Buddy Hollis Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: When we left off earlier, we were talking about some of the interpretation that you provided for visitors to natural areas and let's hope that you might be able to fill us in a little bit more about the guiding and interpreting that you might do in these parks and preserves.

BH: Well, you, you, you take people around and you can--you got two choices: you can kind of work with them or try to spoon feed it all to them. By spoon feeding it all to them, I mean you can stop and say, "this is a 'so-and-so,' blah, blah, blah, and whatever," or you can try to get them to interact with you.

One of the things that I like to do is--is I like to get interact especially usually when you take a bunch of cub scouts or something on a hike; their mothers and fathers are with them.

And there's always some lady back there that "I don't know anything about the woods, I don't know anything about the woods, all I do is cook, cook for these guys, or blah, blah" and then you come up on a little tree down in the woods called Parsley Hawthorne.

And I love I know right where it is and its out of the way and I go over and pick it up and I pick a leaf and I say, "Anybody know what this looks like?" One of those women say, "Well that looks like parsley." I said, See, you do know more about the woods than these people do.

And you'd be surprised how automatically they're the ones that are inching up close to the front to listen to you next time because they see that its not all just completely strange. A birdcall; if you make a birdcall and you hear the; you hear a bird call for instance and you say, "What kind of bird is that?"

"Well that, that's an owl." "What kind of owl?" "I don't know." "Well what's he saying?" "I don't know." So you say, "Okay, lets see. Now that might be a Barred Owl you know, Barred Owl always asks a question he's real nosy" and they'll say, "Well, what's he; what's he asking, what's he asking?" He asks, "who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?"

They listen (mimics sound; hooting) and boy, I mean from then on, you got to wait about 15 minutes before the kids will shut up trying to do it. And then, but if, if you can get them involved, it really helps. And then you've got the problem always got one little kid that's real shy. He doesn't want to get involved.

He tries to hide, hang back; and then you find something that he's looking at real good and then you get him to talk a little about, about that, say something, you can usually get pretty well get them all in it.

And oddly enough, I have found out of all of the kids, the ones that are more fun to take in the woods are little Girl Scouts.

They are the ones that really are the most interested. They tend to work with you tend to work with you better and they're polite.

But it's, it's a lot of a lot of fun. With adults, you tend to get, usually you you, you try to get somebody that thinks they know more than anybody else and they start taking, telling stuff.

Well as long as they're telling stuff that's right, that's all right, but when they start telling stuff that's wrong, you've kind of got to correct them. And that usually does not help out too much.

Yeah, I remember at a Girl Scout camp over at Woodville, had some little Girl Scouts, and we were looking at some trees and this little girl, she must have been about eight years old, nine years old, and I said, "This is a Dogwood tree." And I started to walk off and I felt somebody pulling on my pants leg.

Little girl reached over and she just, "Sir, I don't think that's a Dogwood tree." I said, "Why don't you think it's a Dogwood tree?" She said, "It's just too darn big!" (Laughs)

And that very same trip, we had a, a snake zip across in front of us. It was a Hognose Snake, what we call a Puff Adder. And it was six people, six kids went after him; four of them were little girls.

I had more fun that trip trying to, trying to corral them and keep them going. They were going to catch that snake and it's it's still opportunity out there if you can educate the parents enough to bring the kids. That, that's the problem. They don't want to bring the kids.

One thing that's lucky at Village Creek though is Village Creek is on one of the best waterways for canoeing in Texas. So a lot of people come down there to canoe Village Creek and end up staying in Village Creek State Park.

And that way they get well I they get to be around some of the other stuff and they get a chance to see some of the other things that go on. But we are like I say, we definitely, definitely need a lot more to do work with with these kids because some of these kids are unbelievably smarter than I was at that age.

I remember we had a kid there was a spider in the woods called Golden Orb Weaver or a Banana Spider and it makes a big spider web. And its got sort of a zigzag spoke on it.

And we were walking down looking at some of that stuff and we were looking at the Orb Weaver and had a little seven year old boy and was real odd only only him and his daddy showed up for the hike that day and Jerry Rashall and I were boy, they had they had two of us leading them and little boy says, You know why that's got that zigzag on it?

