Nature Notes

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Nature Notes episodes

August 30, 2018 Tracing a History of Change, Innovation Among Texas’ Ancient Nomadic Peoples
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...
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August 23, 2018 Rio Grande Joint Venture Fights to Save the Chihuahuan Desert’s Grassland Birds
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...
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August 02, 2018 Walter Prescott Webb’s Great Plains
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 ...
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July 26, 2018 Cabeza de Vaca’s “Chronicle”: A Singular Glimpse of the Native American Past
“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 ...
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June 28, 2018 “Lost Crops Rediscovered”: Uncovering an Ancient History of Agave Farming
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...
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June 21, 2018 Complex Forces Shape West Texas’ Summer Monsoon
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...
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May 24, 2018 Tequila Interchange Project Says Future of Agave Spirits Must Be “Bat-Friendly”
It's been a staple for as long as people have lived within its range. From Texas to the Mexican interior, agave has been food, fiber and drink, and its distilled spirits – tequila, mezcal – have been called “the spirit of Mexico.”
Demand for those spirits is surging – agave is now very big business. It could be “loved to death.”
A coalition of distillers, enthusiasts and scientists is pushing for a different way. Sustainability, they say, means respecting the plant's ecology – including its vital bond with certain creatures of the night.
Two architects of the Tequila Interchange Project – and its “Bat-Friendly Tequila” initiative – will speak next month at Ag...
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May 17, 2018 At Agave Fest, Archeologist Will Discuss Bi-National Research into the Region’s Past
Bison-hunting on the plains, agave-roasting in the desert – throughout its epic sweep, Native American life in our region was most often nomadic. One place stands apart. La Junta – the confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Conchos – was long the site of agrarian villages. It was here, too, that Europeans first occupied the Big Bend, in Spanish missions at present-day Presidio-Ojinaga.
In July 2017, the Center for Big Bend Studies, at Sul Ross State University, started an archeological partnership with Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, or INAH. It promises to shed new light on our region's past – at La Junta, and beyond.
Andy Cloud, the Center's directo...
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April 26, 2018 Encountering an Epic Story, at Big Bend’s Fossil Discovery Exhibit
Shining peaks and blood-red desert wastes. Canyons that overwhelm the human scale. Big Bend National Park is an international destination, and a West Texas wonder. Its landscapes have the power to awe and humble.
But scientists have found that these landscapes also tell a vivid story of the past: of seawaters teeming with life, of lush forests alive with dinosaurs, of ancient mammals beneath fiery volcanos.
At the park's Fossil Discovery Exhibit, opened in 2017, visitors enter this epic story.
It's hidden below a ridge, to leave vistas unobstructed. But turning east from the Persimmon Gap road, 8 miles north of Panther Junction, the exhibit comes into view.
Big Bend boast more ki...
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April 19, 2018 In a New Guide, Alpine Botanist Captures the Glories of Texas Wildflowers
Bluebonnets along a roadway, Indian blankets in the chaparral – wildflower viewing is a rite of spring in the Lone Star State. And the opportunities here are almost inexhaustible. A Texan can see a quarter of all the wildflowers in the U.S. without leaving the state.
How would a botanist go about cataloging this abundance?
In April 2018, Alpine's Michael Eason published Wildflowers of Texas. The guide contains more than 1,100 color photos, including many West Texas wildflowers that have never appeared in print before. Eason sought to balance scientific rigor with accessibility.
He'll discuss the book, and sign copies, at Front Street Books in Alpine Friday, April 27. He visits M...
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