Bill Sheffield Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: Dr. Sheffield we in our previous tape, we talked about animals and vegetation and interplay between exotic species and natives. And I was hoping that on the second tape we could talk a little bit about your research and management activities on various private lands and public lands.

I thought perhaps we could start by talking about the time you spent working for Humble Oil and Refining where they had lands I believe in Louisiana and East Texas over 300,000 acres, I think, where you were in the late fifties and into the sixties and you were a Forester and Land Manager for them. What sort of issues did you come across? What kind of work did you do while you were there?

BS: Well in Louisiana, it's a different breed of cat than in Texas. And Louisiana for years was what they had called open range. There they didn't have restrictions on the public using the land. You could stop your car anywhere and walk out in the woods and go hunting and it was not fenced and on those lands all over there were ownowned by private entities.

They had, they were used by the public so it's kind of a unique situation as compared to Texas. But where lands are open to the public with no restrictions, we were suffering, you can suffer detriment from timber theft, wildfires, over-hunting, and that could occur here except for the laws that make ownership more private.

Private ownerships - they, the land doesn't have the ecological protection that it does on lands owned by governmental entities. Usually lands owned by governmental entities, the decision for their use, and, is made by people who are trained in agriculture or wildlife science or rain science or something to that effect so that they can protect the land and then they're supported by laws, federal and state laws.

There're not as many federal and state laws that are applicable to private lands with the exception of some such as the Endangered Species Act, where no matter whose land it is or where you can't cause anything to adversely affect endangered species. So there's more protection on private land, I mean on fed on governmental protected government land.

There is less protection in some areas on private lands. Those kinds of things are the differences. There's a matter overriding. There's a matter of personal concern for the resources. Some people, regardless, want to protect their lands and they value our living, native resources, and they do what they need to to protect them, and they find out what they need to do.

If they don't know they hire people who do know to manage their lands or establish management practices that will protect our native resources. There are other people who couldn't care less, and there are other people who might care if they knew anything about it, about how to do it. So those are my experiences with respect to public, private lands in two different states.

DT: You've been called in from time to time as a consultant to help with wildlife and land management, questions on private lands in the hill country. And I was curious if you could sort of give us examples of why somebody calls you and what you do when you go there? What sort of reaction do you get from the advice you give them?

BS: Well I'll give you one example and it has to do with anthropocentricism, I guess, someone who's more concerned about his pleasures than protecting the resources of - a man who was a business person in San Antonio acquired some property near Pipe Creek, Texas, near Bandera.

And he called me and he said I've got livestock and he said I want to stock some exotics and he said I want you to come out and look at my place and tell me, he said I particularly want black buck and I want you to tell me how many black buck I can have. That was his general question. So I go out there and we tour the land and it looked more like it was growing rocks than forage.

It was literally denuded practically just with his livestock and his native deer, and I told him that and he said well how many exotics can I put on here, I mean how many black buck? And I said well sir, if it was my land, I wouldn't put any. He didn't like that.

And what I've found in a lot of cases, attitudewise among people who have land like that is that they have an idea of what they want to do and what they want and if you go out as a professional and tell them something that's not in line with their ideas, either you don't know what you're talking about or they don't want to listen to you. Now that's not a real common case, but I've had that experience.

So and people just they just think about themselves and how they want to enjoy critters and have those critters and they don't think about all the ecological implications. They don't plan, they don't, you know, to see what is appropriate, what will take care of the land and yet let them have at least some of what they want.

There's another example of where a lot of absentee landowners in the state now, I think there are getting to be more of them, that buy a piece of land and stock it with livestock in order to enjoy the agricultural exemption from taxation on that land.

And they stock more and more in addition to say our native animals, deer, that land becomes overpopulated and it's the land is somewhat degraded, becomes degraded and it's all in the interest of reducing taxes. I'm bitter about those things (laughs).