We said, No, we don't. He said, Well I tell you I saw it on nature last night. We said, Okay, tell us. He said, That's because the sun shines through and bounces off of that and its like a light it attracts the bugs. Real reasonable.

So you can learn from the kids too. We found that out. But it's it's just wonderful seeing them out in the woods, but they just they don't get to do it as much as they should.

DT: I guess you take groups into the woods around year around is that correct?

BH: When they want to go.

DT: Are there things that you can typically see in the winter and some in the spring and some in the summer and some in the fall? Are there sort of characteristic things you look for at different times?

BH: Well, we try to we try to tell people, Okay, you you're in the park we use the park for an example. You're in the park now. Its April. Come back in two months, it'll be a different program, because things do change like that. The you might have different orchids in bloom.

We have lots of orchids up in this area especially. Different birds come through at different times. We've actually got winter birds, we've got summer birds, we've got migrating birds that just migrate through. We have nesting birds which just come this far north and nest in in the in the spring.

So we've got four just different casts of birds plus the ones that the fifth one that stays here year around. So there's always something different in the woods.

DT: You had mentioned just briefly that sometimes you learn from kids. And and I was wondering if if you could sort of elaborate on that. Clearly you teach the visitors a lot. But what do you get back from these visitors? What do you what do you in turn learn from them?

BH: Well one thing I learned that maybe maybe I'm not the smartest guy in the world. But I feel like I've done something when some little kid comes and grabs you by the leg and hugs you and says, Thank you sir. I learned that I've done a my good deed for the day.

But really you, a lot of these kids have questions. They are questions that I wouldn't think of. They are questions that they probably had no idea they were going to ask, it just all of a sudden pops into their mind. And its not necessarily about the animals or the birds in the woods.

It can be about something about the habitat or conservation that it just you know, they seem to we are in a position where we have heard almost all of this all the way before all the times before so we tend to just gloss it over. They haven't heard it before.

They're looking at it from a completely different view. So they've got some questions that they might ask about something or or why why doesn't this fish swim all the way up the river to the to Alaska or something.

And then you get to thinking, wait a minute, the kids don't realize about a dam, what a dam does or anything and you find out that the two-hour nature hike, which is how long they usually are usually we will go a little longer because that's just not long enough.

The these are little sponges here. You sprinkle a little water on them and boy they fill up and grow.

DT: We've been talking about education and and interpreting and guiding. I think one of the other ways you you've done this education is through festivals and and I was hoping that you could talk about the program that you got started, I think it was back in the late 80s called Wild Azalea Days.

BH: Well we have a place north of town on highway 1414 called Wild Azalea King and it was a Temple set-aside site because it was so unusual.

Its in a Longleaf Pine habitat and it is wild azaleas of which are actually Rhododendrons or a Rhododendron canescens to be exact Piedmont Azaleas this area here is part of a area that kind of stretches over from as far away as the Appalachians.

In fact, a lot of the Big Thicket is that way. The were at the western end of the Big Eastern, Great Eastern Forest is basically what it is. So we get a lot of things that are actually a lot of them skip through the Mississippi Valley, but are the same as the Appalachians.

And this is a beautiful flower and its left down in the some a fair amount of them are left down in the bottom of the valley now. A lot of them I remember I had a Dr. Trotti, who was my grandmothers first cousin about four or five years ago, not not long before he died he was going to tell me about Wild Azalea Canyon.

He says, Buddy, he said, When I was a kid, he says, I'm lying, he said, I wasn't a kid, it was only 71 years ago, he said that they they were growing all way up on a hill, which means they were about three or four hundred yards from where they were are now and he was telling me about how the people used to come out there back in the 20s and such and would camp up there and have picnics and things and then got back to trying to let people see it, but its a lot like everything else, people will come in there and with no thought for preservation.

Lot of times they will go in there and they will cut an arm full of them and take them out. And they're going fast too. And we don't know for sure what the is going end up now that Campbell Industries has taken over from Temple.

Temple was going in and cleaning out the areas around them trying to get them to expand.

