There was little question about who I wanted as my first guest on Modern Texas Naturalist.

Dr. Randy Simpson was my graduate advisor at Texas State University, but over the years he became much more than that: a mentor, a friend, and one of the first people who showed me what a life built around curiosity about the natural world could look like.

For this first conversation, Randy and I sat beside a mesquite-and-oak fire at his Cottonwood Farm in Gonzales County, Texas, poured some coffee, and started at the beginning.

In Part One, we trace Randy’s path from a childhood spent outdoors to a career studying and teaching wildlife biology. We wander through early encounters with Texas wildlife, his graduate research on animal behavior, and his work studying nutria and their effects on wetland ecosystems.

Along the way, our conversation turns toward some bigger questions: What happens when the wildlife we remember from childhood begins disappearing? How do shifting baselines change what we think of as “normal”? And, when it comes to conservation, how much easier is it to protect an intact landscape than to try to put one back together after it has been lost?

We also talk about books (because a conversation with Randy was never going to get very far without talking about books) and some of the writers and naturalists who helped shape the way he sees the world.

Mostly, though, this is a conversation between two naturalists who have known each other a long time, sitting beside a fire and following their curiosity wherever it leads.

And we're only getting started.

Part Two continues the conversation, with more stories, more coffee, and, eventually, a perfectly timed chorus of coyotes from somewhere beyond the firelight.

In this conversation

02:09 — Pulling up a chair at Cottonwood Farm

03:36 — Randy’s childhood outdoors and the making of a naturalist

13:07 — Nutria, the fur trade, and an introduced species

18:00 — Studying nutria and thinking about wildlife management

22:45 — Horned lizards, childhood wildlife, and what has changed

30:14 — Preservation, restoration, and protecting intact landscapes

39:39 — Books, natural history, and the writers who shaped Randy

46:35 — Looking ahead to Part Two

About Modern Texas Naturalist

Modern Texas Naturalist is a podcast about curiosity, the natural world, and the people whose lives have been shaped by exploring, understanding, and caring for it.

Hosted by wildlife biologist and conservationist Romey Swanson.

Edited by Dell Little.

New conversations every other Wednesday.

Welcome to Modern Texas Naturalist.

I'm Romy Swanson.

Pull up a chair and join me.

In conversations with people who spend their lives exploring, understanding, and caring for the natural world, and who might just inspire the rest of us to look a little closer.

Let's see what we can discover together.

There was little question about who I wanted my first guest on Modern Texas naturalist to be.

Dr. Randy Simpson was my graduate advisor at Texas State University.

But long before that, he became one of the first people in this profession who really believed in me and one of the first people I could look at and think, that's the kind of naturalist I want to become.

Randy was smart and passionate, kind but expecting.

His office had an entire wall stuffed with natural history books with bones and gar scales and all sorts of things collected from the wild tucked here and there.

His lab was always alive with students, research, field equipment, and usually with a few live animals.

For a young wildlife student who wanted to learn everything, I was in heaven.

But there was something else I recognized in Randy, too.

He seemed afflicted with that same love for the wild others, a love that gets down into your bones.

I wanted to learn from him, and if I'm being truthful, I wanted to become a little like him.

Over the years, Randy became much more than an advisor.

He was a mentor, a friend, and someone who helped me see possibilities in myself that I wasn't quite ready to see yet.

It seemed right to begin this podcast with him.

We recorded this conversation outside at his Cottonwood farm in Gonzales county, sitting beside a fire of mesquite and oak and working our way through a thermos of coffee.

As evening settled around us, and at one point, almost impossibly, while we were talking about coyotes, I a pack started calling.

Somewhere out in the darkness, you'll hear them.

This is my friend and mentor, Dr. Randy Simpson.

I want to first thank you for having me out here to your property in Gonzalez County.

You're very welcome.

And agreeing to sit down and have a conversation.

I appreciate this beautiful fire.

And this is exactly what I'm hoping to have as part of this podcast is sort of an experiential let's get together in person and have a conversation anytime we can.

Outside is even better.

And I know you've been working hard on this particular place for a number of years now, and I'd be really interested to hear some more about that as we get into the conversation.

