Nature Notes

It is today “so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.”

The quote comes from an unlikely best-seller: Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History. Humans, of course, have a taste for salt – but it's essential to our survival. Fluid balance, the function of organs and cells – all involve salt. And it's important in preserving foods and tanning hides. Salt has been currency. Its scarcity led nations to war.

At one West Texas place, this resource was available in abundance. For millennia, people journeyed to the Guadalupe Mount...

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.

This question comes from listener Ken Richards.

“In Big Bend, you see all these fragments and features of this and that, and I assume some of that, a lot of that, moved around by earthquake,” Richards said. “But I'm wondering if it's seismically active now.” 

We don't think “Texas” and “earthquakes.” But the answer to Richards' question is yes: tectonic forces that shaped the mountainous Trans-Pecos landscape are still at work. And now there's another factor: hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is le...

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.

This week, a question from Rachel Monroe of Marfa. Monroe was preparing recently for a Big Bend river trip. It was summer, and she thought she and her companion, a park ranger, could sleep in the open air, under the stars. But the ranger rejected that idea – emphatically. The borderlands, the ranger said, are home to a blood-sucking insect known as the cone-nose or kissing bug. And the insect can transmit a fatal disease.

“My impression was that they would bite you, and it was one of those situations where you woul...

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.

What kinds of turtles live around Marfa?

The question comes from Nathan Stueve. The answer we found surprised us.

Marfa is surrounded by arid grasslands, stony summits and badland deserts. And yet, the area is home to multiple aquatic turtles – including the rarest turtle in the United States. 

The rough-footed mud turtle is a threatened species in Texas. Scientists are working to understand, and preserve, this mysterious creature.

The most familiar West Texas turtle is a land-dweller. Watching a desert box...

Hueco Tanks State Park, east of El Paso, contains an ancient rock art legacy unlike any in West Texas, or in North America. Thousands of painted images on stone outcroppings suggest this was a place of tremendous importance, of sacred significance, to earlier Chihuahuan Desert people.

But it wasn't just a place of ceremony. It was also a habitation. Humble, more subtle than the painted figures and faces, sites across the park preserve traces of the daily life of those who created these images.  

Archeologists call this society the Jornada Mogollon, and they're working to preserve and document its record here.

The Jornada paintings at Hueco Tanks are tucked into shallow caves and cr...

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.

JD DiFabbio of Marfa asks, “What's the current population of horny toads in Marfa?” Another listener asks if horny toads are endangered, and another if horny toads depend on ants for their diet.

It's no surprise they're the subject listeners ask about most. Short in stature, horny toads are long in charisma. They're the Texas state reptile.

But what do we know about this Texas icon?

Plump, armored, they've inspired multiple names. “Horny toad.” “Horned frog.” “Horned lizard” is the official common...

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...