But we our wild azalea sort of festivals you say what we call Wild Azalea Days is a little is a weekend here in town where the local flower club the Newton Flower Garden Club has their flower show and we have that in conjunction with their annual flower show in conjunction with Wild Azalea Days and a fair amount of people come in.

More and more people though come and go see the wild azaleas and leave and we never know they're there because there's nobody out there all of the time. So we don't know exactly how many people we have that come to see them.

DT: I guess about ten years later, there's another chapter in this effort to kind of promote a local ecosystem and that was when you learned about the Texas Parks and Wildlife's plan to have a, a birding trail and I was wondering how you tried to get Newton County involved in that?

BH: Well you met the, the lady that was here that opened the place up for us Susan Karpel, she is our volunteer spark plug for the town. And I mentioned that to her and is the, her and a lady Pam Wright they and their husbands own Whispering Creek Motel and Pam's just the same way as Susan is.

I talked to them and they jumped right on it. So we wanted to see what we could do. So we got in touch with Ted Eubanks and he was going to have a meeting and we invited him to come to Newton and then we invited the little towns around us to come.

And that's when we decided we would have a every other place evidently I don't know exactly how they pick the sites but we figured the people that lived in the area know the birding sites better than the people from somewhere else.

So we formed a last I heard during the, the operation of the birding trail committee back then, we were the only area that had a committee for it. Well we designed a birding trail, we picked the spots.

Jerry Rashall from Village Creek and I drove around and and measured the distance between all the spots and then we had the opening.

They had the first year of the Upper Texas Coastal Birding Trail had the birding oh I forget what they called it now the the contest over at Martin Dies State Park is where they started and then we managed to even get the American Birding Association a, a, a couple of years later came down and had their national convention in Beaumont.

And we set up a station down there and we had handed out all of our literature and stuff. And then we got together with Jasper and Woodville and got together and got with Ted Eubanks and we paid for a ecotourism survey to be done in the area.

And that's where I met his son-in-law not son-in-law his step-son, Seth Davidson, I don't know if you're familiar with him. He has a ecotourism business like Ted's. Last I heard he was up out of oh, somewhere up Sunray or somewhere up in the panhandle and he was doing that kind of work.

And I took him we went around to every spot in the Big Thicket and looked at different things and when he was getting the information for it. Now unfortunately in my opinion most everybody else's too we even had got through Seth we got a web site for the Deep East Texas Nature dot com, which was up here.

Were just a little too far off the beaten path for a lot of tourists and everybody that seems most people seem to be birding; put birding is their number one thing, not birding and fishing or birding and something else.

And when they come to Texas, they tend to want to go to the more exotic places, not come from New Orleans to East Texas and see just the birds from across the river with a Texas accent.

They it's we didn't we didn't do too good and like I told you earlier about it being hard to bird in this part of the state, that's another place that and then places like Kountze they had a East Texas they've got the Big Thicket Birding Festival, but they, to my opinion, they do it all wrong, they put people on a bus and take them to High Island when they're setting right in the middle of the Big Thicket.

They take them to High Island. People go to High Island and they might want to come up here, but they they don't do very good either.

DT: We're talking about efforts to try to bring attention to the local environment. I think that one other effort that you had besides the ecotourism venture is your role with the Big Thicket Association where you served on the, the board. Can you tell us about your tenure there and what the Association has been working on?

BH: Well the Association is trying to preserve as much of the habitat as they can. Unfortunately for our area up here, a lot of people say hey, we don't want anything to do with that. They don't even have any part of the Big Thicket in Newton County.

And basically if you notice they don't have any in Jasper County either except for a little part of the corridor of the Neches River. But the word is that there was aback when they picked the Big Thicket, they had sort of agreement, they, we wont pick anything east of the if ya'll agree to it, we wont pick anything east of the Neches River.

So some of the places like Newton County, which have a lot of stuff up we've got an unbelievable amount of specially mushrooms they're the only place they're found are right here in Newton County. Like I said, Geraldine Watson said that this is the treasure trove of the Big Thicket.

There are a lot of plants up and down Newton County that there's only one or two places they're known in Texas right here. The Sessile-leaf Bellwort, for instance, a lot of the orchids are gone now because once again, people don't think.

They say well that they're going to be here they're going to be gone so Ill dig them up and take them with me. And they we lose them.

