Essays

Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities

Night driving for wildlife
September 18, 2002

It’s four in the morning and I’m nightdriving, toddling down a quiet county road at fifteen miles an hour. Sometimes I wake up early and can not go back to sleep, so nightdriving makes the day start out new and fresh. The windows are rolled down so I can have an insect net hanging out. If I see any critter of any sort, I stop, and if it is little, I catch it to identify it. If it is bigger, I just watch. I watch for “mythical” animals, too – jagaurundi, black panthers, wolves, and other creatures that folks have told me they have seen while out at such an early hour (but no specimens exist for the area.)

It takes experience to tell the sticks from snakes and rocks from toads and glints of glass from glints of spider eyes. Little flecks of light glittering on the road are wolf spider eyes. Sometimes, especially after a fall rain, dozens upon dozens of wolf spiders speckle the road in just a mile or two. Do they come to feast on bugs killed or injured by passing cars, or are they on the road just because it is an open expanse permitting a wide range of vision? Or do wolf spiders form mating leks in open areas? Someday I might observe enough to form an opinion.

I like the little pocket mice. As small as the tip of a person’s thumb from knuckle to nail, pocket mice often are fearless, scampering over motionless shoe tops, stopping and gathering seeds as quickly as the needle on a sewing machine until their cheek pockets are stuffed. When a person kneels and puts their hand flat on the ground, the tiny mice tippy-toe right up, unconcernedly sniffing between the fingers and giving a tug to a ring or watch. Kangaroo rats are fun, too, especially if an old bag of nuts are in the vehicle. Little rodents ignore the bright headlights, so if you are lucky, two kangaroo rats will come to gather what must seem to them to be manna. If you see either little rodent already on the road they are easy to interact with, and well worth the few minutes to slowly ease close.

Night-driving is good for seeing owls and poorwills, too. Poorwills often sit on the road picking up injured moths and owlflies. I often stop to listen for the poorwills calling their name. I love these nightflying birds for their delicate wingbeats. They flit and dance in the air. Even owls do, somehow. It seems as if they are lighter than air -- with so many more barbels per feather than other birds they do not have to work at flying. I stop at the draws and listen for the Great Horned Owls calling and answering each other, and sometimes I am lucky and hear the maniacal laughter of Barn Owls.

Toads are a blast. After a good hard rain, thousands hop to the nearest playa. Early in the morning, they have all reached their destination to join their voices in one of the most grand of choruses. A person can hear it for what seems to be miles, the rising and falling sound of the cadence floating on the cool quiet air – you know how sound travels great distances across a lake, right?

Toad song from far away makes a person conscious of the wide-open spaces of the Llano Estacado. I often feel a warm melancholy when listening to the toads, feeling amazed at the valiant journeys the survivors have made on a beeline through cactus and mesquite, past all the waiting hognosed snakes. Sometimes the hognosed snakes themselves are sprawled on the warm road, beginning to digest a meal of enough toads to keep them alive for a month .

Snake fanciers go night-driving a lot. Further south, down towards Comstock, some of the county roads (and even U.S. highways) have a dozen or more cars parked along the edge, with Gray-banded Kingsnake aficionados poking along road cuts with flashlights in hand. Gray-bands sell for three hundred dollars or more, for snake lovers around the world consider it one of the prettiest. So many snake lovers have prowled the roads the laws have recently been changed to prevent accidents. Night-drivers slow-poking along now get arrested for being hazardous to traffic

Here on the Llano I still do it, for headlights can be seen for miles, and I only pick little used county roads traveled mostly by oil-field and ranch traffic. If I do see lights coming, I pull off the road and put the blinkers on, since I am not in a hurry and everybody else is. Then, however, more often than not, the traveler often stops and asks if I need help, but that is part of why I like living in West Texas – people do care, and have not become too wary. I am sure that often the good Samaritan does have a pistol in his lap, just to be on the safe side. After the howdies and thank yous, we both continue on.

On one out of every half-dozen night-drives I will see a fox, coyote, badger, raccoon, opossum, or a bobcat. Skunks and porcupines are more common. Most are the striped skunks, but we do have the twice-as-big hog-nosed skunks with a big white backstripe and white on their tail. Not too far to the south spotted skunks can be found.

Porcupines have become almost as common as skunks in the last thirty years. Porcupines and skunks are fun to follow. Both could care less about a human that is not too close. I must admit to walking along with a skunk, carrying on a one-sided conversation, chatting about the wonderful cool morning, discussing whatever the creature has found to eat, and amusing myself figuring out what distance is too close for that particular individual. When the skunk stops and stamps its foot, I apologize and back off. Porcupines will rattle their quills with a little shiver when approached within ten feet or less, but I have had them stop and stand on their hindlegs and peer myopically at me.

No matter what I see, when morning comes around I am recharged, excited about my finds. I find a certain sense of comfort, knowing that no matter what, that the creatures of the night are always out there, doing their job.