But for now, I want to launch into this conversation with you, and I want to explain to folks that you'll probably hear me talking to Randy and Dr. Simpson because I can't get out of the habit of calling Dr. Simpson Dr. Simpson, because for so many years that's what I had to say.

And now that I'm out of school, I know that at one point you said, I can call you Randy, and I do every once in a while, but I subconsciously slip back and forth.

Well, I prefer Randy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I like to start every conversation off with just trying to, you know, set the tone around wildlife and why we're in this field and why we do what we do.

And I'm real interested to hear your origin story, so to speak, of what.

When did.

When did the interest in wildlife and outdoors first show itself?

And kind of tell us a little bit about that.

Very young, Some of my early memories around the house.

We lived on a rural delivery route just outside of Dallas, strangely enough, in Irving, Texas.

Which rural delivery route?

Go figure.

Now, try to find that place.

Picking up toads and small snakes and lizards and whatnot.

In fact, my wife and I were.

Patricia and I were talking about this just yesterday or today about Richard Louvre's book, Last Child in the Woods.

This is probably a very poor paraphrase, but he said that nowadays the outdoors is getting further and further from the door for children.

Whenever I was a kid, you walked out the back door and you were in nature, the backyard, which led into an open field, which led into a string of woods.

And that's the way it was.

Nowadays, many children open the back door and it's concrete or asphalt as far as they can see, except for a few small remnants.

Getting to the woods or into the outdoors is a difficult thing.

So when I was a kid, it was easy.

And then on top of that, my parents were.

Both parents were from subsistence farmers.

They had a cash crop, but they basically raised their food.

Big garden, chickens, a cow, pigs, whatnot.

So I went back and stayed with the extended family during the summers quite a bit when I was young, one particular uncle, he was an old bachelor uncle, Uncle Charlie.

We'd go into the woods all the time.

And of course, the biggest thing for a kid, I don't.

I don't have any idea how old I was.

It was very young, though, probably five, six, seven, like that.

My parents let me go out there and stay with my aunts and uncles for quite a bit during the summers.

We go into the woods.

We'd build a campfire.

There's no.

No hike is complete without a campfire.

We found box turtles.

We went Fishing, we did all of those things.

And that gave me a real appreciation for it.

So that's where it started.

And then always had an affinity for animals.

Those other brethren that we treat so.

Have treated so badly so many years.

Dogs, cats and all of that.

Domestics, yes.

But also brought home, like I said, box turtles, horned lizards, and kept them for a while, turned them loose, like any little kid did at that time.

So that's where it began.

And then got into middle school and high school and girls and cars and things like that kind of interfered.

But got to college, I guess.

I wanted to be a physicist, actually an astronomer.

That was my goal.

Through a series of courses and interesting episodes, I found out that no biology was actually of more interest to me than physics was.

And then I, a little bit later on decided, well, good grief, why not combine a love of biology with my love of animals and wildlife?

Just kind of made a nice click.

With the help of Warren Pulich, who was my undergraduate mentor for wildlife, I think, at the University of Dallas, small liberal arts college.

Gosh, I don't know what I took from him.

Ecology of birds, developmental ecology, physiology.

He taught just about all of those courses, along with a couple of other very competent and interesting individuals there at that university.

Sounds like Dr. Pulitz was the department for Wildlife.

For Wildlife.

He was.

He was the man.

That was a wonderful education I got there.

My wife, Patricia, we've met.

Both had the same kind of experiences.

Her family were always outdoors, more on picnics than kind of outdoor hikes across the countryside.

But our interests were the same.

And so we went along with Warren and we banded birds and we went on birding trips, aside from classes with him individually.

Had a wonderful time during that time.

And then from there it was on to A and M and into the wildlife program.

Did you go straight to PhD?

No.

Did a master's degree, interestingly, with a pupil of.

Well, one of the foremost ethologists.

You say ethologist?

Ethologist.

What is the ethologist?

Ethologist is the study of animal behavior quite different at the time, set up much differently than what animal behavior was understood to be here in the US In Europe.

Animal ethology was the study of animals in their natural surroundings and looking at their actions.