DT: I think that you had also worked for state agencies on public properties, and one that I understand you did an inventory on was in the area that includes Caddo Lake. And I was hoping that you could tell the story of that inventory and how sometimes private property interests, government interests, can affect a publicly owned asset like Caddo Lake.

BS: Well that project started, it was administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a couple of major businesses, and one in Dangerfield, Texas where the headwaters of Caddo Lake Caddo Big Cypress Bayou empty - came and then emptied into Caddo Lake and then on into Red River at Shreveport, Louisiana.

Some of these private companies conceived of the idea that they would like to have Big Cypress Bayou channelized so they could get commercial traffic, barge traffic, and what have you into their areas of business and it really, you know, Caddo Lake is probably the only natural lake left in the entire State of Texas, and it really got a lot of environmentalists up in arms.

And so the Corps of Engineers was required to do a study to determine the impacts and they hired Parks and Wildlife. They had a contract with Texas Parks and Wildlife and they in turn hired me to do a ecological recognizance to establish what's there in the way of plant and animal species and then there was some backfire.

Some of the landowners said well if we can't be involved and reap the benefits of jobs and what have you from this channelization, prescribe something to us that will augment that. So we said, well you could lease lands for hunting, you could begin to manage your lands in such a way as to make them more productive.

And so there was a proposal written to address those things and then there were other ancillary things such as setting up a school to teach you environmental concepts and advise people on as to how they might manage their lands in a productive but yet environmentally sound way.

Those kinds of things were created out of this project. And I'm not sure where it is right now, that's quite - I left that pro - I finished that project in about 1969 so I haven't kept in touch. But at least one thing they did was stop the channelization of Big Cypress Bayou. That was eliminated.

DT: What were some of the and (misc.)

DT: When we left off, we were talking about Caddo Lake and this reconnaissance that you did and that fortunately the channel was not approved. But what were some of the major natural assets that you found in the Caddo Lake Basin and what were the some of the concerns, some of the impacts that you were worried about?

BS: Well it has a minimum of urban development. It's farm land, a lot of it, pasture land. There was there were nice wildlife population and quite a diversity of native species which encouraged the Bayou is quite scenic as well as Caddo Lake. It offers a lot of good fishing, fishing resources.

So it's a wonderful natural area, and it's valuable because there's not another ecosystem like that in the State of Texas, and we wanted to protect that, and channelization would have gone right down to the middle of it. And so there would have been a lot of changes in wildlife use, fisheries particularly,

and probably in some land uses, and concerned every conservationist in the country, and they all fell upon that and had their input, and then coordin - cooperation with a local senator who favored protecting the resource. And at that time, even Ann Richards was governor and she even came up there for some meetings.

It was and we had a lot of positive input that, very refreshing to me, favored the resources and we were able to put all that together and present a program that would help augment any losses or at least a lot of the losses of salaries and incomes and jobs by doing other things that were less environmentally detrimental, but they would also produce income.

DT: What was the concern about? Was it the channel itself or was it the barge traffic or tug boats?

BS: Well it would have caused drainage, for one thing, of Caddo Lake, a lot of drainage. And then there was the disturbance of the res - of the areas that the lake that the Bayou transected and the actual development of the thing, probably pollution would have been introduced into the lake from various sources.

That country one thing we noticed all through that country there are trailer houses and small homes and producing trash and what have you and dumping it into the bayous and the tributaries and we came up with a way to get that reduced, protection.

So by going through that system and taking a look at it and seeing what was there and reporting what was there and suggesting activities that could that would that could be a tradeoff between complete destruction and production, we were able to protect the resource.

DT: You've given us some examples of the kind of work you've done for Humble Oil and Refinery and for private landowners in the hill country and, you know, some of these public lands that include Caddo Lake and also the private properties that have bought it. And in all these cases, you've spent time in the field.

And I think in some regards that kind of field biology experience is an unusual one as more and more students do lab research and maybe computer simulations and so on. I was wondering if you could explain why you've taken that tact, and why perhaps many students of nature sort of taking the other track and what the consequences might be.

