There is a belief that you cannot survive without air-conditioning in Texas, certainly not in San Antonio, a city that lies largely in the South Texas Plains. I say largely because San Antonio also borders the Texas Hill Country and the Blackland Prairies. It sits at the intersection of three different ecosystems. I loathe air-conditioning and central heating, and I simply throw open my balcony door, summer or winter, open all the windows, and let myself boil or freeze. And it is not bad at all, because I can listen to the sounds of Texas. I can hear young people splashing about in the nearby swimming pool, I can hear laughter, and I can hear songbirds. I can hear the katydids, cicadas, crickets, and I can hear frogs. Being a bioacoustician I like bioacoustical sounds.
I live on the edge of the Texas Hill Country. It is a few miles from the University of Texas campus where I work, and where the South Texas Plains begin. A long expanse of arid scrubland and brush, that stretches on for more than a hundred miles to the South Texas coast. It is horse and cattle country, and it evokes the romantic stories of cowpokes wandering the trails rounding cattle, as told by Louis L’Amour. You hear the names of places, like Hondo and Bandera and Matagorda, and it evokes images from the past. It evokes images of Mexicans, Spaniards, White Americans, and Native Americans. They all lived here, fought one another, and still live here. They now live peacefully, or at least, I think so and hope so. Along with Biggles and his Sopwith Camel, the Sackett brothers of L’Amour were my childhood favorites when I lived in India and Sri Lanka.
I devoured L’Amour’s books when I was ten years old, and those of Zane Grey, J. T. Edson, and Oliver Strange. Of all the things that I knew about America then, I knew about Texas the best. I pored over an atlas and picked all the towns in the Wild West and marked them with little crosses. These places I had visited. I lived here in my mind, and I was crazy about cowboys. I had driven unruly longhorn cattle through these one-horse towns onwards to St. Louis on the Mississippi. I drank a lot of yeller likker in cheap saloons, I cussed a lot, and I got into fist fights. I frequented prostitutes. I hung about waiting for my little brother, and I would pounce on him and hurl him to the floor because he was a rustler, a despicable horse and cattle thief. I threatened to shoot him or hang him, or both. I never succeeded because he called mum and she would stop me.
I wanted to be a cowboy. I wanted to wear that hat, leather chaps, and spurs. I wanted to nonchalantly whip out my Colt revolver and shoot something, anything. I wanted to be the fastest gun in the West, a cigarette dangling from my lips. I wanted to eat beef jerky. It didn’t matter that I was a vegetarian and the smell of meat made me retch, I wanted to chew on it like other wandering cowboys. I wanted to sit around a campfire under the open skies, drinking coffee from an enamel mug, and I wanted to smell of sweat, leather, and horse manure. I wanted it bad.
No one said it better than Stan Jones in Ghost Riders in the Sky, as popularized by Johnny Cash. I wanted to ride the cattle trail “trying to catch the devil’s herd, across these endless skies.” It is a romantic song, depicting a romantic country, wide open and beautiful. Texas is beautiful country. Arid, sometimes harsh, it catches your imagination and it catches your heart. It makes you want to saddle a horse and ride in all directions. You just have to be careful that you don’t wander into someone’s land. Texans are fiercely protective of their property. There are few commons in Texas, other than those found in national, state, and city refuges. And of these, there are not too many.
Nearly sixty million years ago, I would probably be living under water. The Gulf Coast as we know it now, swept inland North of San Antonio up to Boerne perhaps. Giant dinosaurs stomped about on the ancient coastline, leaving their footprints on algae mats, now petrified. They are still there and come up every now and then when a flash-flood exposes the underlying rock. The limestone cliffs that form the Balcones Escarpment are shelves of rock, remnants of oceanic cliffs and the old continental shelf. They resemble balconies, hence the name. They form the Northern reaches of San Antonio along Highway 1604. From here on, northwards, the Hill Country begins. A series of rolling hills blanketed with junipers and oaks. Rain comes now and then, in the form of spectacular thundershowers, creating flash floods. Sunlit hills, flashing green, stretching to the endless horizon, are now a smoky blue-gray as the clouds sweep over, and the horizon approaches opaque, in a sweeping wall of water. The thunder rolls over the hills, it rolls across the endless skies.
