Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

Dugout Wells at Big Bend National Park
March 26, 2003

I arrived at Dugout Wells at daybreak, as the first pink light caught the tips of the cottonwoods above the tiny trickle of water that courses through the grove. A crissal thrasher greeted the sun by working his way up one of the trees until he reached the sunlight. I sat in the truck, watching other birds slowly move to the sunlight, and the sunlight slowly sweep down until I could see the orb of the sun.

To the east of the eastern parking area I followed an old ranch road that dated pre-World War II, when the last human resident of the site left, after the federal government took over the land. I had not gone far when I stopped to inspect a set of pocket mouse diggings. Charcoal, glass, china, a china teacup handle, and other human artifacts had been brought to the soil surface by their burrowing. The area must have been the ranch dump – and I wondered why archaeologists had not processed the site.

A four-inch strand of hair at the base of a creosote bush caught my eye. I knelt to examine it, and noticed a dozen coyote scats on the other side of the bush. A dozen gnats hovered at my head’s height over the marking post of the coyotes. All of the scats were recent, and two were still wet and glistening. Most had mesquite beans, one had hair, and one wet one appeared to be a grass-filled wad -- dark green, the color of the chara algae in the water. The other wet scat was full of large pulpy and colorless pieces of plant material. The shape and form appeared similar to horse crippler cactus fruits, but horse crippler fruits in May and June, and this was January 1st.

Mockingbirds, cardinals, white-crowned sparrows, and a verdin all fussed as I worked my way down to the alkali sacaton grass that filled the draw below the grove. In a six-inch deep pool of water I found the chara that the coyote had eaten – coyotes must eat fibrous plants for colon cleansing. I knelt to examine the water for aquatic insects, but none appeared.

I meandered on my way back up towards the grove of trees, following the water where it ran over open gravelly soil. Deer, javelina, and skunk tracks were obvious. Bright red two inch long scat chains glistened in the track of the skunk. Despite prodding the scat, I could not decide its constituents. The only red plant material I had found had been the fruit of Christmas cholla, but I could not find any of the tiny glochids (cactus spines) that should have been present.

As I knelt, a dozen birds swooped in, one after another, a minute apart, to drink where the water ran across the open ground. They first landed in the bushes, then dropped to the ground, and in two or three running jumps quickly approached the water. Four were mockingbirds, but the rest were sage thrashers. A black dalea bush bloomed on a south-facing arroyo wall – winter rarely totally diminishes the plant life at Dugout Wells.

Several mesquite, lote, and allthorn were dead. The alkali sacaton dammed up the flow of the water, sending it towards the roots of the desert plants. Baccharis, brickellia, sedges, and young cottonwoods had begun growing in the damp soil. An animal path through the thicket of new riparian plants interested me, so I followed it. It went through the jungle-like growth. I crawled along it, past a screwbean mesquite, a honey mesquite with leaves still present, guayacan, Javelina bush. I examined a branch of the mesquite, worn smooth by the passing animals that made the trail. In the cool, still, humid air I could smell a faint odor of javelina musk.

As I emerged from the javelina trail, an old dry scat, full of strong fibers, and much larger than javelina droppings, caught my eye. I touched it, and it crumbled. The only animal that could produce such a large scat was bear. Bears travel from the sky island (mountain range in a desert) across the river southeast of me, to the sky island just west of me.

I finally began to walk on the trail built for tourists at Dugout Wells. The trail was covered with a varied colored carpet of dead leaves from the surrounding vegetation – gray Texas sage leaves, golden cottonwood leaves, brown hackberry leaves, skinny amber willow leaves, and tiny littleleaf sumac leaves still green. A number of cottonwood leaves still had not sifted to the ground through the tangled branches of the understory thicket. A soft breeze dislodged one, then another, and then another, and soft crinkly noises kept me turning around, expecting animal or bird movement. A hermit thrush was to blame for some of the sounds, as he danced on the carpet of dead leaves, kicking them about, looking for insects utilizing the leaves as shelter from the chill of winter night.

The thicket opened up, under a giant cottonwood. Three generations of trunks, bigger than a person, originated from one central location. The oldest was merely a decaying log, moldering with the slow decay of fungus, soft punky pieces of wood in a “talus” slope against the remains of the log. The second-generation log had grown parallel to the ground, two feet above the leaf litter, arching over to touch the ground, and then reaching for light while the first generation had still lived. It was now dead. Several trunks of the present generation soared upwards at a sixty degree angle, until they surpassed the range of the second generation’s living canopy, then soared straight upwards. The cottonwood roots, half-buried like mole tunnels, created paths to the water of this year, this decade.

Around a bend of the trail past the cottonwoods, I found the source of the strange fruit present in the coyote scat I had found much earlier. A fifteen-foot tall Date Palm, its trunk slanting at a forty-five degree angle had heavily laden fruit panicles. The coyote had carefully inched his way up the trunk, to delicately pluck the ripest of the fruit. At its base were several peelings of the fruit – a more delicate diner had also spent time gathering the bounty of the past planted by the original settler of the site. Was this the scat of cacomixtles (ringtails) or raccoons? Maybe the strange red scat earlier was from the same creature.