No real interpretation as to how this related to human actions, activities, thoughts, behaviors.

This was purely looking at each species with their own set of fixed action patterns.

What they did in a natural environment.

Sometimes that could be brought into a laboratory if you're dealing with small species.

But it was not the type of animal behavior studies that were done by B.F. skinner and a number of those.

So ethology was a study of natural behaviors of animals.

And Fritz Walter was my professor.

I did a master's degree on behavioral development in coyotes.

It was a captive situation, but we didn't interact with the animals other than we raised the bottle, raised them from the time they were young pups and just watched as their behavior developed among litter mates.

So that was an interesting project, but I decided that when I finished that, well, I needed to get more of into a management program.

Wendell Swank was my major Prof. And I did a project on food habits of nutria and the impact on waterfowl in East Texas.

At that time, nutria were quite the animal of concern and invasive that in the Southeast and into eastern Texas was multiplying rapidly and had some very destructive actions.

And so it situated very well with a study on food habits after that, then moved on to working.

When I got my Ph.D. actually, my first job was with a wildlife disease program at Texas A and M. Your.

Ms, Your master study was developing behavior of coyotes.

Behavior of coyotes.

Behavior of coyotes, which Erin, my wife, is going to freak out hearing about.

I didn't know that about your master's work because she's a huge fan of coyotes.

Before we leave that just because I know that you know a lot about nutria.

I think that we've had quite a few conversations about them.

And we see them over on the.

I mean, they've made it pretty far west.

They're on the Devil's river and you see beaver and nutria running around.

If you wouldn't mind for just a second, kind of touching on how they got here.

And we're talking about their exotic invasive and why they're here in such numbers today.

They were actually brought into the US from South America, Chile and southern portions of South America especially.

They're an aquatic mammal.

Superficially, they look a lot like beaver.

They live in the same similar habitats.

I won't.

They're not the same.

Nutria are more marsh animals, whereas beaver are more.

Well, they can be marsh too, but they need deeper water.

Their foods are woody plants, whereas nutria, despite the common conception that nutria cut down trees too, which I ran into with a lot of people said, oh yeah, they just tear up trees around here.

Not so.

No.

Only under a rare circumstance will you find nutria gnawing on the bark of a tree.

And that's very soft wood and very young plants.

Yeah.

They were brought in to supplement the fur Industry, of course.

Right.

Oh, gosh.

So just coming out of that and somebody had the bright idea, well, hey, let's bring in nutrient, we'll supplement the fur industry.

Here's another fur animal.

Several problems with that being in an invasive.

Being the first one.

Once they were brought here, they found suitable habitat and their populations just exploded.

The other thing is that instead of the whole hide being usable for fur, basically it's only the belly, the underside.

The rest of the animal, the pelt is not considered suitable for making.

So whereas a beaver pelt is beautiful, soft and usable all around.

Robust animal too.

Right.

When you find a big one, the nutrients, just a little bit of the belly fur is what they're looking for.

The rest of it's not as luxurious.

Right.

Wow.

And initially they were brought in in a number of areas and with the intention of keeping them in confinement.

Yeah.

Having fur farms like Silver Fox farms, things that you find even today in certain parts of the world.

But they escaped, of course.

I remember before I was even in wildlife seeing ads for nutria, this probably back in the 50s, 60s in which in the back of Sports Afield magazine, you'd see them weed cutters Deluxe.

Want to clear out your.

All the weeds out of your farm ponds that are clogging and preventing you from fishing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, things like that.

Was there any truth to that?

Oh, yeah.

They do cut down the.

The vegetation, but they don't cut down the vegetation that most people want that typically clog a pond.

They will eat cattails to some degree, but that's not preferred.

That's not what they're wanting.

They want something else.

They want the really good stuff that muskrats would eat.

Some competition with muskrats documented out in the east.

In the east, in Texas.

In the east.

Right.

But on the.

In the brackish water and coastal areas, nutria decimating vegetation in situations like that and a lot of damage.

And then there's local damage to conservation.

Dams and things like that are put up.

They do.

They burrow?

Yeah.

Okay.