The Big, the Big, the Big Thicket really now there they have a better chance to educate the kids than most of the others others of us do because they are more present in the schools and Leslie Dubey who is the I guess she's the head interpretive ranger that might be where title lives she does real good at that and Dave Baker that they used to head did real good at that.

And I don't know that how many people they have that just regular schedule interpretive tours I know that Merle King, before he had to retire from for physical reasons, he was giving programs like that. So that's one good thing about the conservation people in this area.

They tend to work together. Big Thicket needs something, they call around. Village Creek needs something, they call around. Newton needs something, we call around. If people have got it, it's it's there for the other one to use and it it works out real well.

DT: Well we've been talking about things that the Big Thicket Associations been involved with, I guess sometimes singly and sometimes in partnership with other groups. But I believe that one of the projects that the Associations been working on is is this blitzkrieg to go through the preserve and try to identify as many different species as possible. I was curious if you've been involved in that.

BH: No, I haven't been involved in that. That started probably what was it a year or so ago, two years ago. Well I had a stroke two years ago so I kind of took me out out of the picture for a while.

But I have some friends right down below me here in the county, Dave and Pat Lewis who are experts on mushrooms and different fungis and they are heavily involved in it.

But that see that's the way we just about got to do things nowadays because if you don't do it in a hurry, its probably not going to be there or there's a good chance it wont be there.

We're finding in South America and places there are no telling how many thousands of species are getting lost just because nobody had a chance to look for them or look at them before they cut the forest.

DT: Speaking of things getting lost, what what do you think the big pressures are on the, the local ecosystems whether its this Big Thicket National Preserve or or the area closer up here in Newton County?

BH: Money and taxes. That's the big thing. People have got to make a living. This is a poor, poor area. So they're going to make a living doing what they can. If its cutting the last of the trees, a lot of them are going to sell the last of the trees.

Taxes taxes are just way too high. I, a lot of this stuff that I've been talking about about people not being able to teach their kids, broken homes, parents I attribute basically to our government and our lifestyle because I see that when the family home broke up and the mother had to go to work and the kids were just left on their own, it just the fabric came apart at the seams.

I know I was very blessed when I grew up. My mother stayed at home with the kids, raised the kids until we were both out of school, then she went to work. Not because she had to, because she wanted to. Nowadays, both parents have got to work just to try to pay the taxes.

DT: What do you think about some of the other factors that II sometimes hear mentioned of I guess one would be the expansion of some of these metropolitan areas Beaumont and Orange sort of seeping out into southeast Texas. Do you see that as being a very big factor in fragmentation of the habitat?

BH: Yes, I do. Not so much for them just spreading out as them jumping out because there's so many areas you'll look around Orange, you look around Beaumont, you will see whole cities that were not there 20 or 30 years ago, that are really booming because everybody decided we want to get out of Beaumont.

This this little place looks good I'm going to build a house here. Then 10,000 other people decide they're going to build a house there and now you've got another big section of the woods gone.

My mother was born I don't know if you're familiar with the Lumberton area but the Big Thicket, right there where Pine Island Bayou comes into the Big Thicket my mother was born on in a little cut and run sawmill town there.

And now, of course, there's no sign of that sawmill town but I mean there is a huge city there and they're putting a strain on everything down there, not only pollution but people wanting to get out and run in the woods and do what they want to with their ATVs and other vehicles and they're just carving up the woods.

It doesn't doesn't take but one ATV to go through a sensitive habitat and ruin it.

DT: How does it do that?

BH: They just get off in there and do it. Its not legal, but they we caught several of them in Village Creek Park down there. They people just don't pay attention. And furthermore, don't care. There have been several times that people have actually destroyed, ...destroyed bird nests down there with four-wheelers just running back and forth across bird nests.

DT: What is this connection between the ATVs and the Canebrake Rattlesnakes?

BH: Oh well I was said the the interesting thing is Big Thicket Association, every two or three years has a Big Thicket science I forget what you call it it in Beaumont and at one of them I was listening to a biologist that worked with the Canebrake Rattlesnake talking about how the ATVs, how they Canebrake Rattlesnake needed large areas to hunt.

