Conservation History Association of Texas
Texas Legacy Project
Oral History Interview
Nature Conservancy in Texas

Interviewee: Jeff Weigel
Date: January 6, 2023
Site: Austin, Texas
Reels: 5063-5066
Executive Producer: Lydia Saldana
Producer: Jeff Weigel
Field Producer / Chief Interviewer: Lee Smith
Videographer: Curtis Craven
Writer / Editor: Ron Kabele
Transcriber: David Todd / Trint
Item: Weigel_Jeff_NCItem31_AustinTX_20230106_Reel5063-5066_Audio.mp3

[Bracketed numbers refer to the time code of the interview recording.]

Jeff Weigel [00:00:15] I grew up in Hudson, Wisconsin, a small town, 5,000 people on the western edge of the state, on the St. Croix River, which is a big, beautiful, wild, wide river that serves as the boundary between Minnesota and Wisconsin. So not far from the Twin Cities, but because it was in another state, it was remote and isolated, even though a city of two million was not far away, because no one ever came to Wisconsin except to buy booze.

Jeff Weigel [00:00:54] My parents were the most amazing folks. My mother was a public school librarian, had two master’s degrees. My father got kicked out of Catholic high school in ninth grade. He used to say, the nuns asked me to leave. He eventually got his GED. They met on a blind date. He was a blue collar guy. He worked for the U .S. Postal Service his whole career. He rode on mail trains. He rode on this thing called the Highway Post Office, which was basically a truck that drove down the highway with guys in the back sorting mail.

Jeff Weigel [00:01:37] But he was a hunter, a fisherman, an outdoorsman. And my mom liked to go camping and read books. So our family activity was we would load up the station wagon, attach dad’s fishing boat and head to a state park and camp out and run wild and free.

Jeff Weigel [00:01:56] My mom would sit in camp or read books and my dad would take us fishing. We also, deer hunting was a big thing in Wisconsin because everybody did it. They used to close the schools for deer season. It’s only nine days long in Wisconsin and we would go to deer camp. Nobody in Wisconsin called it deer camp, by the way. We went to our cabin in the woods and, you know, it was, I started going when I was along as a kid, I didn’t hunt, when I was probably four. My grandma would take care of me and the guys would go out hunting.

Jeff Weigel [00:02:33] And, you know, I just wanted to go so badly. And finally, when I was 12, I got to go and got my first deer. And, you know, that was pretty epic. That that gets in your blood. It’s kind of a rite of passage and becomes a tribal ritual of sorts. I still go to Wisconsin every year to hunt deer. I also hunt here in Texas. So hunting, fishing and camping, that really got my taste for the outdoors going.

Lee Smith [00:03:04] And how many siblings did you have?

Jeff Weigel [00:03:07] I have one. I’m the oldest of three. I have a brother and a sister. And they all, they all were involved in this, too. And, you know, my brother hunts. My sister, well, in that day, girls weren’t allowed. So although I’m proud to say I have three, two sons and one daughter, and my daughter hunts, too. So it’s an equal access opportunity now. But it wasn’t back in those days. You remember that. Girls didn’t get to go. But now now they do because we need everybody we can get to be taking these things up. So we did.

Jeff Weigel [00:03:49] I was talking about deer hunting, but we went out and hunted everything. Roughed grouse, pheasants, ducks, just to get out in the field and have fun. Geese, whatever. My dad took me out on that and it was great fun.

Lee Smith [00:04:04] So would you say that your dad was your mentor in that regard in inspiring you?

Jeff Weigel [00:04:09] Well, huge influence. But I don’t want to leave out my mother because she was she was the more, like I said, she she was a librarian. She liked to read books. She was a little more, you know, intellectual, maybe. But she loved getting outdoors. She loved hiking, being out in the woods, out in the grasslands or whatever.

