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Texas Today: A Sea of the Wrong Grasses

2010; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3368/er.28.2.112

2573-0789

Forrest S. Smith,

Plant and fungal interactions

“In the ’60s when I bought this place and moved here from Houston, we had so many quail that you didn’t even need a bird dog to find them,” mused my 85-year-old hill country neighbor. “Then,” he paused, his satirical glance drifting toward the mantle to a dust-covered 20-gauge double-barreled shotgun and a faded John Cowan Print of a quail hunt on a shin oak mountaintop of the Texas hill country, “by the early ’80s, the quail were gone.” “Well,” I interjected in a smug biologist’s refrain, “what changed?” “Hell, I dunno, but just before that time everybody planted all the maize fields to coastal (bermudagrass), and that damn KR bluestem came in from the highway when they redid it.” “I’ll bet that’s part of it,” added the old man. What ran through agronomist Nick Diaz’s mind on a hot, dry Gulf Coast summer day in 1939, when he first laid eyes on the maroon, glistening seedheads of Dichanthium annulatum growing in a King Ranch pasture, was probably a lot different than what raced through mine on April 26, 2009. As the one who first noticed the accidentally introduced African grass, and the one who helped select, increase, and release what would come to be known as Kleberg bluestem, Mr. Diaz had high hopes for transforming dried up, grass-poor ranges into lush seas of grass. He probably envisioned pastures full of fat cattle and a buffered annual bonus check, courtesy of this grass that could grow so well, and so aggressively, in the hellish windblown sands and cracked black clays of the Wild Horse Desert of south Texas. Today’s biologists look upon Kleberg bluestem, and its African, Asian, and Australian grass cousins brought to Texas, with a nauseating suspicion of an ecological nightmare. It is akin to a viral pandemic, swallowing up chunks of what few can accurately describe with words, few thoroughly understand, but what used to be waves of bluebonnets and paintbrushes in the spring, crimson stands of native prairie grasses in the fall, and carpets of yellow flowers interspersed by funny looking grasses whose seeds stick in socks and shoestrings. The native Texas landscape is disappearing before our eyes, under a sea of the wrong grasses. What ran through my mind on April 26, 2009, when I saw those maroon seedheads blowing in the breeze alongside U.S. 183 was much different than what Nick Diaz must have pictured in 1939. I wondered aloud what the hell a grass that I work to rid south Texas of on a daily basis was doing on a highway right-of-way in one of the most rural counties of central Texas a hundred miles from where it ever grew in the past. In my 20 years of being a plant maniac, and my father’s 40 of ranching, we’d never seen it here before. Scarier still, those ripe seeds, like a pandemic land virus, ended up washing down two different creeks in the six inch rain we had two days later. I didn’t envision a pasture full of cattle, but in my mind’s eye, I can imagine one further void of quail, with fewer wildflowers and all the things that make the native Texas landscape special. I bet that my father and I will see more Kleberg bluestem again in central Texas, and I suspect that my grandchildren will see more of it than I care to imagine. If action isn’t taken now, there’s a good chance that what’s left of the Texas rural landscape will be a sea of the wrong grasses.