BS: Well by comparison with students today who are who use who are computer-wise and use a lot of electronic and technical equipment, we didn't have that in my day (laughs). You know, about the fanciest thing I could use was a mainframe at LSU where I did some of my initial graduate studies and we'd use punch cards and then we'd take them over to the mainframe and that was as close as we got to our PCs now.

And another thing is about the fanciest piece of equipment I had as a field biologist living in the field and stationed in small towns was a Monroe Calculator (laughs). We didn't have computers. So we didn't have that equipment and we didn't we spent more time in direct contact with the resources. We spent less time developing models that so we could approximate what was going on.

We got out into the field and we learned technique, and we learned first hand how to manage the resources. And at the university level, for example, I went to school in at LSU in Louisiana in the fifties, early fifties, and there weren't the students there then. You know, at LSU there were about 10,000 students and we thought that was a whale of a number of people.

You know, now there are about forty some odd thousand. So these students don't get the benefit, I don't think now, of being able to get into the field and labs and what have you and learn the practical applications of their technical knowledge because there are so many they just they can't go to the field with 150 students.

You know, in the lab we had six (laughs), so we were constantly in the field. As students, we worked from the waterfowl areas in Stuttgart, Arkansas all the way to the Louisiana marsh all the time, and when we got out of school, we knew what we were doing. We didnt have to then learn how to apply our technical knowledge.

DT: Can you give us some examples of field studies that you did whether it's transects or surveys or banding efforts, anything that might have taken you in the outdoors?

BS: Well I think I touched on it earlier when we were talking about nutria in the Louisiana marsh. I had a course in marsh ecology and like I said, our professor was trying to create a market for those animals or some way to control their populations. So we would go to the marsh and stay at the Federal Rockefeller Refuge where they had a dormitory for students and we would go into the field

and we would trap species of marsh animals - nutria, otter, muskrats, raccoons. We would bring them back to the vet school at LSU and examine them for endo/ectoparasites determine what diseases they might harbor, and we learned to trap, and we learned to necropsy animals and do a good bit of lab work. That's an example.

DT: Well tell me about trapping and how youd lay out your traps and what kind of traps you'd use.

BS: Well the thing of where we were, there were a lot of canals in the marsh where we worked a good bit. And so we would use boats with small motors and go through the canals and then get out on the levies and walk out into the marsh and set trap lines every so often.

We would determine the acreage that we wanted to cover for the area we wanted to cover and then we had our traps, and we determined the percentage of that area we covered and interrelate that to what we could expect in a large area of the marsh as in the way of population, populations of the species. And we learned to stretch pelts (laughs)

and we learned a lot about the Cajuns in the Louisiana marsh (laughs) and how to be diplomatic with the landowners. Give you an example, I went to after I got out of school, and shortly after the company that was headquartered in Houston sent me to Louisiana, to acquire leases from people who were squatting on our lands, who had never had to do that. And they were suspicious and they didn't want to sign anything.

So to give you an idea of good old field biologist thinking, went to the local priest, most of that country where those people were catholic and explained my problem, told him what I needed to do to just get these people to sign a tenancy agreement. So he goes with me and all those people who wouldn't sign up, signed up immediately (laughs). So that was an example of practical application of experience.

DT: So this was before stock laws, I guess...

BS: Yeah, yeah, that was in those days they had what they call open range. Anybody could and the company at that time wasn't concerned with the service of the land. They were concerned with their mineral production and their mineral interests

and they just let the land squatters came in and set squatted on the land, built their homes on the land, cut the timber and sold it, put livestock in the woods, cattle and hogs and just used it as though it were theirs.

Well then when taxes increased and value of land increased to the point where the company realized that they could make some money from the surface of the lands primarily by through agricultural means, forestry, farming, wildlife management and so forth, then they began to tighten up on the use of the lands and began to be more concerned about squatters.

