Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Habitats

Exploring the Draw Habitat
December 10, 2000

Recently I have been trying to create an "interpretative character" for portraying to young school children the historical changes of Llano Estacado ecology. I "become" Lum (Medlin), the barefoot buffalo hunter and get to act real silly!

"Lum" gets carried away and rattles on, and the other day "he" got to talking about "draws." The 50 fourth graders in the Sibley Nature Center's auditorium had never heard the word "draw."

Every west Texan should know the word, but these kids only knew of "the ditch." Midland has a network of ditches to drain rainfall from the streets, because, as everybody knows, this country is flat. Why should anyone know anything about the DRAWS?

The word is classicly Texan. Think of the way we drawl our words, and remember what gunfighters said to each other. I suppose it is a "guy thing", but the word speaks of hard-working men in dust and heat.

"I am headed down to the draw to sit in the shade," the doodlebugging jugman growls at lunch time.

"I bet that momma and her calf are in the draw in the doghair chittamwood," says the rancher on round-up.

There are forests on the Llano Estacado. Hidden forests, magical forests, private forests. Here and there a grove of trees line a draw, a hundred yards wide and one fourth a mile long.

I have just walked much of the lower end of Midland Draw, most of the distance of Mustang Draw east of the road south of Stanton, and a good hunk of the fork of Beal's Creek along Interstate 20 and the railroad. Unexpected sights can happen. Wonderful, glorious sights that fill a human's soul with gratitude and rejoicing...

A Midland College Continuing Education class visited the old Buchanan home place one spring. To the north of some ancient hackberries around the yard stock tank was the original hand-dug water well. Eight foot across and rock lined, the well had been crumbling and filling in for a long time, but down a dozen feet a bobcat had hollowed out a den. Four baby bobcats clambered in the old hackberries. Rabbit carcasses stripped of meat lay scattered among the mesquite thicket of the old horse trap.

Billy Houston's old homeplace fell down after a hundred years of being upright, but Billy left the pile of old lumber untouched. For years bobcats denned there, even before the house fell down. To visit the bobcats at daybreak (after feeding the turkeys) was a routine that Billy followed for years. To see the wild critters started his day off just right.

Some of the sights of the draw seem strange to city folk, such as porcupines and gray foxes draped in the trees. Yeah -- gray foxes sleeping in trees in the middle of the day. Until Natural History published a picture of one on a telephone pole crossbar, most Sibley audiences doubted such a thing.

One winter I began walking Mustang Draw on the Houston Ranch on an Audobon Society Christmas Bird Count so early I used a flashlight for a mile. 20 degree temperatures held wildlife down even as the sun broke over the horizon. I threaded my way through a grove of Hackberries, enjoying the plume of breath-smoke, stopping to pull the watchcap tighter and snugger on my head.

I became aware of being watched. At first I was a mite worried, for Billy had told of a mountain lion that had coursed through a few months before, and I had heard coyotes howling as I had walked. Part of the joy of such a hike is the intense alertness engendered by the goal of identifying and then counting every single bird seen. I sensed a fierce predatory gaze on me, from my left, and I tried not to change the pacing of my movements to turn and identify its source.

An adult Golden Eagle had been asleep on the top of the last hackberry of the thicket. My dark clothes in the gloaming light camouflaged by the shadows of the trees hid me. As soon as I identified the Eagle, it identified me as human. It immediately began to lurch into the sky, lifting its heavy wings and bending forward, but it slipped on the icy surface of the branch and had to awkwardly right itself. For several seconds the Eagle teetered, and when balanced again it seemed to have forgotten my presence. Its eye did not seem to focus on me until it did remember.

This time it merely glared at me. I did not move. From 40 feet away we waited for the other to redefine the engagement. From underneath the Eagle a Bewick's Wren began its characteristic hopping-with-fury fussing and scolding. It moved closer to the Eagle and as it did, its fussing alerted other birds. A Spotted Towhee mewed from the flood detritus at the base of the tree, and a Cactus Wren at the edge of the draw began to offer a querulous puzzled rattling. The resident Cardinals chinked a loud angry "shut up."

The Eagle listened to the flurry of bird noises and turned his glare from me. He seemed to realize that his sleep was ended. The passerines would mob him if he stayed, so with slow dignity he drew himself into launch position and then with three powerful flaps gained altitude and speed enough to glide down the draw. He swooped to the next trees, a ghost forest -- where natural causes had killed a hundred trees.

"No places for the little varmint dickey birds there!" the Eagle must of thought to himself.

I grow all three species of "draw trees" Hackberry, Soapberry, and Chittamwood Bumelia at my home. The memories of that morning (and other such mornings) spent in the forests of the draw come alive with their presence in my home landscape.