DURING MY RECENT week in North Carolina I greatly enjoyed bird-watching from the glassed-in porch of the Chapel Hill residence that is the home of my daughter Sally, her husband Paul Jones and their son Tucker.

A tubular feeder hung underneath the eave is inaccessible to the grey squirrels that are as numerous there as in Gilmer. A large shrub next to the feeder makes a good hideout for the various birds as they wait a turn at the feeder.

Most of the birds were the same ones I see in my Gilmer yard. These included the Tufted Titmouse, Cardinals, the Carolina Chickadee, the White-Breasted Nuthatch and Red-Bellied Woodpeckers which, I was surprised to see, enjoyed bird seed that are not a normal part of their insect-heavy diet.

A SPECIAL treat was seeing the American Goldfinches that live in North Carolina the year round. We have only the migratory type, that left this year in the spring just as the males were beginning to turn from their dull winter plumage to the brilliant yellow and black they wear in the summer.

I’ve never before seen the Rufous-sided Towhee, said to be a winter visitor here, but these black birds with white breasts and orange on their wings were regulars at the Carolina feeder.

Just as happens at my house regularly, whatever variety of wrens live in North Carolina showed up at the feeder and clearly would have preferred to get into the house.

(This week I had left my garage door open long enough that when I stepped out of the house a very loud bird song greeted me. The wren I thought I had discouraged from building a nest in my garage door opener was back at it.)

ONE DAY IN Chapel Hill a squirrel on the ground, eating the bird seed knocked out of the feeder, had a partner, a tiny striped chipmunk — another creature not seen in our area.

Northeast Texas, because of its many lakes, is a magnet for both rare and plentiful bird species, according to the Texas A&M Press in the announcement of its 2002 book, Birds of Northeast Texas by Matt White.

The book, which is intended to supplement rather than replace standard bird guides, lists 390 species of birds that have been reliably recorded in 22 Northeast Texas counties, stretching from Bowie, Hunt and Van Zandt on the west to the Louisiana line on the east and the Red River on the north. The southernmost counties are Smith, Rusk and Panola.

This area includes Upshur County, of course. A map shows 18 good bird-watching sites in the area. Closest to Gilmer are Lake O’ the Pines, Daingerfield State Park and Lake Bob Sandlin State Park.

WHEN I RETURNED from my Carolina trip I was dismayed to find in the July 26 New Yorker magazine a story about how European songbirds “are being decimated for fun and profit—and in open defiance of law.”

Writer Jonathan Franzen joined a team from the German Committee Against Bird Slaughter and visited Cyprus, Malta and northern Italy, where robins, all manner of warblers, fly catchers and other songbirds are entrapped and sold as food.

On the island of Cyprus the preferred method is to place “lime sticks,” small branches coated with the gluey gum of the Syrian plum, on low trees where they are attractive perches. Stuck, the birds are gathered alive.

When he went with a friend to a restaurant on Cyprus, the proprietor brought them three fried song thrushes that they hadn’t asked for and “hovered by our table as if to make sure I ate mine,” Franzen wrote.

EVERY SPRING, he reported, some five billion birds migrate from Africa north to breed, and as many as a billion are killed each year, especially over the Mediterranean.

The populations of many resident and migratory birds have been “collapsing alarmingly,” the writer found. He said the blue of the Mediterranean Sea is not pretty to him any more, for the sea is now almost empty of fish and birds that are consumed in Europe after being taken illegally.

This brought to mind Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which predicted America would turn into a near-lifeless, birdless desert if the use of pesticides was not curbed. This led to the banning of DDT in 1972, so it hasn’t happened. Ms. Carson is widely credited with founding the country’s environmental movement.

sgreene@tatertv.com