Natural Features in Hays County
Texas·3 places
Nature
The Cedar That Is Not a Cedar
The dark, dense trees covering these hillsides are Ashe juniper, and they are not cedars. The name stuck because the wood smells like one. They are also not newcomers: juniper pollen appears in Central Texas sediment cores well back into the Pleistocene, and Ferdinand Lindheimer, botanising in this country in 1845, described wide cedar brakes along the Comal River.
Nature
The Dripping Springs
Dripping Springs takes its name from a set of small seeps that settlers found here in the 1850s, on a tributary of Onion Creek a few hundred yards north of this road. They still run, and they are a good illustration of how Hill Country water works.
Nature
The Golden-cheeked Warbler
Of all the birds in North America, one breeds nowhere but Central Texas. The golden-cheeked warbler is a small black and yellow songbird that nests in the juniper and oak woodland on slopes like these and nowhere else on earth. It is particular about the reason.
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.