They don't construct a big lodge like beavers do in the middle of water.

If they have it.

They burrow exclusively in the South.

Beaver do burrow to bank beaver and such.

So they're destructive.

I mean, you got a 20 plus pound animal that would be a big one.

20 Pounds that is on the landscape.

In large numbers.

Yeah, by the thousands.

They gotta eat something.

Yeah.

And so they're going to have a heavy impact on the groceries that they.

Prefer first and then.

Right.

I got two questions.

One, what did your study find out?

What was the impact of waterfowl in East Texas?

They eat many of the same plants that produce seeds for wintering waterfowl.

So more nutria, less food availability for the waterfowl, some of the waterfowl.

I'm sure that is a possibility.

Yeah.

That would take other projects to go in there and say, you know, have areas with nutria and without nutria and count waterfowl.

Yeah.

Okay.

I was only looking up at the first stage of that, looking at areas with nutria and the vegetation, without nutria and the vegetation.

And.

Well, I did do some surveys of duck crops from hunter killed ducks.

Yeah, they're eating the same thing that.

Yeah, the nutria were catching the plants at the growth stage, whereas ducks were depending upon what those plants would produce as seeds for the wintering waterfowl.

Do you recall which ducks were most impacted out there?

You reckon with the dabbling ducks, the pond ducks would be the ones because Polygonum, a number of the sedges in rushes that produced seeds that were found in waterfowl crops.

Yeah, they were eating those.

Okay.

And then my other question is, you know, we've got nutri all over the place now.

I mean, you see them on the lakes and ponds at the ranch that I spend most of my time over near Fredericksburg.

And I don't know, I just see them and I'm like, okay, they're, they're here.

They, you know, I see a burrow in the bank of the dam or something, and for the most part, I just kind of leave them alone.

If somebody's got trigger itch or something that we might let them take, turn loose only because they're exotic and invasive.

But I, on these smaller ponds in the hill country, don't see a whole lot of problems with them.

What.

What is your take on it?

I don't.

I think that they have been here long enough.

Yeah.

And they basically are in the coastal areas from Washington state all the way around Gulf coast, all the way up the east coast, at least Chesapeake Bay and all into that area.

They're here.

They're integrated into the system.

Yes.

They do some damage, I think mostly along coastal areas, some parts of Louisiana, that they have devastated some of the wetland areas and have contributed to destructive surge that hurricanes or high tides can bring.

But as far as I'm concerned, this is just my opinion.

I think their days of explosive expansion have passed.

They're here, they're integrated into it.

I don't know that anybody ever really documented serious competition between muskrats and nutria.

They're living in slightly different habitats.

Certainly no problem with nutria and beaver.

That's not a problem.

So they co.

Mingle just fine.

I can't say that.

But they, they're separated ecologically.

Separated.

Yeah.

Now if a beaver, they set up a dam and produced a nice pond and nutria moved in, they're certainly going to do that because that happened in Big Bend in the beaver pond at Big Ben, down in the real Grand Village.

Yeah.

Grand Village.

The nutria moved right in there when they.

When the pond backed up and.

Oh.

So the beaver created habitat favorable for nutria that otherwise wasn't.

Wasn't there.

Right.

Right.

So those meadow pond type situations will attract.

That beavers can build.

Will attract.

Anytime there's emergent vegetation there, the nutri are likely to show up and find a good home.

But you don't get a sense that there's a strong negative impact when the two are present, one versus the other.

I remember they sort of oscillate over at Spring Lake there in San Marcos where we.

I know you spent a lot of time.

You'd see beaver sometimes and not others.

Nutria sometimes and not others.

You'd have to set up some pretty sophisticated experiments to find out are they actually one or the other impacting the other.

It doesn't seem like they're being exclusive.

There may be some negative, but not exclusive of one another.

Because they're on top of each other.

Yeah.

They're just separated by their needs.

Ecologically they're separated.

Foods are different.

Yeah.

So as far as traveling over the same terrain.

Yeah.

And such.

I don't see them impacting one another.

Who knows.

I know that we see them together enough to seem to think that they're doing just fine in each other's presence.

