Tompkins: South Texas is a wonderland of wildness and wildlife
Other than the tick I could feel crawling on the back of my neck and the slight stinging of a half-dozen thorns festering in my hands, the late afternoon was a sensory delight.
Tucked tight against the base of a live oak and hidden by shadows and a screen of leafy, thorny limbs nipped and cobbled together from surrounding brush, I had a front-row seat for a singular show with multiple acts playing out simultaneously on the South Texas sand, a stage unlike any other.
Here, you can see and experience wild things found in few other places. There is a reason some call the southernmost wedge of South Texas "The Last Great Habitat."
Before me stretched a slightly rolling landscape, a mosaic of woods and grasslands. The woods were a mix of dense stands of short trees and brush, mostly live oaks but also mesquite and ebony and lotebush and other such thorny vegetation. The grasslands held a knee-high sea of bunch grasses dominated by little bluestem but also uncountable varieties of other plants.
The pungent scent of one of those plants - Texas lantana, a low-growing shrub that produces riotous clusters of small red/orange flowers - mixed with the sweet smell of fresh, new grass was as detectable on the tongue as it was by nose.
In the late afternoon sunlight, the April breeze-ruffled heads of acres of bluestem fairly glowed a neon-like purple and gold.
In the impossibly blue sky over the patch of that prairie a pair of Harris's hawks cruised, sailing close enough that I could see the chestnut brown on their shoulders and under their wings.
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