I have seen it so often. Driving up from the city towards home, I see a clear line demarcating clouds hanging over the Hill Country, leaving the plains and the rest of the city untouched under a sunlit sky. It is a brooding mass of thunderheads black and gray, covering the northern portion of the sky. Lightning flickers and the thunder rolls over the hills, and then everything is drenched in rain. I imagine the cowboy pulling up his collar, and hunching as he leads his horse down the trail, the rain dripping down from his hat. I hunch in my Mazda Miata and stare at the distant rain through the windshield, and grumble that I am so wet and miserable. I am a cowboy riding into the Hill Country in a Texas thundershower.
One evening, after I had moved to my apartment in the Hill Country, I heard a sound. I listened to it. It could not be a cicada because it was too late in the day, and it did not sound like a katydid. It sounded like a cricket with a hoarse throat. Actually crickets rub a "file" on one wing with a "scraper" on another to produce their chirps. So they don't really call using a vocal organ but instead use a stridulatory organ. But let's call it a "throat". It called in a scratchy voice, rather erratically for a cricket, and then it was silent. Then it started again. I ignored it. The next evening there it was again, that chirping sound, like a cricket with a hoarse throat. I pride myself in being able to recognize animal sounds, and so I began a search for all the insects that could possibly produce that sound. None of the Texas insects produced that sound.
I was working on research in frog choruses at that time and I happened to run across a web site on the frogs of Texas. And there it was, that scratchy hoarse call. It was the Cliff Chirping Frog (Syrrhophus marnockii). North American frogs usually call regularly with clear notes. I had not heard a frog call in this manner. The chirping frog lives in the cracks and crevices of limestone cliffs. But what is unusual about it is that it can run, in addition to hopping and leaping. All of us know that frogs and toads only hop and leap. They do not run. So this frog is rather unusual. I have one male living outside my apartment. There is a thicket of live oaks and Ashe junipers but no limestone. So I am not sure where it lives. But it is a pleasant companion on most evenings. Once I played back its song through a small loudspeaker, and it stopped calling. I was hoping to get a response from it. I was most annoyed.
It did get me thinking about why most frogs only hop and cannot run. A hop requires a coordinated contraction of all the leg muscles simultaneously so that it can power the jump. A run requires alternating movement of the limbs, it requires gait. It is a much more complex motor program. The neural motor commands for running and hopping are therefore different. Why did a certain species develop both? This is true for many species of birds as well. The common House sparrow hops, but the Roadrunner, a Texas bird, can run. This is a question that no one seems to have looked at.
I wander about late evenings trying to find the chirping frog, a flashlight in hand, searching and seeking this elusive beast. I have not seen one yet. I am embarrassed, afraid of being reported as a peeping-tom. This is the same reason why I do not stand in my balcony looking for the endangered Golden-cheeked warbler (Dendroica chrysoparia). This is a beautiful warbler with a lilting song, endemic to the Texas Hill Country, and the subject of my ongoing research on the bioacoustics of birdsong. I think I have heard the warbler near my apartment, but I cannot find it because every time I raise my binoculars I see a human looking at me. Sometimes the human is wearing a bikini. The swimming pool is right across. Pervert!