Jeff Weigel [00:04:31] My dad was a little bit more of a bubba, we might say here in Texas. Just get out and shoot stuff or catch fish. He used to love ice fishing. That’s something they do up there. You go out in the middle of a frozen lake, you drill a hole and you dip your line in and you freeze your butt off while you’re doing it. That was always fun. Uh, so, you know, whatever got us out, we would do. And both parents really had an impact.

Lee Smith [00:05:00] Were there any things in cultural, you know…

Jeff Weigel [00:05:05] Well, you know, that wonderful World of Disney that everybody watched back in that day. Wild Kingdom, of course, big influence there on, you know, seeing these exotic animals from Africa and all over the world and thinking, “Wow, I’d love to see those.” And things like that. Yep.

Lee Smith [00:05:29] So you went to, where did you go to school? I went to college at a state university in Minnesota called St. Cloud State University. It’s in St. Cloud, Minnesota. My freshman year, I took a general biology class. I didn’t really know what I wanted to take up, but I had a professor. His name was David Grether. And he he the whole class, he showed slides of outdoor, you know, habitats in Minnesota. This was in Minnesota. So he was teaching us about the prairie and the forest. And then we did a few field trips. So he was a he was a great influence. He had gone to the University of Wisconsin and studied under a famous botanist named John Curtis, who wrote a book called “The Vegetation of Wisconsin” that is still a classic today. And David was a huge influence.

Lee Smith [00:06:25] St. Cloud State?

Jeff Weigel [00:06:26] So I’m at St. Cloud State and I had Grether. He actually did not have a Ph.D. That’s why I’m not calling him doctor. But he was he was a great influence. And there were several other professors there. But the key thing was they all took us out in the field, you know, back. I don’t know if that’s done as much anymore. But we went out and looked at habitats and studied things in the field.

Jeff Weigel [00:06:53] And, you know, I remember I remember my ornithology class. We went out in the field every week and just looked at birds.

Jeff Weigel [00:07:00] And, you know, that’s how you learn and that’s how you get excited about it. So that was a big factor.

Jeff Weigel [00:07:07] And I was I was a senior. And I remember, I think it was Dave Grether pointed out on the job board. That’s what they had back in the day. You know, a bulletin board with job opportunities. He said, oh, this he had taken us to some Nature Conservancy preserves. So I had first heard about who they were. And he was on the board of the Minnesota chapter. So he said, “Oh, the Nature Conservancy is hiring summer interns. You might want to apply for that.”.

Jeff Weigel [00:07:39] So I did and got hired. And I was put on a crew of 12 other young people. And they stuck us out in the field way up in northwest Minnesota, where they owned a bunch of tall grass prairie preserves. And they said, “Y’all go out here for the whole summer and count the birds, count the mammals, catalog the plants, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies, everything.”

Jeff Weigel [00:08:04] So each of the 12 had a specialty. I was assigned to birds and mammals. So there were a couple of us. We’d get up at 4:30 every day. It was crazy because the sun rises early up there. And we’d go out in the field and listen and look at birds and write them down. And they were doing biological inventories of these preserves. And that was a three-month job.

Jeff Weigel [00:08:29] It was a life-changer because I got to be around other kids, really. We were like 19, 20 years old who were just learning. And we were experiencing so much. And every day you’d learn new stuff because you’d see a bird you hadn’t seen before and you’d have to figure out what it was and put it on the list. And it was just, it was a life-changing experience for me.

Jeff Weigel [00:08:54] I got hired after that summer. The Nature Conservancy hired me to write up management plans for these preserves. So I stuck around another six months or so and wrote up all these documents for them.

Jeff Weigel [00:09:09] And then they hired me on as a assistant land steward. They handed me the keys to a beat-up old pickup truck and said, go out to our preserves and put up boundary signs and fix fences and talk to the neighbors. And we don’t want to see you. Just just disappear. So it was a great job. It was only eight months a year. I had four months off in the winter because you can’t do much when there’s two feet of snow on the ground. And, you know, I camped out most of the time. I made a lot of friends and I figured out how to how to get a lot of free meals. My boss at the time called it riding the grub line. He said, “You’re good at that, Jeff.”

