Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

Every day brings a surprise at the Sibley Nature Center
January 30, 2011

"You put about 50 mashed trompillo berries in a washtub full of hot water, and stir it around, and then add your whites, the berries serve as a great bleach,"  a lady told us.  The elderly woman had come with her grandson's cub scout group.  We always invite parents to join us for any of our children's programming.

The cub scouts had come to earn their naturalist badge. For the poisonous plants and reptiles section, I had discussed our native rattlesnake species,  and then mentioned "trompillo."  If you eat its green berry it will severely irritate your stomach lining. In one of those wondrous human adaptations which makes people wonder how it was discovered, the berry is also a rennet, and has been used for centuries to make asadero cheese. We love to learn new things from  members of our audience.   The new information will be added to our "Ethnobotany of the Llano Estacado" presentations.

Marina Zurkow, a New York University professor and artist, spent over a week in West Texas, and visited the Sibley Nature Center. She is working on a project about the Llano Estacado. She has worked on projects all over the world (Abu Dhabi, Scotland, Korea, and Japan among others).  In her preliminary research, she discovered the Sibley Nature Center website, so on her first exploratory visit to the region, she stopped by to ask questions.  She later wrote in her blog,  "Renatured," the following:

The Sibley Nature Center, dedicated to all things Llano Estacado, is training an army of local citizen naturalists, and is exemplary in the deep study of a very site-specific ecosystem, and by extension, a model at understanding networks, and the networks of networks that make up the world we are enmeshed in. The Center is a dream, full of books, exhibits, and loads of taxidermy, it’s at once polished and handmade, exceptions are the rule. Its idiosyncrasies make it magical. I think Burr’s collection of Day of the Dead sculptures is as telling as the beehive installed behind glass embedded  in the wall, or the fecund library. Sibley’s teaching program about the Llano is years-long, and includes cultures, history, and interferences as well as things we think of as natural or native.

Sometime during the night of January 15th, someone built a small fire among the seats at the interpretative shelter near the pond. I had left the building at 9p.m, and had smelled smoke, but despite a quick patrol had found nothing.  As they left, they must have flicked a cigarette into the darkness, where it landed on a large packrat nest under a mesquite that was surrounded by dry tumbleweeds. The cigarette caused the packrat nest to smolder, and by noon on Sunday had burned the three foot tall rat nest, but had never erupted into flame.

Golfers on the Hogan Golf Course and folks walking along the trail noticed the tiny wisp of smoke and called the Fire Department. One of the golfers knew one the members of the Sibley Nature Center, called them, who called me. I arrived just before the fire truck.  One of the walkers and I unhooked a section of fence so the big rig could get close. The firemen drenched the six foot wide circle of ash and coals, sending up a spewing plume of steam.  "You were lucky," one of them told me, "there has not been any wind at all."

I asked them if they wanted a controlled burn training opportunity, for fire is a natural part of the ecological cycle in our landscape.  "You'd have to ask the chief, but I do not think he would approve it."  Our staff and the our board of director's  "Facilities Committee" had discussed the idea earlier in the week.

During the long drought from 1992 to 2004, every blade of grass between the mesquites died. On about 10 acres of the Sibley grounds tumbleweeds have grown each year after the rains returned.  The mesquites are too close together to allow the tumbleweeds to roll away, so the landscape is "stuck." Only new tumbleweeds can grow up through old tumbleweed plants. Our other option is to brushhog the area  and then plant grass seeds and spray herbicide on any germinating tumbleweeds. 

Tumbleweeds are not native plants. The earliest record in Texas is 1892, 18 years after the first were accidently introduced in flaxseed  in the northern Great Plains by immigrant farmers from the Ukraine.  Many species of native Llano Estacado plants are "fire-adapted," as are tumbleweeds. Tumbleweeds are so full of resins that they almost explode when they burn, as the flames roar, shooting flames ten feet high.

It is great fun working at Sibley. Every day is a surprise!