Under San Antonio, and stretching up into the Hill Country, is the Edwards Aquifer, named after the Edwards Plateau. The aquifer is a karst feature, meaning that it holds water in subterranean caverns. It is characterized by sinkholes that can be quite dangerous, and where water from rain runs underground. We get our water from the aquifer. It is one of the grandest features of our natural world. Life-giving, sustaining, we owe so much to it, and yet we are destroying it. I always monitor the level of the aquifer every day. Today it stands at 675.4 feet above mean sea level, 7.8 feet over the historical average for the month. You may think this is good, but it is not. We have had a good year of rains. Mostly, we are draining this reservoir without concern for our future. I live in Camp Bullis an area that is considered part of the region where the aquifer recharges after a rain. There are sinkholes, some large and dangerous, some no more than crevices in the limestone. And every time there is rain, I, most modern of cowboy’s, who drives a Miata instead of a horse, simply gloat. I watch the water seep into the ground and I am glad. The aquifer gives life not just to humans, but it gives life to a myriad of creatures that live in it. They include arthropods, crustaceans, fish, and tiny living things. Some of them are endangered. They share this world with me.
And so we have karst caverns with beautiful, surreal features, filled with stalagmites and stalactites, and weird natural formations forming stripes and patterns of all kinds. And bat droppings! It spreads in a thick black mass on the floor of the caverns, all of it petrified. I have been in these caverns. They are reminders of our past, of things as they were, once upon a time. One of the largest known underground bat caverns in the United States is Bracken Cave located North West of San Antonio, in adjacent Comal County. It is in the Edwards plateau. About twenty million Mexican freetailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) live in this cave. They stream out at night, taking hours to empty. They overwinter in Mexico, and do not hibernate like most other North American bats. To watch a similar sight you have to hang out on the Congress Avenue Bridge in nearby Austin. Three streams of freetailed bats emerge at dusk from under the bridge. It is quite a sight. But the bats do not number more than a million and a half or so. This is miniscule compared to what San Antonio has to offer. We are rich indeed.
The story of the Golden-cheeked warbler is fascinating, perhaps more to me than to you. It is a wood warbler, a so-called Parulid. Of all the North American Parulids, this particular species is endemic to Edwards Plateau. While other related warblers spread out to the Eastern and Western United States, this warbler stays here in the summer, in a restricted region. It breeds for a few months and then it returns to Mexico and Central America in the winter. I wonder why this particular species likes Edwards Plateau so much. A clue emerges in that much maligned Texas tree, the Ashe juniper (Juniperus ashei). Texans seem to hate it because its pollen causes allergies. They call it “cedar” when it is not a cedar, and they hack it off. The juniper berry is the source of gin, which with tonic, acts as the well-known social lubricant. The Dutch call it Genièvre, from which the word gin originates. We must thank the Dutch chemist Sylvius de Bouve for this remarkable drink that loosens all inhibitions.
The Golden-cheeked warbler does not nest in the Juniper tree. It peels the bark off the tree and then it flies over to the deciduous oak, where it builds a nest by tying together the strips of juniper bark with spider web. I never cease to wonder at the adaptability of life. Thus, this warbler requires the oak, the juniper, and the spider, to reproduce. And because of unchecked development and dislike for the juniper, this bird is fast becoming endangered. Along with my collaborator from San Antonio Parks, Wendy Leonard, we are studying the changes in the song of this warbler. It seems to have changed its song, much like humans have changed their speech. The Golden-cheek is one of the two endangered warblers in the United States. The other is the Kirtland’s warbler, also a Parulid.
There is so much to write about Texas and the Hill Country. It’s beauty, that calm sense of repose that I always feel when I am in it. I see the hills around me. In summer it is hot and arid, and I am surrounded by dense thickets of trees and brushes, wild flowers, and hardy plants. I have not written about these. There are oaks that would not be recognizable to those who come from the North. Live oaks, their twisting ancient trunks, stunted, and wizened with age, a home to cicadas and katydids. In winter, the leaves of some oaks survive, as do those of the conifers, whereas those of other oaks do not. They shed their leaves like other deciduous oaks, whereas some wait till spring until new leaves push out the old. There is always something new to see, something new to find in Texas. Like an infinite onion, you can peel the layers, and see more and more, and never find an end. This never-ending quest to understand Texas is the happiest of searches in life. It has no beginning and no end. It is a search for all that is simple and beautiful in this world of ours. It lies, under a Texan sun.
