South Texas colors a feast for the senses
In the right light and aspect, dung beetles are strikingly colorful and, yes, beautiful creatures.
At least the pair busy at their kind’s Sisyphean task of shoving an impressive ball of their namesake up a sandy incline struck me as such. They were a couple of feet away from where I sat on this late-April morning in a wild reach of South Texas, back against a mesquite trunk and hidden, I hoped, from the view of wild eyes by a screen of leafy limbs I’d cut and fashioned into a temporary blind.
I’d spent the past three days looking for turkeys, especially long-bearded Rio Grande wild turkey gobblers, hoping to tempt one within range of the shotgun that lay across my folded legs. And I’d seen some. But I’d also witnessed a whole lot more. Like the dung beetles.
I guess I’d never really taken the time to look closely at other dung beetles, which had always seemed to be dull, flatblack insects just industriously going about their interesting, if somewhat unsavory to me, business. But now I was seeing them in a new light, literally.
The sun’s leading edge had not long before topped the wall of live oaks and mesquite, hackberry and ebony and other trees and shrubs to the east of the opening I overlooked, illuminating the South Texas landscape around me with that intense golden light that makes everything seem to glow.
The beetles didn’t exactly glow; when the morning light hit them just right, they shimmered with a metallic mix of green and copper and steel blue.
It fit a theme, I realized. So many colors in such a harsh and, at cursory glance, seemingly relatively dull and even lifeless landscape. All it takes is being open to seeing them.
South Texas’ “brush country” — the sweep of mesquite flats, prickly pear cactus patches, live oak motts, grasslands and pastures, sand and caliche and red dirt threaded by creeks and draws that only sometimes actually are pressed into their intended service of holding water — was long called the “Wild Horse Desert” and pretty much considered a wasteland. It is anything but that.
The landscape is alive with life, especially in spring. Certainly, this piece of it was. We — my wife, Susan, and I — have been blessed with the opportunity to spend time chasing wild turkeys on this piece of Brooks County for a few days each spring for the past several years. Each visit proves as enlightening and memorable as the ones before, and not just because it’s a tremendous place to chase Rio Grande gobblers during the spring hunting season. Although it certainly is that.
But, really, the most striking and memorable and richest experiences aren’t limited to those involving turkeys. It’s the chance to witness and try to absorb one of the richest, most diverse and, yes, magical wildland landscapes in Texas, if not the world.
Thrill of the hunt
I am enamored of turkey hunting, and everything about it. There are few things more thrilling than having a wild adult tom turkey thunder a gobble in reply to your imitation of a hen. And the tactical decisions, woodsmanship and patience and just plain hunting “smarts” necessary to be successful at turkey hunting are skills any hunter should be proud to develop.
But, the truth is, spring turkey hunting to me is a lot like what Roderick Haig-Brown said about fishing.
“Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers,” is the way Haig-Brown famously put it.
“Perhaps turkey hunting is, for me, only an excuse to be able to wander in wild, beautiful places in the spring,” is, I guess, my corollary to Haig-Brown.
We’d done just that for three days. And the rewards were manifold.
There was the Harris hawk that perched on an old windmill overlooking the opening where Susan and I sat up one morning and, when it would spot wild turkey’s approaching, would let loose with that species of hawk’s singular wildcat-like scream/growl to warn the interlopers that this was its territory.
Roadrunners chasing lizards like the miniature feathered velociraptors they are.
Texas horned lizards — horny toads — lapping up red harvester ants or perching on rises and rocks and surveying the landscape like they owned the place.
Texas tortoises, the rims around their mouths caked and smeared with the green of the cactus they’d been feasting upon. The sweet, iconic and somehow melancholy sound of bobwhite quail whistling their mating and assembly calls.
Butterflies by the scores — swallowtails and cloudless sulphurs, mostly — crowded around the muddy edges of a depression holding remains of a recent rare shower, sucking up crucial moisture.
We sat on the porch of the hunting cabin and watched rivers of butterflies — thousands if not tens of thousands — flow over the wildflower-carpeted pasture the porch overlooked. It was a river of color, streaming over a sea of color.
This was not a great spring for wildflowers on the place. It’s been dry. But still, there were great swaths of a half-dozen species of sunflowers doting the landscape with yellow. Phlox painted the ground purple in places. The yellow/orange of Texas lantana. White of prickly poppy. The yellow and orange blossoms of prickly pear cactus. The pale purple on cenizo. The myriad shades of green of the mesquites and oaks and a scores of shrubs and grasses.
Then there were the birds.
The vermillion flycatchers — “brasita de fuego,” little lump of fire — darting and diving from the edges of an ancient live oak, snatching one of the millions of grasshoppers that scattered like covey of quail as we walked through grasslands.
Scissortail flycatchers with their peach-color flanks and those impossibly long tails hovering over opening, falling from the sky to grab some unfortunate bug.
Raucous green jays, with their striking blue/ black/green/yellow markings. Golden-fronted woodpeckers, which are as beautiful as their name sounds. Bronzed cowbirds, metallic black with eyes and otherworldly red.
Indigo and painted buntings. Couch’s kingbirds. Black-bellied whistling ducks with their coral bills and feet. And so many, many more flashes of feathered color.
One such flash caused me to look up from my watching of the metallic dung beetles. A flash of orange in nearby live oak proved to be a hooded oriole, a bird like so many others I’d seen found few other places than South Texas.
There was color all around me. And I had to smile at the coincidence that hit me.
On this ranch, as with almost all ranches and hunting leases, names are assigned to particular areas of the property. There’s the Morales Trap, Sandia, Number 11, Sissy, the “T” and others. Some names make sense; some have stories behind them.
The place I hunted this morning was Mil Colores, Spanish for “a thousand colors.”
I’d never heard why it was so named. I wondered.
Those thoughts disappeared with the sound of a gobble. A hard, loud, intense gobble, coming from somewhere among the oaks and mesquites to the east.
I picked up the slate call and scratched out a series of loud yelps that were immediately answered with a double gobble.
A hen loped out of the woods and into the opening, stopped and stared behind her.
Two gobblers, looking like huge black beetles, strode out into the opening. One immediately went into a full-blown strut, his tail fanned wide and his head tucked back into his ballooned body. I could see his long beard from 150 yards.
The dominant gobbler danced toward the hen, who rebuffed the move by trotting several yards. She obviously was not interested.
Call brings results
I popped a diaphragm call into my mouth, offered a series of hen yelps while clucking on the slate call. The dominant gobbler seemed conflicted. Not so with his wingman. The “satellite” gobbler began moving toward me and the pair of decoys I had staked 15 yards or so from my hide.
The hen ran a few more yards. I yelped and the big gobbler took the bait, gobbling hard, folding up and following his buddy toward me.
They disappeared behind a screen of grass and brush.
Then they were there, walking down a path through the mesquite.
The big bird blew up into a full fan and strut and came dancing into the opening toward the closest decoy. Fueled with testosterone and mating lust, his blood-gorged head and neck were brilliant red and blue and ivory.
The morning sun hit him full, and his body was aflame in copper and shimmering metallic green, shiny black, bright orange and red and gold and I don’t know how many colors.
A thousand, maybe?