And I like that.

The idea, or I like considering the idea around.

Like they're now naturalized, they're now part of the landscape and the waterways and they've probably backfilled to the point where they're not right now being disruptive in population growth because they've already grown.

They maybe are backfilling into some spaces.

But where they exist, they exist in numbers.

Yeah.

That have evened out.

That's my thoughts.

Yeah.

Now I could be wrong and I'M.

Curious to know more about it.

So this would be something.

This will be a rabbit hole I'll probably dig into with some Google searches and maybe look for a couple of papers.

There's probably somebody out there that's dug pretty dang deep on this topic.

Oh yeah, I'm sure.

And like I say, it seems like coastal areas are where they are of more concern.

Those critters.

So fascinating.

But let me take us back.

We went through your upbringing and you mentioned horny toads and toads around Dallas in Irving.

How common were the horned lizards then?

Cause this is the story you always.

Hear go out in the front yard and wherever there was a harvester ant mound, you could very often find horned lizards, horny toads right around the harvester ant mounds or we'd see them running across the yard.

Unimaginable now.

Yeah, right.

Unimaginable now.

Right.

Totally different.

The only places that I've seen them now that are like that down at the Chaparral.

Whenever you take students down there.

Horned lizards common and other specific areas where you can find them up in the Panhandle.

I remember back in Comanche county, deleon was where most center of most of my summer activities when I was a young kid in the town.

You walk out into the back alleys and there was likely to be a horned lizard running down the back alley.

So this was in town.

Their scarcity now pure speculation on my well, it's not speculation.

It's a number of things.

It's not any one thing.

They're quail with scales.

There's so many different negative impacts that it's kind of the.

There's no straw that broke that camel's back.

It was a bale of hay that it was hauling around the whole time.

I have the same sort of experience and observations as yous a. I've never seen that many horned lizards anywhere.

I've never gone and said there's a red ant mound and looked around and kicked up three or four.

However, where they exist and the population seem to be fairly stable.

That is West Texas, the western Edwards Plateau, the Panhandle.

There are places and usually healthy grassland and savannah situations where it's not difficult to kick one up with some effort.

Few people, right?

Few people in a relatively natural looking ecosystem.

I could imagine if you were to have horned lizards, if there was a place for horned lizards to live within a city environment, cats would probably find that such an easy animal to catch and play with or I think it'd probably be pretty short on Nutrition.

Because there's all the skin and scales and stuff and not a whole lot of meat to it.

Right, right.

It's more of a play thing for the, you know, if I know anything about cats, it's not that they're gonna eat that lizard.

They're gonna just play with it, present it to you.

That's why you should keep your cats indoors, folks.

I don't care how, you know, not aggressive or not targeting wildlife.

You think your cat is.

They are.

They just wait till you're not looking.

Yep.

The other thing I thought about whenever you were mentioning growing up was the toads.

And one of the things I know is that Woodhouse's toads, if you're familiar with those, are not abundant anymore.

And they were at one time the most abundant toad that you came across.

They were like the Gulf coast toads that we see or the driveway toads that we see now.

Do you remember seeing Woodhouses toads growing up?

Yes.

Later, the toads that I played with as a kid might have been woodhouses.

In fact, they probably were.

I wasn't into identifying them at that time.

Yes.

I remember when my dad retired and they moved back to De Leon, there were Woodhouses toads, and I remember the toads that I played with.

I get all the little ones, but occasionally there was the big toads and much bigger than any valiseps you find around now.

So wood houses likely, given the habitat and the area.

Well, I assume that if you had horned lizards, you had healthy habitat, at least during that time.

And at that time, woodhouses were much more common.

Yep.

For whatever reason, they're not any longer in most of the range in Texas, but I do know that there's still a pretty healthy pocket of them around Denton area and going out sort of west from there.

I still haven't found them in that region, but I know of many observations and I just.

You.

You and I have had the conversations plenty of times what it was like 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, or to be able to get into that time machine and see what Texas was like 150 years ago.

The abundance of animals was much higher than it is now.

Francis Rose and Rick Manning and I have a coffee meeting usually every week.

Every.

