Three jackrabbits and a cardinal

March 5, 2015 blog -

As I was sitting behind the Seminole Canyon State Park Headquarters building trying to send an email to the blog list, about 4: 15 p.m. yesterday, what had been a beautiful, fairly warm, sunny day suddenly turned nasty. The wind came up from the north and the late afternoon turned dark and cold. We hurried back to the Airstream, took a quick shower, and then hunkered down for a stormy night. The wind howled and about 7 p.m. the rain began. We had to close off both the back and the mid section of the Airstream so that our Dyson heater could try to keep the front living area warm. It was a losing battle. The best it could do was keep the temperature in the mid fifties. We cuddled up under our blankets, watched a movie, and then went to bed with the heated mattress pad to keep us warm over night. 

This morning it was COLD. Okay, not below freezing cold, but in the upper 30s. But, by 10 a.m. the sun began to make an appearance and the wind began to abate. At about 10:30 we hit the trail and the desert looked as clear as we have seen it in many-a-day. 

The Middle Fork Trail was muddy in parts with standing water in some of the ruts. We saw 3 jackrabbits and one cardinal. We saw a lot of other birds, but none that we could identify. I don’t have any pictures of the jackrabbits - they are very fast - and that’s too bad because one looked to be about three feet tall; it was huge!

Water in the desert.

The view from our campsite.

Sotol plant. Kevin told us that Archaic People used the stalk as a spear in hunting and would dig away the prickly fronds to expose a bulb at the core of the plant. If the bulb is roasted for two to three days it makes a nutritious food.

Bake oven used by the Archiac People.

At the Park Headquarters this afternoon we visited the exhibits that showed a lot of what Kevin had talked about the first day we were here and went on his tour of the rock shelter and viewed the pictographs. Of course, all of what is shown is speculation but it is based on archeological research.

At the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago, nomadic hunters came from Asia over the land bridge to become the first Americans. Passing between mountains of ice, these hunters discovered a huge grassland that extended from Canada to Mexico along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains.

This is how they think the landscape of southwestern Texas looked about 10,000 years ago.

At this prehistoric time, the plentiful water at the junction of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande attracted a variety of wildlife into the steep-walled canyon. Some of these species, like the mammoth, the ancient camel, and the massive bison, are now extinct. Others, like the jackrabbits that we saw this morning, have survived.

By 8,500 years ago climatic change had established the present dry character of the land. Trees like the pine, juniper, and oak retreated to higher elevations in nearby mountains. People who had once relied on large game animals for their needs now had to depend on other resources for survival. This is a depiction of how the people 

 living in the rock shelters hunted. Notice the net that the hunters are driving the jackrabbits toward. These nets were made from the ocotillo plant.

This rock shelter scene depicts a family group engaged in subsistence activities. Adults teach the young skills necessary for survival. The shelters protected them from extremes of heat and cold and were used time and again over thousands of years. Each group must have remained small, perhaps 10 to 12 individuals; otherwise they would have over-taxed local resources.