Nature Notes from West Texas Public Radio

Often overlooked, they're among the most abundant signs of our region's ancient human past. To encounter one in a remote corner of West Texas – the caprock canyons, the Devils River, the Big Bend desert – is to be reminded how thoroughly this land has been lived in.

“Ground-stone bedrock features” are holes in stone that prehistoric peoples used to prepare food. From shallow depressions in boulders to deep mortars in limestone shelves, there are tens of thousands in West Texas. 

Archeologist Amanda Castañeda analyzed more than 800 bedrock features in the Lower Pecos canyonlands. Her work sheds new light on a technology at the heart of ancient life.

Their use was global. Fr...

What's now West Texas was home to nomadic societies for more than 10,000 years. But, about 1,500 years ago, some Chihuahuan Desert peoples began to adopt a different way of life. They embraced agriculture – farming corn, beans and squash using rainfall and mountain runoff. They established settled communities, of pithouse villages and, later, adobe pueblos. Trade connections brought goods, and ideas, from far corners of the Southwest, and from deep in Mexico.

Archeologists call this distinctive culture the Jornada Mogollon. Its civilization stretched from the Guadalupe Mountains to present-day Las Cruces and northern Chihuahua. Around 1450, its communities were abandoned.

But its leg...

For this episode, Nature Notes is teaming up with “West Texas Wonders” – a new reporting series, where listeners ask questions and Marfa Public Radio finds answers. Adele Powers lives in Marfa.

“Windy season is the bane of my existence,” Powers said, “and I think for a lot of other people too. I remember getting on my bike a couple years ago, and I couldn't ride it because I was being blown off. It seems like this miserable thing – and I want to know why it happens.”

E.V. Smalley brought it to the attention of a cosmopolitan audience in an 1893 article in the Atlantic. There was, he wrote, “an alarming amount of insanity... in the prairie States among farmers and thei...

For this episode, Nature Notes is teaming up with “West Texas Wonders” – a new reporting series, where listeners ask questions and Marfa Public Radio finds answers. Alan Cox is a Big Spring native.

“One of the deals that I've always been curious about are the scrubby mesquite bushes you see all over West Texas,” Cox said. “When did they come along? Growing up, I heard that story that they were not native to West Texas. You look at really old photos of the area, the landscape seems so much more clean and open than it does now in many places, where it's totally polluted by mesquite.”

It's been called “the devil with roots” – the thorny bane of cattle, horses and cowha...

From the Ice Age to the late 19th century, Native Americans had pursued nomadic ways of life in what's now Texas for more than 12,000 years. It's possible for a contemporary outsider to imagine those ways of life were timeless, unchanging. In fact, indigenous life here is a history of adaptation, innovation and change. As populations grew, hunter-gatherers developed new techniques to survive in this land.

It's a process called intensification, and archeologists are just beginning to trace its history.

The first people to enter the Americas had diverse hunting and cooking technologies at hand. They knew how to make unleavened bread. They could roast plants in earth ovens.  

But they...

They're prairie seas, framed by desert-mountains – from the Marathon Basin to northern Mexico, the Chihuahuan Desert contains stretches of stunning grasslands. The grasslands support ranching, and iconic wildlife – from soaring raptors to sprinting pronghorn. 

They're also home to a group of lesser-known creatures: birds known as “grassland specialists.” These small, secretive birds make continent-spanning journeys, and they're facing a crisis.

In our region, the Rio Grande Joint Venture is leading the effort to preserve them.

Migratory Bird Joint Ventures started with a specific crisis: a rapid decline in ducks and other waterfowl. With support from hunting groups, U.S. Fi...

He was an unlikely candidate to become one of Texas' most famous intellectuals. Reared on an East Texas farm, Walter Prescott Webb was, at 40, unemployed, having failed out of a University of Chicago doctoral program.

Then, in 1931, he published “The Great Plains.” The book brought a groundbreaking perspective to the American West, and its history. It earned him a PhD from UT – and international acclaim.

Webb's reputation has ebbed and flowed since. His approach to women, Native Americans and Mexicans is often myopic – and sometimes loathsome. But there's no doubt he opened an intellectual frontier. A westerner today reads “The Great Plains” with mounting recognition – a ...

“I wandered through many very strange lands, lost and naked. This is the only thing that a man who left there naked could bring back.”

In 1527, with hundreds of his countrymen, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca sailed for the Gulf of Mexico. Their aim was “La Florida,” and their mission was conquest – to expand, and enrich, the Spanish Empire.

Their failure was abject. Only Cabeza de Vaca and three others survived – and only after an eight-year sojourn across what's now Texas and Northern Mexico. But the survivors experienced something no European had – Native American nomadic life. Cabeza de Vaca's “Chronicle” provides a fascinating glimpse into how indigenous peoples in ...

For Native Americans in the Southwest, agave was the staff of life. Slow-roasted, agave hearts were converted into sweet food, and nomadic peoples cached dried agave for lean winter months. Agave fiber was used in baskets and mats. The plant is famous today for distilled spirits – tequila, mezcal – and Native peoples also fermented agave, likely for ceremonial use.

In the 1980s, researchers began to uncover another thread in this rich story. First near Tucson, they found clear evidence that agave had been farmed. Agave was not only a wild food source – it was a crop.

Native agriculture in the Southwest is often identified with the “Three Sisters” – corn, beans and squash. I...

Temperatures linger well above 100 – the outback bustles with scorpions, rattlesnakes and tarantula hawk wasps. Summer in West Texas is fierce. But, in this arid land, it also means the happiest of prospects: rain.

Between May and September, the North American monsoon brings the majority of our region's annual precipitation. For both wildlife and human communities, life here hinges on those summer rains.

And the forces that shape the monsoon are dauntingly complex. If, when and where it rains in West Texas depends on factors as distant as the South Pacific Ocean, as near at hand as mountains on the horizon.

It begins, in many years, on an afternoon in May or early June. The heat i...