Nature Notes

Guadalupe Mountains National Park launched an artist-in-residence program in 2013. It's one of more than 50 residencies at national parks and monuments. For artists, the residency is an extended encounter with a compelling, if forbidding, West Texas place. The artists give back, supporting the park's mission by donating works and leading visitor programs.

Walt Davis was the park's spring 2019 artist-in-residence. Davis is a painter, but also a scientist, the former exhibits curator at the Dallas Museum of Natural History. His life and career illustrate both the fruitful exchange, and the tension, between the two disciplines.

“I can't do my science without thinking art,” Davis sai... Hosted by for KRTS

The ancient Southwest was a place of tremendous diversity. Among the deserts, high plateaus and wooded canyons, cultures grew and flourished, influencing one another. They mastered agriculture in some of the most forbidding landscapes on Earth. Ceramics were ubiquitous – for cooking, and for contact with the sacred world. Artisans in adobe and stone, they built kivas and multi-story pueblos.

This Puebloan world extended as far as the Pecos River. What's now West Texas was home to a civilization archeologists call the Jornada Mogollon. In two new exhibits at the El Paso Museum of Archeology, visitors glimpse this ancient civilization.

Impressively situated beneath the Franklin Mountai...

West Texans can sample and learn about sotoles, at Marfa's third annual Agave Festival, June 1-9.

Distilled agave spirits have long been a mainstay of Mexico and the borderlands. But they've gone global. Tequila exports from Mexico have doubled since 2000. Mezcal production has risen even more dramatically. And now, the spirit of another desert plant – sotol – is poised for a boom.

Every boom takes its toll. With agave, demand has outpaced supply. Wild populations are threatened, as are agave pollinators, like the endangered long-nosed bat. 

Will sotol follow that pattern? Some producers hope to safeguard the ecology, and the deep cultural traditions, of this emblematic Chihuah...

It's a curious thing to say about creatures that are in fact dinosaurs, and have endured for tens of millions of years, but birds are having a moment. Birding has a growing number of young practitioners. In city and town, it's an accessible way to connect to nature.

Birders often keep a list of the birds they've seen. But there are less formal ways of appreciation. There's a specific pleasure in birdsong – and in recognizing the calls of the birds that surround us.

A long-time park ranger, Mark Kirtley has led visitor programs at Big Bend on animal sounds – including identifying and imitating birdcalls.

The curve-billed thrasher has been described as the “default desert bird.�...

The plains and deserts bloom. Birds whistle and sing. There are radiant days when the wind abates, and the sky itself seems to mellow and ripen. Springtime in West Texas is always a sweet surprise. 

And across the region, gardeners greet the season with vigor.

On Saturday, May 4, the Big Bend's Native Plant Society holds its spring sale in Alpine. It's sold out in recent years, as gardeners have increasingly embraced native plants. In Midland, the Sibley Center's native sale sold out in pre-sale.

On this episode, we turn to two accomplished native gardeners – to hear the lessons they've learned.

Patty Manning, of Alpine, is a botanist who managed the Sul Ross State University ...

They're diminutive, less than a foot tall, but their claim to the open spaces and arid plains of the West runs as deep as the bisons'. They're skilled hunters in the prairie night.

Burrowing owls live in holes created by other creatures. They rely most on abandoned prairie dog holes, as sanctuary from predators, as nesting places. 

Our region is home to year-round burrowing owl populations – they're glimpsed occasionally in daylight, in pastures or on fenceposts. But new research shows West Texas is also a critical hub for owls from very far away. The research tells a stunning story.

David Johnson is director of the Global Owl Project. Recently, his research took him to Dell City...

Travelers on Interstate 20 east of Midland see it from dozens of miles away – a bluff rising 200 feet above the otherwise unbroken West Texas plains. The promontory has always been a landmark. Abundant springs once flowed at its base, and it was a destination for prehistoric bison-hunters, for Comanche raiding parties, and for the earliest westering settlers. 

Today, it presides over Big Spring, a city of 30,000. The rugged bluff, known as Scenic Mountain, is a treasured community resource. Big Spring State Park is a repository of West Texas history, landscape and wildlife.

Big Spring's identity as a “crossroads” community is woven into its history. It was a stop on the Gold Rus...

It's a place of serenity, a West Texas landscape with the power to mesmerize. Monahans Sandhills State Park encompasses almost 4,000 acres of sand dunes and sandhills – part of a larger expanse of sandhills here at the southwestern edge of the High Plains. The sandhills are an ecosystem unlike any other in Texas, and they conceal a surprising diversity.

Monahans' fortunes have ebbed and flowed since the 19th century. Its economy contracted with the oilfield bust of the 80s. Now, it's in the midst of a fracking boom. Thousands of wells have been drilled. Housing is scarce. There's daily rush-hour traffic on Interstate 20. 

But out in the dunes, that haywire pace recedes. It's a surre...

This episode of Nature Notes was inspired by a question from listener Josh Knight – submitted as part of “West Texas Wonders,” the reporting series where listeners ask questions and Marfa Public Radio finds answers. Knight asked if the Odessa Meteor Crater was indeed produced by a “crash,” and, if so, what ecological impact that collision might have had. The reporting led to unexpected places – and as far as the asteroid belt. Thanks to Knight for submitting this question.

Five miles west of Odessa, a 600-foot-wide circular hole marks the West Texas landscape. It's shallow  – just 15 feet deep. The Odessa Meteor Crater is a subtle feature, but it tells an explosive story �...

Beneath the soaring western escarpment of the Guadalupe Mountains, geologic and chemical forces combine to create a resource humans have sought since civilization began: salt.

Indigenous peoples made salt expeditions here for millennia. Spanish invaders sent wagon trains to gather salt for mines in Chihuahua. But in the late 19th century, the Guadalupe Mountains Salt Lakes became a flashpoint in a violent conflict. Echoes of the San Elizario Salt War continue to sound today, and its traces are etched in the West Texas landscape.

Today, San Elizario is a small, if growing, community on the Rio Grande, downstream of El Paso. But in the mid-19th century, it exceeded El Paso as a cente...