He brought me a plate. "It's on the house. These are too big to be Chinese shrimps." 'Shineese shreemps.' The alarm rang the next morning at four-thirty, and shortly thereafter, I was driving north. This vast Plateau, the far border between the Great Plains and the Desert Southwest, is dotted with ranches, dry-weather trees, quartzite quarries, and the Texas prickly-pear cactus.
Because it is early morning, and I am surely the first on this particular one-lane road, there are a fair number of white-tailed deer, steer, sheep, raccoons, and other assorted mammals out and about. The smaller of these, I had heard in Fredricksburg, are referred to as 'varmints.' This includes most small mammals, except the Brazilian Free-Tailed Bat, which consumes the worst of varmints in Austin. Worst means smallest in Hill Country. 'A glorious creature', according to two giggling ladies I met on the plane. They were off to a convention - The Council of Bishops and Elders of the Evangelical Orthodox Baptist Persuasion. The bats invaded Austin after a bridge was built that was to the particular liking of flying rodents.
I
had brought along some literarature on this subject, the largest collection
of urban bats in North America. I highlighted the following paragraph:
Samples
of their droppings collected at San Antonio contained remains of the
following insects: moths (nearly 90% of the total number of insects
eaten), ground beetles, leaf chafers, weevils, leaf beetles, flying
ants, water boatmen, green blowflies, and leafhoppers. A separate food
habits study showed these bats take small prey from 2-10 mm in length
and listed the following food items and proportions: moths (34%), flying
ants (26.2%), June beetles and leaf beetles (16.8%), leafhoppers (15%),
and true bugs (6.4%). T. brasiliensis often feeds on swarms of insects.
The huge summer colonies of these bats clearly would have a great impact
on nearby insect populations; they are estimated to destroy from 6,000
to 18,000 metric tons of insects annually in Texas.
I
am listening to the 'Lone Star Revival' radio station. "God's gonna
make you successful if you try. And God's gonna make you successful
if you try your darndest for him. He's our good lord and he'll make
you successful if you try."
The
song is harmonized by four or more, and brighter in tone than a John
Denver ditty, and when I pull into the Ranger Station, the attendants
nod, and wave me by. From here I walk into the hill country wilderness,
specifically over a series of well-tread pink granitic mounds known
as Enchanted Rocks. When I approached the wilderness, a gray bearded
man with yellow eyes approached me and began to speak about his travels
in the Pacific Northwest. This, I had been warned, is called 'visitin'-
the Texan propensity to chat.
'They
won't let you go, they just keep visiting with you and making it hard
for you to leave,' said the wise ladies of the Baptist persuasion, in
a side-note to our discussion on bats in Texas. I wanted to test this
on the first Texan who visited with me, to see if I could outvisit him.
I asked what he did. Web consulting, he said.
"But
that's not my real callin', you see. In 1981, The lord Jesus called
me."
"On
the telephone?" I said, thinking I can't believe I said that. "No, the
lord came to me when my wife and I were livin' out here in Hill Country,
he spoke to me."
)
){kind=link}