In Texas, it's a problem, in Louisiana it wasn't. A person would have to squat on the land for a number of years before they could make any kind of claim. But in Texas, they have a shortage of five years statute in those days, I guess they still do, where someone could go in and put a fence around a piece of land and put a cow or two in it and go to a lawyer and get him to fix out a deed

and then start paying taxes on the land and then in five years, he could own the surface of that land and so Humble and the oil companies were particularly concerned about bringing their lands under management in Texas and then later in Louisiana.

DW: Before we leave the Louisiana marsh, you say it's the early fifties this time and it's Humble Oil. As part of your training, were you shown what's now a very famous documentary film called Louisiana Story made by Humble Oil about were you shown that film at the time or do you recall that?

BS: Yeah was that the one where they interviewed Dan Lay and Jim Teer?

DW: It was an old black and white film made in the forties.

BS: It's familiar to me but boy, that's been years ago. I went to work for Humble in 1955 and left them in fifty 69 to come to the graduate school at AandM.

DT: You had said that you, as David mentioned, were spending time in Louisiana in the marsh studying animals, but I was curious as somebody who has this formal training from LSU and later from Texas AandM, if you also learned about the wildlife from the people who lived there, some of these Cajuns and Creole people living there?

BS: Yeah, we learned a lot. I learned from trappers.

DT: What did you learn?

BS: Well I learned their lifestyle, the way they lived and their history, how industrious they were, how self-sufficient they were. The history of the Cajun, the Acadian is very interesting in Louisiana. They and that's another story. But those people are very self-sufficient and early on, they stayed in the marsh.

They made everything they needed. I have a duck call that was made out of a pocket comb and a piece of cane. They made their own boats, their canoes; they made their own traps, they ate just about everything in the marsh (laughs). They were kind of like feral hogs, they would eat anything.

And but some of that cooking was something else. And so I learned about the people. I learned diplomacy. I learned how to deal with people and how to go on land and try to sell them into taking better care of it, and it pretty well has paid off.

DT: Well maybe you can explain how you do convince somebody to take better care of their land, whether it was fifty years ago in Louisiana or, you know, more currently when you go to consult with somebody in hill country?

BS: Well I'll give you an example of what we talked about in Caddo Lake Project. We proved to people using an early version of this model I was telling you about, how they could make appreciably more money from leasing for deer hunting and consequently taking care of their land so it would support deer than they could from their cattle operations. There was no overhead in taking care of deer.

They were enhancing their land and we had an agricultural economist at AandM calculate, for those times, the net profit from a cow on a piece of land up in that piece of country. It was twenty-three dollars by the time they paid everything and all the medicines and they did all these things.

From deer, they could lease the land for four dollars an acre, which is paltry by comparison with what land is leased for in the hill country. In fact, they sell the animals by the animal now and not necessarily by the acreage. At four dollars an acre, as I recall, we proved to the landowners they could make around 1600 dollars a season from deer leasing,

as opposed to well twenty-three dollars an animal, and the average stocking density was about fifteen animals if you kept within carrying capacity. So it showed that you can make more money from managing wildlife, but if you manage both properly, you can make even more money.

DT: So many times, it was kind of an economic argument that you made rather than an ethical argument.

BS: Economic and demonstrating to them that proper care of the land will ultimately increase the value of land and improve the quality of the habitat so they'll be more productive. (misc.)

DT: Dr. Sheffield, you've worked in various parts of the state on different kinds of wildlife, different kinds of ecosystems, and I was wondering if you could give us kind of an overview of what you've seen and that how things the condition of ecosystems in Texas, how they've changed and how attitudes about natural systems have changed.

BS: Well I'm concerned because with more and more development, there's more and more habitat loss. So and we're losing species pretty rapidly. They're declining - a lot of species are declining with human development and human activity and land use practices such as large areas, grasslands that are exotic, grasses only good for cattle. So I'm concerned about the future for wildlife.

