Nature Notes

By Marfa Public RadioScience Education Life Sciences Nature

Nature Notes episodes

April 05, 2018 Could the Mexican Gray Wolf – Source of Fascination and Hostility – Return to the West Texas Wilds?
Lobo – the wolf. From Monahans to El Paso, the words are inscribed into West Texas – in place names, in team mascots. But the reality they evoke is almost unimaginable – that lobos, gray wolves, once roamed this land.
The last wolves in West Texas were killed in 1970. By the end of that decade, the Mexican gray wolf was extinct in the wild.
But the animal has endured, largely thanks to zoos. For one El Paso Zoo staffer, returning wolves to the West Texas wilds is a passion. He says that reintroduction here would require the support of state officials, and West Texas landowners and citizens.
The gray wolf – canis lupus – was once a dominant predator across North America...
5 min
March 29, 2018 The Texas Hornshell Mussel: An Endangered “Engineer” of an Endangered River System
It's a member of one of the most endangered groups of animals in the United States, and its home is one of the most imperiled river systems in the world.
The Texas hornshell mussel is native to the Rio Grande and its tributaries. But like that river system, it's at the brink. In February 2018, the mussel received federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Brownish in color, the hornshell is nondescript. But it has a fascinating life history. And its fate is tied to one of this arid land's most precious resources: its rivers and streams.
Freshwater mussels are hard-pressed across the Southwest. The Texas hornshell is now the only native mussel found in New Mexico – once h...
5 min
March 08, 2018 El Paso Zoo Connects Urban West Texans to the Desert Ecosystem
Paul Simon put it together in 1967: “Something tells me it's all happening at the zoo.”
The El Paso Zoo is one of the most popular attractions in Texas' desert-mountain city. More than 300,000 people visit each year.
They see African lions, meerkats, Asian elephants, Malayan tigers. There's the thrill of the exotic, and an initiation into the planet's stunning diversity of life.
But among the zoo's core aims is to connect visitors to the very ecosystem in which they live – and to protect that ecosystem's most endangered creatures. Chihuahuan Desert programs are already central to the zoo's mission, and in February 2018, the zoo started construction on an ambitious new Chihuahu...
5 min
March 01, 2018 The Gray-Banded Kingsnake: Alpine’s Dennie Miller Wrote the “Bible” of a Secretive West Texas Native
Say “snake” and “West Texas” – and the mind buzzes with the image of a certain venomous character. But rattlers are hardly the full picture. Our region's truly distinctive snakes are less fearsome, but more striking.
The gray-banded kingsnake is one of them. Ringed in bands of lustrous orange, it combines beauty with mystery. Sightings are rare.
In the 1970s, a Sul Ross State University student turned his attention to this secretive animal. Dennie Miller went on to have a varied career – including a quarter century as director of the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute. But in his early work, he laid the foundation for understanding a unique West Texas creature.
In the ...
5 min
February 15, 2018 Pulse of the Desert Plains: Tracking Grassland Birds on the Marfa Plateau
It's dawn in late January, near Marfa, and the grasslands on Mimms Ranch are radiant, swaying like a thick, golden mane in the sporadic breeze.
Across the plateau treks a 20-person team – scientists, birders, volunteers.
A pair holding radio antennas leads the way. Soon, they locate a signal. Technicians swiftly raise a net – and the rest of the group moves into formation, creating a semicircle.
Quietly, they advance, closing in on the signal's unseen source.
Suddenly, it rises, in a flurry: a tiny grassland sparrow. The bird darts skyward – and then flies just outside the net.
It's a narrow miss. But as the morning continues, this team – led by Alpine's Borderland...
5 min
February 08, 2018 At Borderlands Research Institute, Seeking New Insight On Secretive Montezuma Quail
Nineteenth and early 20th century naturalists found them “fantastic,” “curious,” “bizarre.” The male's face is marked by swirls of black and white – and with their wild patterning, they were called “harlequin quail,” “fool quail,” “crazy quail.” They were recognized as distinctive to arid North America – found from Mexico to the Trans-Pecos, southern Arizona to the Edwards Plateau.
Montezuma quail are one of the region's most charismatic birds. They're also one of its most mysterious. Despite their striking plumage, they can vanish into grassy slopes and mountainsides. Little is known of their ecology and behavior.
Scientists at Alpine's Borderlands Research...
5 min
January 18, 2018 Painter Mary Baxter Captures Far West Texas’ Haunting, Elusive Essence
Daunting in its vistas, its haggard peaks, Far West Texas strikes some as barren, unwelcoming – certainly no place to linger. Others, however, are entranced by that very starkness. But even for those seized by the beauty of the Trans-Pecos, explaining it, communicating it to others, can be a challenge.
Mary Baxter has been painting in Far West Texas for more than two decades. When it comes to capturing the elusive essence of the arid desert-mountain country, she has few peers. Her impressionistic paintings transmit the landscape's haunting allure, its intoxicating loneliness.
Far West Texans not native to the place often recall when they first felt its magic. Baxter was born in L...
5 min
January 11, 2018 Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge: A Chihuahuan Desert Wildlife Spectacle
They sail in on wingspans of 7 feet, arriving in groups of three and four. The massive birds stake out their roosts for the night, and they jostle, cry and call.
As the sun sets, the assembly swells into the thousands. The birds' wild, rolling cries fill the sky. Visitors look on from just a few yards away.
It's like something out of an African safari. But this scene – one of the planet's great natural spectacles – is in the Chihuahuan Desert.
Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, on the Rio Grande near Socorro, New Mexico, was created as a sanctuary for migrating waterfowl. Each winter, it's home to as many as 15,000 greater sandhill cranes, tens of thousands of geese and...
5 min
November 09, 2017 The Frontera Land Alliance: Preserving Open Spaces in Texas’ Mountain City
“Oh, how I wish I had the power to describe the wonderful country as I saw it then!”
So wrote Texas Ranger James Gillett. He kept the peace in 1880s El Paso, ranched near Alpine. “For one who loved nature and God's own creation,” he wrote, “all of western Texas... was a paradise on earth.”
No part of that “wonderful country” has changed as dramatically as El Paso. From a valley of farms and Spanish missions, its metropolitan area now has a million people.
But undeveloped mountains, thorny arroyos and agricultural rhythms remain. The Frontera Land Alliance, an El Paso nonprofit, is working to preserve those pockets of open space.
On El Paso's west side, the Wakeem/...
5 min
November 02, 2017 For Birds of Prey, Winter is the Time in West Texas
The rains have ended. The weather is bracing. On prairies and grasslands, green gives way to gold. Winter is coming to West Texas, and nature herself seems to quiet and still.
But even as arid months begin, a wave of commanding predators arrives in our region. They are the birds of prey. If you thrill to the sight of a hawk, eagle or falcon above the West Texas landscape, winter is your time.
Kelly Bryan is an ornithologist, and former Davis Mountains State Park superintendent.
“We have a pretty decent contingent of breeding raptors in West Texas,” Bryan said, “but it's always enhanced every year by hawks and falcons from the north migrating to the Trans-Pecos region of Texas ...
5 min

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