Black-capped vireo Edwards Plateau
— the bird that came back from the brink.
Not only on a wall.
Black-capped vireo Edwards Plateau, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A small olive-and-white songbird with a glossy black cap and bold white spectacles, breeding in the shin oak and live oak scrub of the Edwards Plateau. Listed endangered in 1987, delisted in 2018 after three decades of cowbird trapping and habitat work, much of it on Fort Hood. The males sing from the same shrub for an hour before they move.
The place, in three passes.
The Edwards Plateau covers roughly 24 million acres of central Texas, a limestone uplift defined to the east and south by the Balcones Escarpment. The plateau supports a mosaic of grassland, oak-juniper savanna, and dense shin oak shrubland on shallow karst soils. The black-capped vireo (Vireo atricapilla) breeds in the shrub layer from March through August, then migrates to the Pacific slope of west-central Mexico. Strongholds include the Fort Hood military reservation near Killeen, the Kerr Wildlife Management Area, and the Devils River drainage in the west.
The vireo was listed as endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1987, when fewer than 350 known males remained across Texas and Oklahoma. Brood parasitism by the brown-headed cowbird was the largest pressure; cowbirds laid in vireo nests and the hosts raised the wrong young. Three decades of cowbird trapping and habitat management, much of it on the Army's Fort Hood, recovered the population. USFWS delisted the species in 2018. The Texas count has since exceeded 14,000 territorial males across the breeding range.
Males arrive on the Edwards Plateau in late March and hold territory through July. They sing from the same shin oak motte for an hour at a time, a bright, irregular phrase that fits no easy template. Pairs build a cup nest hung from a low fork. Migration south begins in August and the wintering ground is the Pacific slope of west-central Mexico, in dry deciduous forest from Sinaloa to Oaxaca. The bird is rarely seen outside the breeding season except by birders who travel to its winter range.