I think they're declining because of human activities. I think humans exist at the expense of all other higher forms of animals because we're just using more and more, more and more of the earth, and as our population increases, and that concerns me. And I don't see - I shouldn't be negative - but I don't see a lot of improvement in that respect.

I think there are more and more entities and probably more and more individuals that are concerned about the resources and that's a kind of a diverse response to what I just said but whether they can have the influence, whether people concerned about the resources can have sufficient and strong enough influence to overcome our concern for making money and developing areas and things like that,

I think it looks pretty bleak. I am encouraged by the fact that people are more knowledgeable about what's needed, and it could be that some point at some point in time, we can have some amount of what's left of our native resources.

DT: Do you see it as mostly a problem of just sheer numbers of people? I mean, I remember you said that there are many problematic exotic animals, but that humans are the worst exotic.

BS: Correct, we get concerned - you know, the average livestock man, a good one, he knows, he realizes the importance of maintaining his animals within the capacity of the land resource to support them. We biologists know that its not good to have an over-population of deer.

The deer suffer and the habitat suffers, but we don't apply the same principles to ourselves, and there are too many taboos, too many concerns and beliefs about human population and human control population control, and unless that comes about, unless we begin become very conscious about human population control, I think other resource, the wildlife resources, are in trouble.

DT: Well do you think it's principally that, just the sheer number of people or is it also the level of consumption that (inaudible)?

BS: Well the sheer number of people are the root of the problem. We're - our shortage of gas and our increase in the cost of gasoline is a classic example of using a resource. It's finite. At some point were going to run out of hyhydrocarbons, petroleum products

and all you got to do is go uptown and see all the streams of cars moving in every direction and realize, and multiply that by all the cities and towns in the United States and elsewhere, and you begin to wonder how our resources have held up as long as they have. And it's increasing.

The demand is increasing and you say, well we can come up with other energy sources and we can come up with this and we can come up with that, but I don't see how we're going to come up with it without reducing certain production with quality of the air, the handling waste products, things that go along with our population and our population increase.

So unless we can control ourselves, I don't think were going to have a lot of luck maintaining, helping maintain our living, native natural resources.

DT: You had mentioned hydrocarbons and air and it makes me want to ask you, what do you think the impacts of climate change are on native systems?

BS: Well my personal opinion is it's realistic and it's going to happen because of what we read about in the way of decline or reduction in our frozen north and south pole, ice sheets or whatever you call it. And so I think that we are going to suffer a climate change.

I believe in that what scientists have said so far is accurate, that it's going to affect water levels, it's going to affect quality of water, it's going to affect temperatures, environmental temperatures, they're going to rise. We're going to find it's going to be more uncomfortable as time goes on unless we come up with some way to slow these things down that are causing climate change.

Our reduction in trees - you know a lot of people don't realize that in a very basic, common way, that these trees that we're cutting down by the millions, by the acres, actually contribute to our life. They take up carbon dioxide and they produce oxygen.

And the less vegetation, the less green plants we have, or the fewer green plants we have, the more likely our environment is going to become imbalanced with respect to our exchange between what we produce in the way of carbon dioxide and what the plants are able to absorb and put back in the form of what we use, oxygen.

DT: Let me ask a follow up question. A lot of your work has been as a scientist and a researcher, manager that makes for a fine career and an intellectual challenge, but I'm curious if you could put your finger on why you followed a career as an ecologist? What has been the appeal? What is important to you rather?

BS: I just love the our living, native resources. I love the animals, I love the trees. I think they have as much a right to be here as we do, and I am interested in making some minor contribution albeit to protecting them and keeping them here and keeping them healthy. That was a major interest to me; it is still.

DT: You mentioned off camera that you've got grandchildren. How would you explain your interest in this to them and what protecting natural resources might mean to their generation?

BS: I have trouble because my grandchildren are all strictly urbanites and they've been impressed by development and commercialism and things like that. And they really aren't all that interested in listening to my preaching, so I don't do a lot of it.

