A visit to West Texas;
batwatching and Hill Country botanists

One wonderful thing began during the July floods. Like the rain, drawings simply poured out of me. Long held-in thoughts and views began to form on paper. The rain outside gave me leave to wander through all the places and times of my mind's eye. Once I even reached beyond my own life to try depicting what Boerne looked like about 1877. Although since July the world has repeatedly come to the door, my drawings continue.
I got to broaden my field with a fine trip to West Texas last month. Home of my childhood, it always feeds my visual side. How could it not, with mountains rising from beautiful plains, fine yellowing grasses and shrubs daring me to get out the plant books? I stayed with our cousin in her brand new house designed to incorporate a 360-degree view. Unobtrusively located, not on the top of a hill or mountain, the house is a part of the landscape, not dominating it. Her choice of stucco colors blends into the soils and grasses. Only a bright milk-blue door betrays the colors within. The house is elegant and pleasing. Having coffee with sunlight streaming in, West Texas silence, and fresh mountain air starts a morning off right.
I went for a vacation but had some "work" to do also. I wanted to draw and visit but I also went to look at Texas Longhorn bulls.
We are changing our herdsire and, not having had to do that in a very long time, we found the longhorn scene changed dramatically. We have mostly raised our own bulls by artificially inseminating our own cows. This way we have been able to have the best quality and select from the best longhorn bulls collected. Our preference is for old-time bulls, which provide easy calving and fast growing calves. They are born easily, quite small, and grow like a weed. Longhorn bulls must have smallish heads, long faces, narrow shoulders, and evenness throughout. In addition the offspring look good and thrive.
The man who did our AI work retired this year so the time had come to look at bulls. What we found on trips to longhorn breeders in Central Texas rocked us back on our heels. Gone are those cattle that provided the longhorn's fine traits just a few years ago. Now the bulls are huge, large-headed, broad-shouldered, and huge-rumped. We even saw many that are post-legged, short-faced, and narrow-flanked. These didn't even resemble longhorns. They couldn't do a day's work as a longhorn! What they are is beyond me. In desperation I called Fayette Yates in Amarillo. He is a member of the board of directors of the Cattlemen's' Texas Longhorn Registry. They began about 12 years ago to preserve those specific traits which they believed were being bred out of the longhorn by know-it-all car salesmen, insurance agents, stock brokers, and such. Those folks got into the business in the late eighties and the nineties and began to ruin the breed. Crazy ideas about what "ought to be" emphasized: such things as enormous horns, huge rumps, and enormous frame. Today we view the result. There are reports of calving problems and infertile cows now. Thank heavens for Fayette Yates and his bunch. To register an animal with them it must first pass a visual inspection. They send out inspectors who are old-timers who have been around longhorns all their lives and know what a longhorn looks like. These guys say yea or nay and if the animal passes that test it must be blood tested. Other breeds like watusi, brahama, etc., show up at that point. I do imagine the inspectors have gotten very good at seeing other breeds in modern longhorns. We certainly can.
Mr. Yates put me in contact with a breeder in Alpine. The day after arrival I went with his foreman to see a four-year-old bull and an eight-month-old bull calf. Both were just what we were hunting. The bull was medium-sized, horns fighting length and useful, great confirmation, simply everything a bull should be. The calf will make a fine herdsire, too. The trip to see the cattle took us to an old ranch we had often visited in our childhood. Sunday lunch was served to visitors in an old two-story barn/bunkhouse built out over the cattle pens. You ate pot roast or fried chicken while work went on down on the ground. There were saddles and ropes all around the walls. The walls of the pens were even more special. They were built like pens in South Texas, with two stout upright posts and the wall of horizontally stacked posts. These were all oak and alligator juniper, silvered by time, huge, many from the trunks of bent trees. When we got to the pens the foreman stopped to talk to a couple of men getting ready to brand some limousin yearlings. I walked over to the pen walls and knocked on the timbers. They rang like a bell. Hard as iron, they haven't aged much since they were built over a hundred years ago. I kept missing the building, however, and that night remembered it had burned back in the sixties. We saw the fine longhorn cattle all with the old Texas twist to their horns and proper medium size. I took photographs and the cows ate cake. Afterwards the foreman took me on a grass hunt. We had conversed on the way to the ranch about grasses and shrubs, and he turned out to be a student of Dr. Barton Warnock. We shared our Dr. Warnock stories and then spent at least an hour and a half wandering and identifying grasses and plants. I continued my grass collection book with at least fifteen new entries. I told him he needed to teach a grass seminar like the one at Bamberger Ranch in Blanco. When we looked up it was almost mid-afternoon and we drove back to have Mexican food in Alpine.
The rest of the trip was fine. We rode horses, went to a horse show in Odessa, viewed the only Scottish castle in West Texas (and run on solar power), collected seeds and photographs, ate good food, and visited.