And the how the in the area where he was hunting that or was studying them that the ATVs had been running through there for a couple of weeks and said it just ruined it for rattlesnakes because rattlesnakes just you know, they're not going to stay around if they came of course a lot of people that would be a good good thing but Canebrake Rattlesnakes a beautiful animal.

DT: One one other development that I've heard people question and and and worry about frankly, is that is that source of damage to the habitat is these proposals for reservoirs that come up Fastrill and Rockland. Do you have any opinions or thoughts you can pass on about those?

BH: My opinion is we've got probably about 80 or 90 percent too many reservoirs now. Seems like every time somebody wants some more water, they want to put in a reservoir. If they want less water, they want to put in a reservoir to hold the water to keep it from going downstream.

If they need more, they build a reservoir. Its just everything we seem to do, we need to keep the corps of engineers employed and build a new reservoir. And it's ev--people once again it not thinking.

The prime habitat how many millions of acres of the best river bottom habitat in the world is underneath these reservoirs and we st--steadily building more. I understand they've had problems over with Martin Dies. They want to raise the lake from, for water for Houston.

Houston says they don't need any water. They don't want any water, but they want it for Houston they want to raise the water. I understand we, I don't know if how far its gone but if its a big project that take a lot of water out of Toledo Bend to send to Dallas.

But it seems like instead of conser, conserving water, seems like our big problem is people they think that its unlimited and we need to just keep providing water.

DT: We've we've talked about a whole variety of things from the habitat to the wildlife, to education about it and and to some of the threats that that concerns that that might be harming this areas.

I was wondering in retrospect and as you look back over the last 15 years where you've been actively doing this and I guess earlier as more of a hobby. What is it that that drives you to to teach people about nature and to guide them toto see these special spots in nature?

BH: I guess its I guess I can trace it back to my dad. He always taught me that he taught now we were hunters and we were fishermen. He taught me you don't kill anything unless its really bothering you or you you going to eat it. You care for it.

Just like every time I had a dog, he says I don't care he said, you you've got that dog he said, I don't care if that dog turns out to be the meanest or the sickest dog in the world, he's yours. You take care of him. He is your responsibility.

The whole worlds our responsibility. And I guess that's what its grounded in and I thank him for it.

DT: And how would you explain this to some of the kids that go on your field trips? What this means to you and maybe what it should mean to to them?

BH: Well basically I try to show them that its not out there to harm you.

Its out there to help you in sometime try try to explain a little bit about, you know even even the bug that's boring in the tree how it helps you and how that rotting tree there, if it wasn't for some of these bugs and things it wouldn't rot and the other trees wouldn't have a fertilizer for it and that snake wouldn't have a place to hide and get the mice that you don't like and things like that.

And it and it is all a chain it's all connected. And you break one link of that chain and you're in trouble.

DT: You've taken kids and adults to to many beautiful spots in East Texas and and probably elsewhere. Is there other place in nature that that you can recall that that means a great deal to you just as a place to seek out to for that kind of feeling of solace or rest or trying to reconnect with with with nature?

BH: Yeah, I would if I could get there. You cant get there anymore. It was over in Bartonville. It was down the hill behind my grandmothers house. Little big, big U shaped bend in little Cow Creek.

It was always cool down there and the birds were singing and you could sit I remember when I was a kid, I used to sit there and fish and sometimes Id pick up my line, wouldn't have any bait on it. No telling how long the bait had been gone.

I was sitting there sitting there with a empty hook in the water, but I, I, I just cant ever forget that and was a deep cold creek and now they've cut logs and thrown the tops in and its silted in. Cant get through the timber company properties to get in there and from from other directions. Its just the lost world.

DT: Well I think we've sort of drawn to a close here. Isis there anything you'd like to add?

BH: I cant think of anything.

DT: Well thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

BH: I appreciate you coming up here and seeing our little niche of the world.

DT: Yeah, the what we call it the ark of North America. Thanks for being our tour guide. I appreciate it.

BH: Well, you're welcome and come back and see us sometime when you walk down Wild Azalea Canyon and see the flowers blooming.

DT: I would like to see that.

[End of Reel 2432]

[End of Buddy Hollis Interview]