But they're intelligent enough to realize that our native resources are important, but they don't bother themselves about being involved that much or trying to resolve or solve the problem.

DT: Well, to the extent that - I've read somewhere that eighty-percent of Texans live in cities, and so I imagine that your grandkids have got a lot of partners in their attitude. How can people of that background be impressed with the importance of what you've done in the field and in more rural areas?

BS: Well they can be more impressed with conservation of our resources by being educated. My daughter, my oldest daughter, has taught ecology at a school for disadvantaged kids in Houston, some of them, most of them had never been off the streets of Houston, never, probably never even been in a park.

And she began to explain to those kids some ecological concepts and they were responsive, even though they didn't know anything about anything, as far as the resources, the native resources. And so there's hope there but I don't think we're spending enough effort, I don't think we're doing enough to educate these young people

because I don't think enough adults are concern themselves with protecting resources. They only concern themselves with making money and being comfortable and having two, three boats and four or five cars, a yacht or two or something like that.

I don't think they're they want to give up anything which they might have to economically to accomplish what we need to accomplish to really preserve the resources. And but I think they might if they begin to be educated in it. You know you can stop the average guy on the street in a small town in Louisiana where timber industry is important

and he can explain to you pretty well, no matter how little he knows, how important income from that timber industry, from that sawmill or whatever is. But if you ask him, well what about the ecological implications, he'll think you're cussing him.

He don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about, and that pretty well - that's anala - that kind of explains our whole society. We don't understand, people don't know enough of about care enough about the resources because they don't really realize how valuable they are.

DT: You mentioned your daughter and her teaching of these urban kids. I read that there is a book called Last Child in the Woods that Richard Louv came out with couple years ago, and it talks about kids of that kind who are urban and they don't have exposure to the outdoors,

and that they are missing something that is sort of integral to people's development that, you know, we grew up over thousands of years in connection with nature and that this is the first generation that doesn't really have access to a farm or a ranch or even a vacant lot. Do you see that as being an important thing or a real thing?

BS: A minor example, in my daughter's teaching basic ecology to these kids, one thing we did - I would go - she would take them to the state parks and what have you, sometime. They had never seen anything like that. And I'd go and we'd walk through the woods and explain this, that and the other and I thought, man what a waste of time initially, but I was amazed at how interested those kids were.

DT: Well maybe you can remember, what were one of those walks through the woods like?

BS: Well, for example, one place we used to like to take them is over to Lake Conroe and walk areas around Lake Conroe and talk about why these plants were there and what their value was and what they were, and then we would go to some of the state parks, Huntsville State Park primarily because it was convenient to Houston,

and walk through those parks and discuss the systems and talk about the animals and why this owl lived in this hole in the tree and all those kind of things and what and how valuable those trees were because they produced oxygen which we breathe, and boy, they were responsive.

DT: Were there questions that you recall that they would ask or things that they showed a special kind of interest in?

BS: Well, I remember one time when some of them got onto a yellow jackets nest (laughs), and they were asking us how to get relief. No, I don't remember all the questions.

They were usually, they were directed to my wife, I mean my daughter, and some of the other teachers who would go along. But they would want to know about, you know, what kind of plant is this and what kind of animal is that and what are they good for, things like that.

DT: And were the questions that kind, what are they good for, not rather, you know, that they're good just for themselves? (Inaudible)

BS: Yeah, they, you know, in other words I think what they were getting at was what is this animals role in life, you know, what does it do? How's it live? So, that was a worthwhile contribution, and that made me realize how valuable and yet how difficult a chore it is to begin to educate people in the right direction of protecting the resources.

And we set up a lab at this school, and they called it the Living Learning Lab, and we would collect plants from mesic systems, aquatic systems, xeric systems and plant them and create those systems in a microcosm and require them to take care of those systems and kind of preach to them as we went along. That went over pretty big.

