes to build on that relationship by having a purple martin box at every elementary school east of the Mississippi. 

For Julie Mattox, hosting the purple martins is just one piece of the natural, native landscape they are creating. Their holding contains native grasses: big and little bluestem, switch grass, Indian grass and eastern gamma grass. The Prairie Schoolhouse is open and still going strong, and Mattox remains busy coordinating the multitude of agencies, departments and non-profits that share similar aims at restoring native ecosystems, but may not be yet in synch. 

Mattox is very positive about the future of ecosystem management in East Texas.

As she summarized, “People want to use their land for the best benefit possible, we simply need to become better educated on what those uses are and the assistance available in doing so. We all want to be good stewards of our post-oak savannah ecosystem.”