Nature Notes
Why do rattlesnakes rattle and hummingbirds hum?
How do flowers market themselves to pollinators?
Why do tarantulas cross the road?
Nature Notes investigates questions like these about the natural world of the Chihuahuan Desert region and the Llano Estacado every week. Through interviews with scientists and field recordings, this Marfa Public Radio original series reveals the secrets of desert life.
Join host Dallas Baxter on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7:45 am during Morning Edition and 4:45 pm during All Things Considered. New episodes premier on Thursdays and replay on Tuesdays. Episodes are written and produced by Andrew Stuart and edited by Marfa Public Radio and the Sibley Nature Center in Midland, Texas.
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The story was repeated dozens of times in the 19th century, from the Carolinas to California: lands and resources promised to Native Americans in treaties… -
“Oh, how I wish I had the power to describe the wonderful country as I saw it then.”James B. Gillett entered West Texas in the 1870s, as a Texas Ranger.… -
As a return to air travel accelerates, some remember its conveniences, others its hassles. There are also surprising moments of beauty from the air. A… -
On the prairies and deserts, in the cities and towns, sweet bursts of melody are announcing spring's arrival in West Texas. As the poet Gerard Manley… -
At the threshold of West Texas, where the waters of the Pecos and Devils rivers mingle with those of the Rio Grande, and the Chihuahuan Desert blends with… -
“Febrero loco y marzo otro poco” – “February is crazy and March a little more so” – a popular saying in Mexico and the borderlands has it. There are… -
“You can never hear enough sound of wind in the pines,” the writer Gary Snyder says in a poem. It's like a vast breath, enthralling as crashing surf. In… -
It is – to put it mildly – a fraught history. Thousands of Native American burials were exhumed in the 19th and 20th centuries, by white scientists and… -
It's a time in the Earth's history that speaks clearly to our own. The Eocene Epoch began – some 56 million years ago – with massive greenhouse gas… -
Our region's Native American legacy endures in communities and living cultural traditions – and in countless emblems and traces on the West Texas…
