Essays
Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities
When it rains the Llano Estacado explodes with life
August, 23, 2006
Honor the rain! Take the time to walk and see how it transforms the landscape. Rain is the ultimate blessing for an arid land. Rain creates growth – just look around you! Plants have bright new leaves, and a flush of blossoms quickly follow. In the years with late summer rains the Llano Estacado has a second spring. The grasses of the pasture send up delicate flowering panicles of intricate design. Sunflowers, sawtooth daisies, chocolate daisy, buena mujer, sand buckwheat, sand heliotrope and other wildflowers sparkle against the lush greens of the grasses. Oh, yes, take a walk and witness the rebirth of the landscape – it is an enriching spiritual experience. You, too, will feel rejuvenated! We all know the feeling of gratification of thirst, but rain brings a thirst-gratification to our souls!
Sibley Nature Center volunteer and Lee High School student Rebecca Arenivas was assigned a “photo walk” as part of her fulfillment of volunteer work hours required by the Texas Scholars program. On the morning of her walk the skies were splattered with dying thunderstorms. The soil was still damp from showers the night before, and the air was saturated with the soft cloying blanket of humidity. It was her second walk – she had done one before the rain.
Rebecca noticed that the bare dirt was green. How incredible! (Check out her photos on the August Virtual Trail, and then go back to the "Wild on the Prairie" essay entitled Cryptogamic soil, and learn why the ground was green after the beginning of the fifth paragraph.) She also discovered that the base of one of the trees at the pond at Sibley was completely clothed in green, like trees in a rain forest.
Sibley volunteer and Trinity School student Kelly Tipton was also received a photographic assignment for fulfilling hours needed to meet Girl Scout Gold Award volunteer hour requirements. She visited a ranch managed by family friends and found a Great Plains Skink. Skinks are fossorial – living underground most of the time, but after rain showers they become much more active on the surface. They are huge lizards, up to a foot long. (Check out the skink on another photoessay entitled “You never know what you will see on a daytrip.” A half-dozen photographers contributed to this photoessay.)
Sibley staff member Richard Galle also has some photos on the last mentioned photoessays. He visited one of the thousands of Llano Estacado playas and found Black-necked Stilts and a Canada Goose. Next spring, the Sibley Nature Center programming will focus on playas. Later this fall the Sibley staff will be preparing the educational material on the playa habitat, so we hope that more digital photographers will join us, and concentrate on photographing playas. If anyone is interested, we can arrange for permission for access to several playas.
We have received a number of reports about the toads that emerged with the rain. We would love to have a series of pictures of the toads – mating in the playas, the egg strings in the playas, the swarms of tiny tadpoles, and the hordes of toadlets hopping away from the playas. Midland Naturalist member Sybil Eberhart reported finding a rare Green Toad on a 1 a.m. nightdrive near the salt playa on the road to Midkiff. We would also love to have photos of fairy and toad shrimp, and of Indian Potato and other wildflowers than only bloom in playas filled with water. Has anyone noticed the unusual all-green form of the Couch’s Spadefoot Toad this year? Read this "Wild on the Prairie" essay about the toads.
Two people have called us about another phenomenon related to the rain. Lonnie Gaston has killed five baby rattlesnakes in his yard near Greenwood. Sybil Eberhart found a female and at least eight newly birthed young under a building on her rural Valley View property. As an adaptive instinctual behavior, rattlesnakes give birth during the late summer monsoon period, when baby mice are plentiful in the wetter years. Many species of mammals, insects, and reptiles mate or give birth at the most opportune time for the young to survive, and in the arid lands such as the Llano Estacado, that is often during the rainy seasons.
Rain creates its own ecosystem, the “temporary pluvial ecosystem.” The explosion of life during the temporary pluvial ecosystem is absolutely phenomenal. Rain stimulates termite and ant orgies, stimulates tarantula mating. To learn the breadth of activity that rain stimulates, again, please utilize our website by reading the "Wild on the Prairie" essay entitled “Temporary Pluvial Ecosytem.” In the text of that essay will be mention of rainbugs, and there is both an essay ("Exploring the Natural World" category) and photoessay (" Prairie to Mesquite Brushland" habitat) on rainbugs on the website, as well.
The staff and the board of directors of the Sibley Nature Center love our home, the Llano Estacado! We hope you find our website an enjoyable introduction to West Texas. Please recommend it to out of town family and friends. If you believe our work is a valuable asset to the regional West Texas community, please consider becoming a member, and please encourage your child’s teacher to become an educational partner to the Center. We would like to offer our utmost appreciation to the local foundations, corporations, and members that have contributed financially in 2005 and 2006. All of you are making a dream come true – my eyes are filled with tears of gratitude. Fellow Llaneros, you are wonderful!