Nature Notes from Marfa Public Radio

Gardening for wildlife is fun! Wildlife gardens are beautiful, full of life, always changing, and always engaging.  What’s the newest bird, butterfly, dragonfly or flower to be recorded in the garden? Wildlife gardens pull you outside to examine things closely, and while you’re there the little garden chores become aesthetic ecological interpretative acts. A gardener will think, "Hmmmm,  I’ll deadhead the blue mist so the queen butterflies come back, and I’ll remove the espantes vaqueros so the tube tongue doesn’t get shaded out . Then the vesta crescent butterflies will lay some eggs. Aaah... the evergreen sumac has ripe fruit, so it’s time to make some lemony tasting tea...

Have you ever seen a mountain lion? Puma concolor has many names: puma, cougar, panther, painter, catamount and mountain lion. In Mexico it is known as "lepardo." By whatever name it is called, it is a handsome and extremely interesting member of our fauna. Mountain lions originally ranged from Canada to the southern tip of the mainland of South America, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They are found in many diverse habitats, from sea level to elevations over 13,000 feet: in swamps, deserts, forests, mountains, plains. Their range in the United States at the present time includes southern Florida and wilderness areas west of the 100th meridian – that is more or less a straight lin...

Who hasn't spent a few lazy moments sitting by a pond or stream watching those lovely, gauzy-winged insects called "dragonflies" and "damselflies"? And we have all wondered if these beautiful creatures had descriptive common names or only multi-syllabled scientific ones. The difficulty arose from the fact that the last comprehensive monograph on these insects dated back to the 1950's, and no one had seen the need to create a list of common names that would be accepted by academic students of dragonflies and damselflies. Thus the many naturalists curious about the dragonflies and damselflies they saw on their adventures were at a loss for names until the last decade. The common names no...

Over 175 rehabilitators are registered in Texas alone. A guess of total funds spent by them over a year's time is around a million dollars just in the state of Texas. Does that million dollars save a species of bird? No. Does it alter population dynamics? Not at all, for a rehabilitator sees a very minor part of the local population. The truly endangered species have specific programs in place to captive-raise individuals, release individuals to create new locations for the species and to raise public awareness. The average yearly mortality rate of any balanced population of any species is 50%. In smaller organisms the mortality comes from predation, and in larger organisms mortality i...

Do you know how many species of poisonous snakes live in the Chihuahuan Desert and on the Llano Estacado? One West Texas rancher speaking to his daughters said this of rattlesnakes: "Rattlesnakes are not evil. God put them here, to teach us. They teach us to respect the land. They never ever attack people just to hurt us - we are monsters to them, huge clumsy monsters. Rattlers rattle at us to tell us and cows - and buffalo back in the old days - that they want everything to go around them and not step on them. They only bite us when we are being careless, or when we are trying to kill them and do a bad job of it. We did not put the rattlesnake on this Earth, girls, and we do not have the...

Perhaps we could do without the Great Tailed Grackle! West Texas is blessed - according to birders who are intent on expanding their life lists as quickly as possible - a characteristic of most birders - or is cursed - according to those who know them better - by two of the three species of grackles which are found in Texas. One, the Common Grackle, has visited since 1961 when first reported by regional birders. The other, the Great Tailed Grackle is a relative newcomer. Both species began nesting in the area in the late 1970s. Both grackles have about the same colonial courtship, nesting and feeding behavior. Bother are very noisy, traveling in flocks that move restlessly from place to p...

In the early 1950s the late Frances Williams began writing essays for the Midland Naturalist newsletter, "The Phalarope." She edited the newsletter for 35 years, as well as becoming one of the founding members of the Texas Ornithological Society and of it's Bird Records Committee. From Marfa Public Radio, in cooperation with the Sibley Nature Center in Midland, Texas, this is Nature Notes. Hello, I'm Dallas Baxter. Frances Williams collated the Southern Great Plains report for the Audubon Society's publication "American Birds" for 25 years, and was the first to publish research on a classic West Texas bird, the Cassin's sparrow, in Arthur Bent's encyclopedic "Life Histories of America...

From the Northern reaches of the Llano Estacado in Eastern New Mexico to the Big Bend Borderlands of Texas, this is Nature Notes. A  Chihuahuan desert  arthropod that looks ferociously dangerous  is the big, black, whip scorpion, or vinegaroon. Normally they’re found in rocky country, only after significant rain events. From Marfa Public Radio, in cooperation with the Sibley Nature Center in Midland, Texas, this is Nature Notes. Hello, I’m Dallas Baxter. In most towns in West Texas tan wind scorpions, or solifugids, with pincers on their face and long front legs that run very fast are often mistakenly called vinegaroons.  Solifugids are great house guests, eliminating brown ...

From the Northern reaches of the Llano Estacado in Eastern New Mexico to the Big Bend Borderlands of Texas, this is Nature Notes. The explosion of life after a rain is amazing – winged forms of termites and ant swarm into the air with scissortails, nighthawks and kingbirds gorging themselves on the flight. From Marfa Public Radio, in cooperation with the Sibley Nature Center in Midland, Texas, this is Nature Notes. Hello, I’m Dallas Baxter. Dinothrombium pandorae , or" Rain bugs” or “Santa Claus bugs” also appear, tiny velvety red plush cutie-pies. Even though they are called “bugs”, they are not insects at all, but arachnids, related to spiders. They’re the large...

From the Northern reaches of the Llano Estacado in Eastern New Mexico to the Big Bend Borderlands of Texas, this is Nature Notes. Earthstars - the Latin name is Astraeus hygrometricus) are fungi, a close relation to puffballs. Most people have seen puffballs - irregularly shaped ball-like mushrooms that are just dry spore sacks that make a satisfying "pop" when stepped on. From Marfa Public Radio, in cooperation with the Sibley Nature Center in Midland, Texas, this is Nature Notes. Hello, I’m Dallas Baxter. Earthstars have an outside covering to their puffball that opens and reveals the puffball as it grows. The outer covering splits into a leathery star around the 50-cent sized w...