Every time we have a chance at least once a week and we talk about that.

And not so long ago, you know, just a few decades ago, 30 years ago or so, getting in a car and do road riding and the number of snakes that you'd come across in a night's time on just Road riding were much higher.

Like you say, there are places now where you can go and experience a number of snakes at night.

Right.

But they are in the areas where there's few people, few cars, nothing's pristine anymore.

But it's more like a very natural part of the habitat as it was before very many humans got here.

So you have to go to those sites to find the numbers.

And even now, those numbers seem to be less than what you hear people talk about.

Yeah.

Talk about asking people, well, how abundant were they?

And they say, oh, they were just everywhere.

Well, did you see one every 30 minutes?

Or did you see one every hour?

Or did you see one a day?

And if you pin people down, it's finally, if you see one.

Oh, that's a lot nowadays.

It is.

Back then, what was it like?

Yeah, 100%.

And of course, like, when we're.

When we're young, we're not paying attention and we're not taking effort notes.

Right.

That would go along with all these observations.

There's no way of telling, but I think that kind of jumps into that concept that was that called sliding baseline syndrome?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

You know what?

You, in your life, notice the difference between when you were young versus now that you're older.

Me or say your grandson coming up is seeing what you're seeing at the tail end of your life is seeing at the beginning of theirs.

And then they'll see it continue in decline, but not be too alarmed about it because, oh, I see animals.

I see us see animals.

They're just not abundant like they once were.

What you experience in your lifetime is the norm.

Right.

You don't have any reference point to what was there before.

So that's.

Yeah, sliding baseline.

You know, I've got friends of very mixed backgrounds, political positions, and the way they just look at the world.

Some, you know, are folks that are in finance and look at the world through mostly economic lenses and investment lenses, and they get really interested in why.

Why are you so passionate, Romy, about, you know, this particular parcel of land or working where I work now, the Devil's River.

Why are you so passionate about protecting and preserving this particular site as opposed to anywhere else in the state?

And one of the reasons is, I think an answer that helps them in some ways is to say where we are today.

The impacts have hit so hard across the landscape, you don't see it.

You drive across the field and you see all this beautiful yellow grass, and I see KR bluestem that has invaded and.

And usurped from all the native grasses that were once there and the species that.

And so you look at things differently.

The reason that some of us in the conservation sector get so passionate about a particular parcel of land or preserving a ranch or whatever is because it may represent the last intact, ecologically healthy and sound peace remaining.

It's a vestige of a much larger landscape that is no longer here.

Precisely.

Right.

And it's way easier to preserve that which is already healthy and intact than it is to try to restore.

Yeah, restoration is.

Is a tough road.

A hoe man.

The cost is immense, you know, and that.

There you go, though, like, that resonates with someone that's more from that background.

Like, hey, this is why.

Because it is lasting.

To restore something else somewhere going to cost way more than this particular project.

I don't know if anybody's come up with a formula for restoration, but I probably have not read enough to get into it in terms of restoration.

But my thoughts always were.

People usually think of restoration as the cost of materials, the cost of the labor, and things like that to put into it.

If you think of it in terms of energy, some of that is not measurable.

Yeah, you pay a person for their labor, but do you have a good handle on how much energy is required and what energy they brought to it?

I mean, the sweat of their brow, what energy they brought to it and what it took to provide that energy.

So you're moving energy from one place they ate, you're importing it and lunch and supper over here, and they're working over there.

And while that may seem trivial in some things, it's a movement of energy.

And if you're having to grow plants to produce seeds to take over here, you know, there's all kinds of energy transfers that nobody thinks about.

So it'd be interesting if somebody could come up with a holistic formula.

What's the energy movement?

Yeah.

And where does that energy come from?

In addition to energy movement?

I think about uncertainty.

And, you know, someone in the finance field, I keep going back to this, but like, one of the things that scares folks or the investment field is uncertainty.

You want it when you're, when you're doing this sort of work, you want as much certainty as you can have so that you don't think that, you know, you put this much amount of dollars into this investment that, you know you're going to get some return on it as opposed to a loss.

And restoration has inherently built into it a lot of uncertainty.

