At the buzz of a rattlesnake, the heart races, and the adrenalin flows. Our response is primal, physical.

But rattlesnakes also exert a power over the imagination. For many, the fear of rattlesnakes is mixed with fascination.

Rattlesnakes are impressive predators, and they play an important role in the West Texas ecosystem.

Rattlesnakes first appeared about 4 million year ago. They're the most recently evolved snake – and the most highly specialized.

They're unique to the Americas, found from Canada to Argentina. But West Texas is truly rattlesnake country. The majority of rattlesnake species live in the American Southwest and Mexico.

Rattlers rely on complex adaptations to ...

“Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it.”

Lyricist Cole Porter may have rendered it with a characteristic wit and concision. But it wasn't a new idea. Poets have long seen in the bee's regard for the flower an image of attraction, of the energies of spring and the sweet forces of allure in nature.

The desert isn't usually part of the poetic picture. But, scientifically, arid areas are bee havens. And the Chihuahuan Desert has among the greatest diversity of bees of any region on earth.

Honey bees are the most recognizable members of the bee lineage. But they're imports, introduced by European settlers in the 17th century. Massing in colonies 60,000 strong, European h...

For Native peoples, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas brought destruction on a staggering scale. Along with the catastrophic human toll, there was cultural shock – the violent disruption of ancient traditions and histories.

But even where people were displaced or destroyed, clues to the history endure.

Two decades ago, Carolyn Boyd, an artist-turned-archeologist, founded the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center. Based in tiny Comstock, Texas, it's dedicated to documenting – and preserving – a standout legacy of the Native American past: the painted murals of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands.

At the threshold of West Texas, near Amistad Reservoir, the Devils an...

As every school child learns from Johnny Appleseed, bringing plants to the people is good work.

Since 2002, the Big Bend chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas has been spreading the news about native plants. And on Saturday, April 22, the nonprofit will host a plant sale, behind Chambers Realty at Avenue E and North Eighth Street in Alpine. The sale will feature more than 75 native species, and as many as 1,000 plants.

Planted in a garden or lawn, native plants can reinforce a sense of place. And they provide food and habitat for wildlife – from hummingbirds and solitary native bees to monarch butterflies and more.

But it's not easy to find these plants in a commercial nurs...

Near Langtry, Texas, in January 2017, the Texas Archeological Society hosted the Lower Pecos Canyonlands Academy. It was an immersion in new research into Texas prehistory.

One focus of that research is Eagle Cave. The cave, deep in a canyon near the Rio Grande, attracted human communities for 13,000 years. Sediments accumulated through human use, and those sediments preserve tools and bones, traces of plant foods, ancient latrines.

What does this site have to tell us? And what does research here entail?

“In 1935, 36, the Witte Museum did the first large-scale excavation at Eagle Cave,” archeologist Charles Koenig said, “and they dug what became this trench...”

The limest...

“It was illimitable expanse of desert prairie... a region almost as trackless as the ocean,” wrote General Randolph Marcy in 1852, in one of the first English-language accounts of the Llano Estacado. The vast plateau, he said, was a place of “uninhabitable solitude, and must continue uninhabited forever.”

We can appreciate Marcy's awe at the scale and starkness of the West Texas plains. But the record proves him wrong. For the resourceful, the Llano has always offered a home – from Native peoples to pioneering ranchers and farmers, to a fascinating cohort of plants and animals.

The Sibley Nature Center in Midland hosts its annual Nature Festival, Saturday, April 8. The theme...

They're uniquely austere landscapes, in a famously austere region. Across the Chihuahuan Desert, exposures of gypsum create white dune fields, badlands, bleached hills, ridges and flats.

But that austerity conceals a surprise.

A half-century ago, botanists turned their attention to these pockets of harsh terrain – and began to find dozens of new plant species. Far from lifeless moonscapes, the gypsum outcrops are home to their own distinctive flora – unique, highly adapted plant communities.

Research on these “gypsophilic” plants continues. It's providing new insight into the fundamental mechanisms of evolution.

Texas' highest peaks rise dramatically ahead. The desert scr...

The Rio Grande, the Devils River, the Lower Pecos. The rivers of West Texas are exceptions to the desert rule. In this harsh land, they're a life-giving resource.

And they're irresistible to backcountry adventurers. There are challenging rapids, and some of the most spectacular landscapes in Texas.

Louis Aulbach published his first West Texas river guide in 1988. His guides are iconic. For thousands of boaters, they've been essential company.

Boquillas Canyon, in Big Bend National Park, is a classic Western experience. The Rio Grande sweeps for 30 miles through the cliffs and spires of the Carmen Mountains.

A native Houstonian, Aulbach was working in the oil industry when he mad...

The canyonlands surrounding the confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande are the boundary of West Texas – and they're famed in Texas archeology. Natural shelters here preserve stunning rock art, and one of the best records of North American hunter-gatherer life.

One of these rock shelters tells a particularly dramatic story.

Bonfire Shelter is the southernmost, and perhaps the earliest, evidence of an ancient hunting technique. Here, hunters successfully steered bison into a fatal fall. Now, Bonfire Shelter is the focus of new research.

Though he never witnessed it, he described its results in the journal of his 1805 journey.

“Today we passed... the remains of a vast ...

Nineteenth century Americans knew the Pecos River as the boundary of the West. And the westering traveler today can feel that transition. In the canyonlands at the confluence of the Pecos and the Rio Grande, the Hill Country gives way to the Chihuahuan Desert. Mountains appear on the western horizon. Ocotillo and yucca stud a harsh landscape.

These canyonlands of the Lower Pecos are also a world-class archeological site. Caves and shelters here preserve one of the richest records we have of hunter-gatherer life in North America. Now, a group of Texas archeologists is taking a new look at that 13,000-year record.

A half-mile from Langtry, Texas, Eagle Nest Canyon is luminous in midday l...