Nature
Cave Swallows Under the Bridges
The small square-tailed swallows nesting under these highway bridges were, until recently, a rarity confined to a few limestone caves and sinkholes in the Texas Hill Country and Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s they discovered that culverts and bridge underpasses imitate a cave mouth well enough, and the population exploded across Texas and beyond — one of the clearest cases anywhere of a bird…
Nature
The Bastrop Fire and the Pines Coming Back
In September 2011, at the end of the worst single-year drought in Texas history and with a tropical storm's winds behind it, fire burned about 34,000 acres of this pine forest and more than 1,600 homes — the most destructive wildfire the state has recorded.
Nature
The Colorado at Bastrop
This crossing is old — a ford on the Camino Real, the Spanish road between San Antonio and the Louisiana settlements, chosen because the river runs over a firm sand and gravel bottom here instead of the mud it carries further down. The banks are lined with bald cypress and sycamore, and the pines come down almost to the water, which is an unusual combination this far west.
Nature
The Colorado at Smithville
The river here runs on sand rather than clay, and that change is the beginning of something: the highway is entering the belt of deep sandy soils that supports the isolated pine forest a few miles ahead. Sandbars, clear runs and a bottom of loose quartz grains distinguish this reach from the muddy Colorado further down.
Nature
The Lost Pines
A stand of loblolly pine grows here about 100 miles west of the main East Texas pine forest, separated from it by prairie that pines cannot cross. The reason is underfoot: the Carrizo Sand, a band of deep, porous sand that outcrops in a stripe running northeast across the state, holds enough water in a drier climate to support a tree that otherwise needs the rainfall of the Piney Woods.
Nature
The Sandy Country at Buescher
The rolling, sandy, pine-and-oak country here is the eastern lobe of an isolated forest sitting about a hundred miles west of the main East Texas pinelands. The deep sand holds enough moisture through a dry summer to keep loblolly pine alive in a climate that is otherwise too dry for it, and the low hills are the eroded edge of that sand formation rather than anything structural.
Nature
Where the Houston Toad Actually Lives
The endangered toad named for Houston has not lived there since about 1970, and this sandy county is its last real stronghold. It needs two things that rarely occur together: soil loose enough to burrow into and stay damp through a Texas summer, and shallow ponds that hold water long enough in late winter for tadpoles to develop but dry out before fish can colonize.
Nature
Where the Sand Gives Way to Clay
The soil changes over a short distance along this stretch, from the loose sand that supports the Lost Pines to the dense dark clay of the Blackland Prairie approaching Austin. That single change decides almost everything visible from the road — which trees grow, whether water sinks in or runs off, what was farmed and what was grazed, even how the fences sit.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