And then we would take kids from algebra classes and history classes, bring them together in that lab and tell them how all these things related, you know, how ecologically and how history and mathematics and the whole schmear related, came together under an ecological concept to protect these. Some of them would responsibility was counting the number of plants as they grew,

those were the mathematicians, I guess. And it related to their particular courses they were more interested in - history, you know, what's the history of these plants and, you know, and that's the way we tried to, and I think that was successful. I don't know if it's still going on, that's been several years ago.

DT: You mentioned taking these kids to Huntsville State Park and taking them on nature walks. I'd be curious if you were to select a place to take yourself for a nature walk just to get outdoors and enjoy it, where would you go?

BS: There are a lot of places I like. I don't think I know of an ecosystem in Texas, and there are twelve, that I don't like. There's some I wouldn't want to live in but I like to visit. And I'm particularly like, enjoy going into the Big Bend area and looking at the desert ecosystem there and the plants.

I like, I guess if I had to pick a place I'd prefer to live, it'd be somewhere in East Texas but I'm so familiar with the piney woods ecosystems and the old savanna ecosystem and all, that and I'm not that familiar with the desert systems. So it's fascinating to me to learn more, to go out there, and that's where I would spend a lot of my time if I could. And I've been to Big Bend a good bit.

DT: Can you tell about one of your favorite trips out there?

BS: Well it's a little diverse. I got interested in the history of Texas trails, Texas historical trails, so my wife and I bought a RV, and we did a little research to find out where they went, and we traced them. And one of the interesting trails to me was to trace the Great Comanche War Trail across Texas, and it went down in through the Big Bend country and out into Mexico.

And so I got to spend a lot of time down there tracing those trails and seeing where the, you know, and then I got associated with the ecosystems there and the prehistoric remains found there and all kind of natural things that enthused me.

DT: Well did some of these trails follow particular springs or easy crossings of mountain ranges?

BS: Yeah. Yeah the Great Comanche War Trail went from water source to water source. Also it varied depending on the game, presence of game, you know, sometimes there were deer or so, or whatever they fed on they were more plentiful in one area and they'd alter the trail a little bit.

But most of the time it followed - we followed it from Palo Duro Canyon to the Rio Grande and Big Bend National Park. And most of the time, it went from spring to spring or water source to water source.

DT: And how would you find traces of these very ancient trails?

BS: Well researching the literature and gathering data from the Texas Archives and reviewing historic maps and reading publications by people who did different things along the trails, and just mainly literature research and then just getting out and tracing.

And then along the trails, you could find traces and you could find historic markers and what have you that verified, well yeah this is where this is, this is where the Butterfield Trail came right across here, you know, and we would be confident that we were on the right track.

DT: Well did a number of these trails later become major roads or highways?

BS: Yeah. A classic example is Highway 21, El Camino Real, goes right through here, right above Bryan. Comes from - it crosses at Yule Pass, comes on up along the Balcones Escarpment through near San Anton, through San Marcos, by Austin and right on up to

some oh well when it hit 21, it came to it actually came through Bastrop and then on into this country and into East Texas and on into Louisiana and all the way to Florida.

DT: And was the El Camino Real, I guess, was a colonial trace, but was there an Indian trail that might have been beneath or near it?

BS: Well it was, as I gather, the trail was initiated, parts of it, was initiated as game trails, buffalo and elk and what have you. And then the Indians followed those game trails. Then the Spaniards when they came along they followed the Indian trails and then expanded them to go to places of their interest. And then we came along and built roads over some of them.

DT: Well, good, well you told us a great, long history from, you know, days before the Spaniards all the way to the current day.

BS: Well the life of the biologist is interesting.

DT: Well thanks for sharing with us. Is there anything you'd like to add?

BS: No, except that I appreciate being invited to give this interview, and I'm enthused about your use of that data, not only mine but other people you interviewed.

DT: Well our pleasure. Thank you so much.

BS: You're welcome.