Now you're talking about a farmer's life.

Exactly.

They had the uncertainty of what's the weather going to be like?

What's the weather, you know, what's the supply going to be for fertilizer for seeds was the cost.

I mean there's so much built into it.

Yeah, my, my sympathies.

Like we were talking before, my folks, you know, they were subsistence farmers, dirt farmers you might call them.

Not my dad, but my ancestry is from that.

Most of my ancestors were farmer.

I mean that's what it was.

They worked the land.

A farmer's life is one of uncertainty.

There's no getting around that looking at.

It back through that restoration lens.

The ranch where I spend a lot of my time was condemned for pipeline a couple years ago.

And they come through and they mow down everything that's woody and then they dig up and even in the land surface use agreement that we negotiated.

So hey, they're going to be very meticulous about layer of dirt and then putting, when they put the dirt back, it's going to go in that proper order and they're going to make good faith efforts to restore the grasses to the condition that they were pre disturbance.

However, beyond doing the practice of reseeding and following the agreement, the weather doesn't cooperate, the rain doesn't come at the right time.

Who knows where the seeds were sourced, Were they locally sourced or were they imported energy imported from Kansas or some other far off place that weren't acclimated to our climate.

So there's so much uncertainty inherent to this restoration practice that multiple years later now we still have a bunch of dirt, a few forbs and weeds growing and not very many clump blue stems and yellow Indian grass that was there dominant before, right?

Yeah.

Uncertainty like the drought that hit us here this last year has been really harsh.

Really, really harsh.

And drought is an emotional thing that only the people who work the land or who care for the land in various other ways can actually experience.

Most people that live in cities, drought impacts them because A it's probably hot, B they can't water their lawns.

See, there's talk about, you know, water resources but other than that I don't know that it impacts.

I may be wrong, but it's, it's an emotional impact when you walk out here.

One of the oddities that we saw this year, mistletoe was dying on the trees.

Trees Are stressed to the point that.

The mistletoe can't get enough nutrients.

I'm assuming that's why it was.

I have not talked to a botanist or plant physiologist about that, but that was my take on.

Now, not every tree, not every bit of mistletoe, but it was scattered around here.

And how long has it been since you saw dead mistletoe on a tree?

Right.

That's unusual.

Then you think about, okay, it's impacting those plants.

What is happening to the various and sundry animals that are having to find forage, water, all of these things, the pollinators, Very few flowers.

We have hardly any butterflies here.

And in good years we're covered with pipevine, swallowtail.

I don't know how many I saw this year.

Very, very few.

When you watch the details, it can be an emotional thing.

Yeah.

I was thinking about the.

That book, the Time it Never Rained.

Oh, yes.

Elmer Kelton.

Yeah.

There's a good book to jump into to kind of get a sense of what a novel that was written, I think, with a lot of experience from the drought of record in the 50s and the impacts.

And I guess this was probably based in the San Angelo area.

It was really good book to kind of get a sense of that culture, that time and the impacts of that drought.

The record.

Yeah.

And it takes the impact from the ranching industry right on up through the socioeconomic impacts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is a good book.

It's very, very much worth the read.

You.

You showed me.

And one of the things I always thought was so fascinating whenever I'd come into your office is that your entire wall was covered in books and you just had so many.

And maybe that's where I picked up this habit because now I have just shelves full.

I mean, my son's room, he's 19 now, going on 20.

And he's not up in his room often anymore because he's in college.

But I've moved some huge shelves into his room because I needed more space outside of my office, outside the living room.

You've read a lot, and that's a habit that you've helped ingrain in me, too.

What are some of the most interesting reads you've had?

Relative to wildlife, relative to Texas natural history, or even beyond that?

Well, of course, start off with Aldo Leopold's book, Sand County Almanac.

I love the Almanac, but the essays that come after it in the very volumes that are around that are available, particularly the Land Ethic.

Leopold.

I don't know how to say it.

He was an extraordinarily eloquent writer, but he could cram so much into so few words, and they were beautiful words.

It's not that they were spare words because his texts are well written and like I say, eloquent, not spare.

