Subscribe to this RSS Feed
Cover Story
Gone with the Wind?
Lesser prairie-chickens are imperiled in the quest for renewable energy.
Story by Stayton Bonner; Photography by Jerod Foster
On February 8, 1868, Charles Goodnight packed Oliver Loving’s corpse with powdered charcoal in a sealed tin casket and carted his dead partner 600 miles from Fort Sumner to Weatherford. The two men had fought exhaustion, Reconstruction-era rustlers and Comanche to blaze a cattle trail that created an empire and worldwide mythology. Before Loving died, he told his young partner he wished to be buried back home.
For these hard-driving businessmen, Texas was more than a land of economic opportunities. Realizing the bison’s inherent worth as a part of the Great Plains, the land from which he’d made his fortune, Goodnight preserved a herd of his own. The bison’s descendants still roam the prairie at Caprock Canyons State Park.
Their tales may never have survived had it not been for biographer J. Evetts Haley’s 1936 book Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman. The cattle drive stories that Haley recorded from Goodnight ended with the barbed-wire fencing of the West. But the writer’s grandson, Jeff Haley, a fifth-generation cattleman east of Pampa, now sees a new economic endeavor approaching from just over the southern horizon. As cattle drives and their ensuing ranches closed the bison’s range, wind energy may doom another Great Plains species — the lesser prairie-chicken. [read the whole story]
Stories Worth Viewing (again) |
This Month's Features
Monarch Mania
Each October Texans witness an amazing natural phenomenon—in their own backyards.
By Elaine Robbins
Sure, Mike Bessire raises cows on his ranch near Abilene, but it’s really butterflies, not Brangus cattle, that get him excited. Each year a growing crowd of friends and family gathers for the show.
“They are here!” he wrote last fall in a posting to Journey North, a monarch migration website. “For the seventh year in a row we have monarchs in mass numbers roosting in the tall willow trees. The preliminary count is as low as 12,500 and as high as 25,000!”
Up to 300 million monarchs migrate annually through Texas. They fly in from Maine to Minnesota, from across the eastern United States and southern Canada, they funnel down to a 300 mile-wide central flyway through Texas centered on Wichita Falls [through Abilene, San Angelo and on to Del Rio] (A smaller migration route follows the gulf coast.)
Where are all those monarchs heading? To their wintering roosts in the oyamel forest of Michoacán, in central Mexico.
Last fall, a week after the monarchs left Bessire’s ranch, they flitted through Helen Cordes’ backyard in Georgetown, where she was having lunch with her daughter Zoe.
“We watched for at least 15 to 30 minutes when a dozen at a time flew by,” she says. “They seemed to be flying a route that went right down our street. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
A few days later, they were gliding high on a thermal over Sabinal Canyon, where Mitch Heindel watched them through binoculars near his home in Utopia.
“I saw one, then an hour later 10, then 100,” he recalls. “I’m standing at one edge of this river of monarchs. The river could be miles wide and who knows how many miles long. Like the wildebeest or whale migration, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the energy of life you’re getting to witness.”
[read more]
Kayak Convert
It only took one hunting trip to prove the allure of duck hunting from a kayak.
By Scott Sommerlatte
Over the years I have taken to the water to chase fowl in more ways than a person could possibly imagine.
When I was younger I would walk miles through the marsh with decoys on my back or travel hours in a rough-riding johnboat or, sometimes, do both in a day in pursuit of a limit of ducks. Later in life I resorted to elaborate contraptions such as marsh buggies and airboats. Now I prefer to revert back to a simpler time in life and can sometimes be found making my way to a favorite duck-hole paddling a kayak.
Last season, a buddy who does most of his outdoor recreation from a kayak told me of a fantastic day of kayak duck hunting. It wasn’t so unusual, but I had never heard of it.
I thought to myself, “A kayak might just make a choice addition to my arsenal of waterfowl hunting tools.” So a-shopping I went.
I was completely overwhelmed by the number of choices available to the consumer when it comes to kayaks. There are several different styles and as many or more different brands. It took me all of one shopping trip to realize that I just did not have a clue.
I had only kayaked a few times with buddies who had a spare and invited me along on a day of fishing. Honestly, I did not even remotely enjoy fishing from a kayak and swore I would never own one. I was completely satisfied with poling around in a skiff, and always wondered what all the hoopla was surrounding this whole “kayak” thing. On top of that, I could not wrap my brain around the concept of it becoming the fastest-growing segment of the outdoor industry.
In spite of all this, now I wanted one, so it was time to do some research to find exactly what I needed in a “yak” for the pursuit of ducks. [read more]
Keep Texas Wild (PDF)
Mysterious Monarchs
