Essays

Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities

Porcupine chasing at Moss Creek Lake
January 26, 2005

Have you ever slithered? Have you ever crawled on your belly, inching along the ground seeing the world from a rabbit's eye? Amateur naturalists do strange things, I guess, because people ask, “How can you stand getting dirty? Don’t you worry about ants and snakes and centipedes and scorpions and ticks and fleas? It sounds so gross!” It is not an activity for where fire ants reside, for sure! But out here, west of the hundredth meridian where aridity rules, fire ants can not live except where the soil is moist.

I was introduced to slithering by circumstance. I love to grow plants native to the dry country, so I collect seeds. Kneeling or bending over enables a person to collect most seeds, but for some species the effort to find the seeds requires a supine position. Several groundcover plants that I admire reproduce mostly by stolons or rhizomes. Phlox pilosus, a wonderful ground cover from the hill country, is that way. I have never had success propagating it by taking cuttings – only by division, and that seems to work only in the early spring for me. It blooms profusely in April, becoming a pink carpet for three weeks. The rest of the year it is evergreen, though in summer it should be cut back almost to the ground.

Over the years I slowly increased the numbers of the phlox in my garden by division, but wanting to increase its numbers exponentially and failing with cuttings, I crawled around looking for seeds nestled among the leaves. I found very few and was greatly disappointed. Despite that failure, I found the experience of wallowing on the ground fun! “Thar’s a whole world down thar, by gar!” The discovery of spider egg clumps, lacewing egg stalks, ants sipping leaf nectary glands, and a zillion other busy miniature creatures amazed me. When I first related my experiences to a group of kids and clowning around, I used the boisterous diction of the early mountain men relating tall tales.

I have slithered in some disparate places – sand dunes, oak motte leaf litter, rocky desert arroyos, pine forest duff, playa bottom buffalo grass, maple groves in the Guadalupe Mountains, and rhyolite gravel hillsides in the Davis Mountains. When I am in the field, I often wear tough camo pants, a long sleeved denim shirt, and boots; clothes that can withstand considerable wear and tear and that gain “character” as they age.

Animals and birds seem to ignore a human slithering on the ground. Some actually seem to come to investigate the strangeness, and then after seeing that the person’s attention is on the ground, tend to ignore the slitherer. I have come face to face with armadillos in the hill country, and surprised several other species of creatures – foxes, bobcats, and once, a mother porcupine and her baby.

Moss Creek Lake is just east of Big Spring, and south of Coahoma and Sand Springs. In the draws on the south side of the lake are groves of trees – chittamwood, hackberry, and closer to the water, willows and buttonbush. Moss Creek forms the watershed on the north side of Signal Peak, a famous landmark on the Dora Roberts Ranch. On a visit some years ago I arrived before the gates of the county park were open, but as soon as I was allowed in, I went to a favorite draw where on previous trips I had wonderful success in finding plenty of bird life and a decent variety of plant life to investigate.

I spent an hour clambering up and down, ambling about, seeing what I could see. As amateur naturalists are wont to do, I kept lists of my sightings. I sat on a fallen hackberry log to rest. I pulled a water bottle from my knapsack and guzzled half of it. I reviewed my list and added comments of behavior or ecological connections to a smattering of the sightings. In the quietude of my inactivity a cardinal perched nearby, singing “Syrrrrr-up…Syrrrr-up.” A mockingbird sat on the top of a chittamwood, jamming a jazz version of a dozen species of birds’ songs augmented by giddy flapping leaps into the air, flashing the white of his wing patches.

Satisfied with my notes, but not ready to walk more, I slid on down to the ground. Tubetongue and rouge plants, both fun ground covers in the home landscape, formed little separate patches on the ground, in between splotches of sideoats grama grass still with last years’ seedstalks waving in the breeze like the feathers on a Indian warrior’s spear. I charted a course that would go from the small sunny meadow to a grove of a chittamwood. By the time I had slithered the twenty feet of sunny landscape I was sweaty, so when I reached the first shade and found a rock ledge to drape myself over, I relaxed on my back. I studied the trees, looking for bird nests, mistletoe, lichen and other curiosities of forests. A ladder-backed woodpecker poked her head out of a hole in the biggest tree, probably wondering when the male would bring her a snack. After peeking up and down and around, she withdrew out of sight. I scribbled some notes about the creatures in the side-oats grama and a description of the caterpillar chewing on the tubetongue.

Looking up, I saw a porcupine clinging to one of the chittamwoods a dozen feet up above the ground, doing nothing but peering myopically in my direction. I did not watch it long. It did not move. When I was cooled down, I slithered on. I had not gone far when I disturbed a small skink. “A variable skink!” I was excited, for Odessa school kids found the first officially recorded sighting of the species on the southern Llano Estacado on a Sibley Nature Center sponsored field trip to Comanche Trails Park in Monahans Draw along I-20 on the south side of Odessa. After a Midland gardener brought another one to the Sibley Nature Center, I found a third at Barnett Spring on the Dora Roberts ranch on a guided tour. The Odessa specimen (captured and kept in a cage) ended up dying, and I sent it to Sul Ross University for their collections. New editions of books about Texas reptiles will have a dot on the range map because of the curiosity of school children.

I decided to watch the skink forage. It poked about with slow careful movements, lifting dead leaves with its head and staring at the soil underneath. One leaf must have had something tasty attached to it, for it spent five minutes headbutting and pushing the leaf about. I could see it move its “lips” as it smacked, but was too far away to see its prey. It moved on, to another fallen log, and disappeared underneath. I slithered up and peered under. I decided to roll the log over to investigate its home. As I brought my knees under me and raised up, I placed my hand on the top of the log.

I jerked my hand back, for a sudden tooth clacking noise started just below my hand. A shiver of fear straightened my spine. Very slowly, I leaned over. A small baby porcupine stared back at me. Scratching noises from the trees above me warned me the mother was moving. How would she “defend” her baby? She came to the ground and headed our way. I did not move. It started making a noise that can only be described as a finger plinking the tines of a plastic comb. The baby immediately stopped its tooth clacking, ducked down and made its way along the back of the log. The two met no more than fifteen feet away. The mother raised up, perched on its hind legs, propped up by her tail. The baby began nursing, nuzzling the quill-free belly of its mother. How wonderful! The image of that mother and child will still come to me when I close my eyes.