Essays
Moseying: Exploring the Natural World
Summer pasture walking
July 14, 2004
How many people like to go walking in a pasture? (A hot windy stickery pasture, a typical west Texas pasture?) How many people go walking in the same pasture at least once a week, year after year, just aimlessly wandering and observing? It is a great daytripping adventure! Not many people get a chance to, for almost all pastures are privately owned. There is a place you can do that, you know – right here at the Sibley Nature Center.
Walking is good exercise. Hundreds of folks walk in the mall, in the city parks with walking trails, or in their neighborhoods. There are racewalkers who wiggle along, or folks that meander and stop and chat with whomever they meet. Other folks, like me, like to look at plants and birds. We like to know the names and stories of the “neighbors,” the other living creatures that share our wondrous world. When you know the stories of our neighbors, what seems boring because of “sameness” becomes interesting. Change always occurs.
The fact that it is early July will bring new things to see. Black witches always visit west Texas in the first week of July, although some came early this year – I had one at home on June 15th, the earliest I have ever seen one. Butterfly expert JoAnn Merritt put out bananas on a platter, and one morning before sunup looked out to see eight black witches feeding on the bananas. Black witches need dark places to hide during the day, so homeowners often report them in garages, but if a person walks where there are trees, even a grove of native soapberries and hackberries in a local draw, black witches can be found
The moths breed in Mexico and Central America, and then head north to die. Some years they make it as far as Canada. Last year, during a hurricane on the Texas Coast, another biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife had seen hundreds, even thousands, descend from the sky as the eye of the hurricane passed. Black witches were just one of many things to be seen on a walk in the Sibley pasture.
Rain brings change, too. Rainbugs came out with rains. Dozens of people called the Sibley center about the little red “tarantula-looking dudes,” wanting to know what they were. Every group of kids that visited Sibley had to catch every rainbug they saw. Rainbugs are the world’s largest red spidermites, and eat termite alates – the breeding males and females that emerge after a rain. Most years we only see rainbugs in June and July, but in the driest of years we have seen them as early as late April and as late as mid September. They emerge once a year to feast on termites and to breed, then return to their 24 inch deep holes that go straight down to emerge again the following year. They did not eat all the termites, however.
Termite mud tubes appeared on the dead litter of the drought. Dead grass stems, mesquite twigs scattered on the ground, and even animal droppings became covered with a fine layer of mud. The termites come up at night and eat the material inside the mud covering, which is placed there so the termites do not dry out. Termites are important to the aridlands ecosystem, for they turn the litter into nutrients that improve the soil.
Two plants magically appeared with the rain. One is visible only for less than a week. The yellow rain lily sends up a shoot that breaks the soil the day after a rain. The next day it grows to its 3 inch height, and the next day it blooms. The third day after the rain, a seed pod begins to form, and by the fifth day the pod turns black. On the sixth day the stem turns black and the seedpod opens. On the seventh day all is shriveled and gone, the seeds carried away by wind and ants.
The other plant, Talinum, may have already had tiny narrow leaves along a wire-like stem, but after a rain, bright yellow stars appear. Some plants will have 30 blossoms by the second day after a rain, and it will quit blooming within a week, to shrivel up to its previous appearance to wait for the next rain. Other plants respond to the rain as well. Corypantha cactus is the only cactus that I know of (locally) that will bloom after every rain during the growing season. Six inches tall, it is most often single-stemmed (but old clumps can have a dozen stems.) Its stem is comprised of fleshy tubercules arranged in rows and tipped with spines. The blooms are bright shocking pink and multi-stemmed clumps will have up to a dozen blooms. Each bloom will reopen for three or four days.
Wolfberry, like the ocotillo which lives in more desert-like conditions, puts on a new set of leaves after every rain of more than two inches. Some years it will put out leaves 4 times a year, and if three inches of rain falls, it will bloom and produce bright red berries as many times in a year. Its blooms, tiny white tubes, are sweet smelling, and bring every nectaring insect within smelling distance to go totally bonkers, getting soused on its nectar.
Other plants bloom with the rain. Many people grow texas sage, which blooms after a rain from June to frost. Regionally, bee brush, a kin to lemon verbena, becomes covered with spires of tiny white blossoms that sweetly perfume the air for a hundred feet downwind. It is a gangly shrub that in the home landscape needs to be pruned and shaped several times a year, but because of its incredible sweet blooms should become a more commonly used shrub. It is a smell of west Texas that all Llaneros should know and love.
Another plant is the smell of rain. Creosote bush, or greasewood, like beebrush, does not grow at Sibley, but I have smelled it at Sibley. When a thunderstorm is growing to tremendous size south of Odessa and its outflow winds come rushing to Midland, the cool winds carry its smell all the way to town. Sizable populations of creosote grow southwest of the old Pegasus oil camp, 20 miles south of the airport. It has a medicinal smell, like that of mentholatum or eucalyptus, and not an unpleasant smell at all.
The smell comes from the resin in the leaves, not its tiny yellow blossoms. After a rain it does bloom, and then sets hundreds of tiny white fuzzy seedpods. Further west, citizens of the arid southwest have declared it “Desert Boxwood” and plant it in their yards, hedging it back to create a short formal English hedge. I have planted it at Gone Native, and have discovered that in our rainier years that it can actually be killed with too much moisture. I now plant it on berms mulched with rock, where I never ever water it.
Yes, there is plenty to be seen if you walk at least once a week in a scruffy, scrubby ol’ west Texas pasture. It can look like it has been scorched by a blowtorch, or it can reveal amazing stories of survival, or it can indulge the senses beyond compare. Just get out and walk, by Gar!