Bebe Fenstermaker

One of the most amazing sights I witnessed this summer was the emptying of Bracken Cave by some of its 40 million bats. Bebe and I were invited to join a group watch as the bats left on their nightly journey foraging for insects. The cave, on a ranch northeast of San Antonio, has now been acquired by Bat Conservation International. Our leader was the young woman working for the organization and who knew the bat lore of the cave. For years, it has been mined for the bat guano by folks in the plant nursery trade. The cave is inhabited by Mexican free-tailed bats. They spend November through January in Mexico and migrate north in February. When they arrive, some 20 million females fill Bracken Cave. Once the young are born the population jumps to 40 million. Each mother has just a few minutes after birth to become familiar with its pup. There is just so much room in the cave so the pups cling to the sides of the cave or each other, stacked several bodies thick. Upon returning to the cave, each mother locates its own pup from the millions clinging for life along the cave wall. Should an unfortunate pup or adult happen to fall to the cave floor it is skeletonized within minutes by beetles. We were told in advance to watch for coach whip snakes around the edge of the cave opening. They lunge as the swirling bats leave, literally snatching them out of the air. Sometimes hawks can be seen circling above waiting to dive for a meal. We were also advised to watch for albino bats. The speed with which the bats leave the cave is determined by training the "radar gun" on the albinos. Before they emerge, the bats can be seen flying back and forth across the inside of the cave mouth. I must say, we saw it all. The coach whip snake lunged, grabbing a flying bat out of the air; the hawk, circling overhead, dived for its meal; and several albino bats were seen swirling amongst the crowd. The bats flew counter clockwise in tight circles up out of the cave. They flew off in a southeasterly direction. It would have been a three-hour show had we stayed to watch the last bat fly out. I had heard years ago that when they fly out in the evening the bats register on the radar at San Antonio's municipal airport. Walking back to the cars that evening, we couldn't help but stop from time to time to watch as the bats continued to stream out overhead.
Bebe and I recently joined a neighbor who is currently editor of our native plant society chapter (NPSOT) newsletter to New Braunfels to interview Chip Schumacher at his nursery, Schumacher's Hill Country Gardens. We have known Chip for a number of years and knew some of his history but it was interesting to hear in his own words how he got interested and involved in plants, especially those native to this area. He graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans with a degree in music (piano). One of his major professors was a collector of tropical plants, and from him Chip developed his interest in rare and hard to find plants. Upon graduation he traveled to South America to look for and collect a variety of plant species not commonly available back home. Chip supported himself by creating saleable items he sold on the roadside and in the markets. In essence, he made his living using his wits, as do most of the citizens of those countries. Eventually Chip returned to the U.S. and got into the building industry as an independent. It was not long, however, before he started dabbling in plants again. He credits Scott Ogden, a well-known native plant expert and author of Gardening With Difficult Soils and Garden Bulbs for the South, and Michael Schroeder, local architect and native plant enthusiast, with piquing his interest in natives. Chip admits learning a great deal from them. While still in the building business he built a greenhouse next to his house. Then he began collecting seed and taking cuttings from various sources and his propagating took off. Sometime later he established his nursery and stocked it with the overflow from his greenhouse. Along the way Chip met Lynn Lowrey, a well known seeker and collector of native plants in the southern and southwestern parts of Texas and across the border in Mexico. Many times Lynn would go by the nursery for a visit and soon he and Chip would be seen driving off on one of their famous plant hunts that would either take hours or days. Chip laughed when he remembered how Lynn would say to him, "I don't supposed you would be interested in this plant I found." Well of course he was! And another Texas native or one collected from Mexico, but at a similar altitude as our Hill Country, would become the "mother" plant from which cuttings would be made or seeds were collected. In time, it would be offered for sale in the nursery. Over the years, Chip has established his reputation with the native plant world. He still runs both a wholesale and retail business and continues his propagating. As I listened to him that day, I realized Chip was one of those botanists we in Texas are lucky to have. For me, his work ranks up there with Lynn Lowrey, Bennie Simpson, Carol Abbot, and Barton Warnock.
Sissy Fenstermaker