Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

The ecology of oilwell pads
August 25, 2004

Surveyors, doodlebuggers, roustabouts, toolpushers, pumpers, and roughnecks go into the Llano Estacado countryside everyday. At the end of the shift, mudspattered or dust-enshrouded trucks pause for locked gates to be opened, then rumble down the farm-to-market roads headed for town. Oil-field traffic is part of the landscape. Frac-trucks, workover rigs, jugtrucks, duallie crewcabs, pipetrucks, and watertrucks kick up the dust of the caliche roads.

Gas plants, pipelines, pumping stations, tank batteries, pumpjacks, and electrical lines accompany the grid of roads in an oil field. From the air, the geometric regimentation of regulated well spacing makes the countryside look tamed, as tame as the patchwork quilt of a farmed landscape. Here and there, drilling rigs are running, filling in empty spaces within a field or reworking old fields with new technology. Nowadays most drilling sites have a gateman at the pavement, to limit access to only those that belong.

When much younger, I was a lab assistant to my paleontologist father, cleaning microscope slides, preparing thin sections, cleaning samples, and coloring stratigraphy charts. I never got an allowance – the only money I had to spend as a kid was what I earned by helping. When traveling, we carried the WTGS Fieldtrip Guidebooks that discussed the region’s surface geography. The copy of the WTGS Lexicon that my father helped produce sat on his at-home lab table. Harold, my father, worked hot-shot wells the last ten years of his career – jobs in which the oil company in charge enforced rules demanding the utmost secrecy. In the last decade of his life, when we were driving down a road in west Texas we would stop at historical markers commemorating the discovery of oil fields in the 1940’s, he would say – “I did the paleo on that.”

Earlier this summer I “had cause” to be on a ranch with dozens of pumpjacks. In passing, I took a look at the ecology of wellpads (the flat expanse of caliche around a pumpjack.) The slush pits at an active drilling rig did kill some birds, without a doubt, back before the passage of a law requiring netting over the pits, but negative ecological reactions to human constructions are often balanced by positive ecological reactions.

At “nigh on to” every pad, there is a nesting common nighthawk, and from previous observation, I knew that further west and south, lesser nighthawks did so as well. Old-timers call them bullbats, for their habit of diving during their mating display and making the wind “pop” their feathers with a roaring and whirring sound. By nesting within a foot of the road’s entrance to a well pad, they use routine human behavior to protect nest sites from predators. (Mockingbirds and other birds will often nest right above the most-used door of a house.) They do not make much of a nest, just wallowing out with their breast enough space for two speckled eggs.

In the shallower soil sites, and well sites in the mesas at the edge of the Llano, every well site has a clan of “mountain boomers.” Sometimes local pet stores sell them. Collared lizards are big, green and blue, with a “dragon head,” as Deborah once said when confronted with one in the bathroom sink at home. We had caught it in a caliche pit while loading rocks for a garden project on a cold day. The cold had made it torpid, unable to move. When cold, collared lizards turn dark, losing much of their color. We stuck it in a bucket, but when it warmed up in the house, it was able to leap up and out, unnoticed. When she discovered it in the sink it reared back and opened its mouth wide, huffing and puffing.

The big colorful male mountain boomers pick out the largest rock outlining a well site and use it as their “lord of their territory” lookout posts. When approached they leap down, and take off running so fast that they run on their hind legs. They “really whoop it up,” sprinting away at 25 miles an hour. When handled, the lizards tame down and enjoy riding on its host’s shoulders or head. A friend of mine “used-to” amuse dinner guests by appearing at the table with one dangling from his earlobe, its sandpaper teeth gripping his flesh like a pair of pliers.

In the 1980’s amateur naturalists helped Dr. Keith Arnold of Texas A&M do the most intensive “breeding bird survey” of Texas to that date. The Midland Naturalists spread out all over west Texas, and over a 5 year period filled out hundreds of detailed forms. One year I went with my ornithologist mother over to Tommy and Howard Morrison’s ranch near Westbrook (Tommy had played pony league baseball for my father). We found a kestrel nest in an active pumpjack.

The nest was on a ledge of the rising and falling beam of the pumpjack – and as I remember, it was a “custom pumpjack” with features not normally found on “standard issue” pumpjacks. The bird on the nest allowed us to approach it within 15 feet as we milled around it, flabbergasted by its choice of home site. Kestrels are the little hawks usually seen in the winter, perching on electric lines and hovering over darting mice in agricultural fields. Summer nesting records for kestrels in this region of west Texas are not plentiful – possibly a reflection of climate preferences – for it needs plenty of rain for a plentiful supply of grasshoppers and mice. In some years it is “just too dang dry” so local populations never become permanently established.

Almost every well site has nesting killdeer, too. “Killdee” are those fun little birds that run across schoolyard and park grass expanses. Their nest is like the bullbats – just a few rocks rearranged, and the babies are as speckled as the eggs. It is impossible to see either – and the precocial (run as soon as they are born) baby killdee will not move until a foot is on the downward movement of a step right above its head. At Sibley I have had kids sit 40 feet from a nesting killdeer and try to see the bird on its nest – and they usually do not see it until it moves.

Oilfield traffic, during wet times, pick up plant seeds in the mud, and as it dries, the seeds fall from the trucks. As a result, plants get spread around, and sometimes the plant being spread is a pest. African Rue, a plant that arrived from North Africa after World War II on the wheels of bombers that were stored at Pyote, seems to like the tight caliche “soil” of wellpads. It is bad news for livestock. I have had ranchers buy me a steak dinner for noticing a colony of the plants on their ranch and then pointing it out. Other plants like that “soil” as well, and over in Mitchell County a species of “threatened” buckwheat seems to prefer old wellpads.

The amazing and wonderful “God-given” gift of “adaptation” to all of “nature’s critters” allows plants and animals to adjust to disruptions within their local ecosystem. Given enough time, they will reclaim any human construction.