But there was so much true ecological fact crammed into those essays and some very poignant experiences that he had.

So Sand County Almanac.

I love that book.

Any of the biographies about Leopold is also good.

And taking that even further, pick a person that has been known in the past as contributing to wildlife or just gathering information about the natural world and get a biography about those people.

Whether it's John Muir, whether it's Humboldt, it doesn't matter.

These people that are recognized as being pioneers and anything related to wildlife, ecology, the natural world, is well worth reading about Charles Darwin, it doesn't matter.

Just pick a biography.

You may not be big on biographies, but you would be surprised once you get into an area that you're interested.

Well, if you're not interested in wildlife, then pick one of the pioneers in your own profession and read about those people, because if they've been recognized through these many centuries as being pioneers in the foundation of our knowledge, they are worth reading about.

So books like that, gosh, could go on, but I know you could.

Some of them are one that read not that long ago, a few years ago, Coyote America, which, since we were talking about coyotes, San Flores, yes, it is a book that will give you information that you never thought about, about what humans do to the natural world and the durability of certain natural elements of the world, coyotes in particular.

Books like that.

Right now I'm sitting here trying to think, which one do I want to mention about Texas history?

Of course, start with Vernon Bailey.

I like that about the natural aspect of Texas.

But if you're interested in Texas history, just go back and pick up some of the old journals.

Romer.

There's any number of them.

This part of Texas that we're in right now, sitting here near Gonzalez, is the heart of tremendous amount of Texas history.

And these are books that you can pick apart, say, well, I want to read about.

Do you have anything to say about San Marcos?

You can click through and find that not much about San Marcos.

Olmsted didn't think it was much, but.

Let me interrupt you there for a Second, I reread that book recently and when he was.

When he was riding his horse down from Manchak Springs down towards San Marcos, he talks about seeing these enormous white birds out in a pasture and the only thing he can be describing are whooping cranes.

Exactly.

That was my face too.

It is.

He might not have had much nice to say about San Marcos or maybe that's not the point.

He just omitted most of skipped over it pretty much.

But boy, that was a pretty cool observation.

It was back at a time when there was, you know, probably way more whooping cranes than there are now and certainly, you know, in the early 19th century.

But in some of these books you can go back, like Roemer, he was actually a geologist, but did a lot of natural history observations.

His descriptions of the country going from San Antonio up to Fredericksburg and then from there over to San Saba.

And you get the idea that, huh.

Well, Texas hadn't been settled that long and yet he could be describing the hill country as we see it.

I mean, in some of the descriptions of the hills.

And he described cedar breaks.

Yeah.

There's a lot of things that I think we're taught that, oh, well, cedar is basically a native invasive and it is now taken over so much more country than it ever was before.

That being true, cedars were here.

Cedars had their place.

Yes, they were.

They were everywhere.

So you kind of get a sense of how things have and have not changed.

So the older I get, the more I like history because I wish I had read those things earlier in my life.

There's nothing like that.

I wish I'd have known then what I know now.

I could have done a better job.

Well, you did an incredible job.

And I think that you're right.

You're hitting the nail on the head.

I see so much value in those early settlement era writings that they create an incredible and beautiful prose and a reference point to what once was.

As we're all working to try to understand, you know, what is a healthy landscape.

Yes.

And what is restoration?

What is the ultimate goal of restoration?

What are we restoring to?

You know, ultimately I think we understand man's fingerprints on everything.

And restoration may not be accomplishable, you know, to a long history point of reference, but it sure is nice to know what that point of reference might have been.

Yes, absolutely.

That's where we'll leave things for part one of my conversation with Dr. Randy Simpson.

But we're not done.

Not even close.

In part two, Randy and I settle a little deeper into the conversation.

The fire keeps burning, the coffee keeps flowing, and we keep following the stories wherever they take us.

And for those of you who've been waiting on those coyotes I mentioned at the beginning of the show, you're not going to have to wait much longer.

They make their appearance in part two and somehow at just the right moment.

So stick around or come back and join us for the rest of my conversation with my friend and mentor, Dr. Randy Simpson, on Modern Texas Naturalist.

Until then, stay curious.