Essays

Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities

Investigating the fish of West Texas
June 19, 2002

Have you ever been to Pandale, Baker’s Crossing, Horsehead Crossing, Live Oak Creek, or Independence Creek? What about Beale’s Creek (under the I-20 overpass), Lake Colorado City, Monahan’s Draw, Soda Lake, and Lake Quitaque? Or Limpia Creek, the Ft. McKavett crossing of the San Saba, Lake Balmorhea, or the Water Valley County Park? In 1990-1991, my friend, Hugh Franks, became fascinated with the idea of inventorying all of the different types of fish that can be found in West Texas.

Hugh is known to several of his friends as “Baron von Franks” because he reminds us of the European royalty of the mid-1800s that often visited the wild, Wild West. The Museum of the Southwest recently had a display of Karl von Bodmer drawings done on a similar, but more scientific, visit from the era. Such high muckety-mucks would arrive on the scene with a retinue of twenty-five servants, ten wagons full of caviar and other such delicacies, fine table linens, and a silver tea service. Many amused themselves by killing everything they saw – “Jolly good fun, what?”

Hugh has lots of toys, too, and he brings them along on every camping trip. He has enough camping gear to fill a pick-up truck and an eight-foot trailer, and every bit of it has to be used every day. Stowed in the gear are usually several guns and half a dozen knives. “Use the microscope for this. Take a GPS reading. Photograph that. We will use the three-burner stove tonight, but set up the one-burner stove for coffee in the morning.” He always plays the quartermaster and camp cook, and everybody else is along for the ride, with assigned tasks and duties.

During his fish-craze, Hugh purchased two seines, several dip nets, a throw net, and a battery-run aerator, and converted one of his ice chests into a fish transport chamber. He also acquired a 55-gallon aquarium in order to observe each species he caught once he got them back home. Several fish identification books were added to his traveling library of field guides. Weird canned fish, preserved in horrible sauces, were added to the big wooden chuck box that Hugh created from the design of one my father built fifty years ago. And he actually expected his “assistants” to eat such “fish boogers”, as they were dubbed by his brother, Andrew. Come to think of it, it was Andrew who started the fish-craze, since he was working for NASA at the time and seining places on the Gulf Coast.

Hugh’s passion was not just a warm-weather endeavor. I still hurt from a trip to Baker’s Crossing we took in February back then. We dragged the seine for fifty feet, and then knelt in the cold, shallow water, sorting through five hundred wriggling slivers of silver, looking for one or two that were different from the rest. Hugh kept asking me to do “one more” sweep with the seine until I was so numb I could not close my hands. No wonder I have arthritis nowadays! A norther blew in that night, with fifty mile-an-hour winds that blew all the gear “to Hades and gone.” The one-burner stove did not stay lit for coffee that morning, either.

Over the two-year period, we found Tilapia, Mexican Tetra, Plains Killifish, Red Shiner, Longnose Gar, Sheepshead Minnow, Long-eared Sunfish, Bluegill, Black Mudcat, Rio Grande Cichlid, and many more species, including one I found on a stop at the Ft. McKavett crossing of the San Saba on the way back from the Rio Frio. When I got the San Saba fish to Hugh’s house, the behavior of the little creatures worried us. The little two-inch fishes rested on the bottom of the aquarium, propped up by their pectoral fins. Their heads moved independently from their bodies, like a lizard’s. Their tails sometimes curved so far they looked like the letter “c.” Their coloration was striking, with blue throats, orange arcs on their front dorsal fins, orange dots on their sides, and blue tinged anal fins. They rarely swam, but when they did they would sink as soon as they stopped. This indicated that they had no swim bladder, the organ that keeps fish suspended in water.

The Audubon fish book indicated they were darters. A survey of the ranges given in the books stressed that we should find only Orange-Throated Darters in the San Saba. Ours had blue throats. According to the books, a blue-throated species lived in the Red, Sabine, and Arkansas drainages. After a week of debate, I called Jim Davis, a freshwater fish expert at Texas A&M. After hearing my description, his reply was surprising. “As far as I know, nobody has ever looked closely at the fish at Ft. McKavett. Your description indicates the Speckled Darter. Fish field guides are woefully incomplete, and with good reason. Bird books are good because there are tens of thousands of birdwatchers in the state. But maybe only fifty folks -- at best -- are doing what you guys are doing.”