Jeff Weigel [00:09:54] And, you know, I made a lot of friends and learned about prescribed burning because all these prairies needed to be burned. So I was leading burn crews to go burn them. We were kind of low-tech back in that day. We just, we didn’t have the yellow Nomex suits. We had a couple of drip torches and a couple of flappers, which can be described as a mud flap on a stick that you use to beat out fires. And we would cut fire lines and use the wind to our advantage to burn. And, you know, I learned a lot about that, the art and science of prescribed burning, which is super important for grasslands. And did that for five years.

Jeff Weigel [00:10:37] And I met a wonderful woman along the way. Name Mary Candee. She was a biologist, too. She was working at the Science Museum of Minnesota as a curator. And we started dating. And at one point, we decided we needed to go to grad school after we’d been working for about five years after undergrad. And we had three rules, which were: it had to be outside the Midwest because we’d never lived anywhere else. It had to have a major of interest for each one of us. And it had to be dirt cheap because we were the working poor.

Jeff Weigel [00:11:18] I knew some people who had gone to Texas Tech through work and knew there was a couple of professors there interested in prescribed burning. So we went down to Tech and visited. We found out they’re one of three schools in the country that had a master’s program in museum administration. And Mary was interested in that.

Jeff Weigel [00:11:38] So off we went from Minneapolis to Lubbock. That was like moving from one galaxy to another, let me tell you. So different. I remember right after we moved into town, it was a Sunday and said, “Oh, let’s go shopping. Let’s go to the mall.” They had one mall in Lubbock then, and we got there and the place is closed. “We go, what’s going on?” And they said, “Oh, you can’t shop on the Sabbath.” They had these things called Blue Laws.

Jeff Weigel [00:12:09] And we learned about that and, you know, had a great experience in Lubbock. I was in the wildlife department. I studied range ecology, rangeland ecology, which is basically grassland ecology. I worked on a grazing study, learned a lot about grazing.

Jeff Weigel [00:12:27] And I got to know a professor there who was a board member of the Nature Conservancy in Texas. And that helped me reconnect. I had a goal of wanting, I wanted to go back to work for the Nature Conservancy when I got out. And that connection helped a lot. And I was able to get a job with the Texas chapter when I graduated.

Jeff Weigel [00:12:50] So we moved to San Antonio. Mary got a job. I think she was working at the Institute of Texan Cultures then, museum job. So here we were in San Antonio and we’ve pretty much been here ever since.

Lee Smith [00:13:05] Now, take me back just a little bit. What was your undergrad?

Jeff Weigel [00:13:10] Biology. I had a degree in just sort of general biology, but more a field emphasis. So I took all the “ologies”, ornithology, zoology, ichthyology, which is the study of fish, and, you know, got a good general background. And I had exposure to all these things from these professors who believed in getting you out into the field. That was really helpful.

Lee Smith [00:13:36] And when did you get to Tech?

Jeff Weigel [00:13:40] So I got out of St. Cloud in 1979. I worked for the Nature Conservancy as an intern initially and then as a kind of seasonal employee for four years or so. We moved to Lubbock in January of 1985.

Jeff Weigel [00:14:00] And that reminded me of another story. I was standing in line at the grocery store and there were a lot of people in line. I’m going, “What’s going on? Why is everybody in the store?” And they said, “Haven’t you heard? We’re going to have a big snow storm. We’re going to get two inches of snow.” And me from Wisconsin and Minnesota, I thought, “Two inches. And you think that’s a big storm?” But, you know, these Texans didn’t know how to drive in snow. So that was pretty funny anyway.

Lee Smith [00:14:30] So you graduate from Tech and you had a connection with the Nature Conservancy. And so they hired you as what?

Jeff Weigel [00:14:40] Yeah, the professor’s name was Bill Kitchens. He was a landscape architect and parks administration guy. And he had had a student as an undergraduate years before named Andy Sansom. And Andy Sansom had gone on to become a great figure in conservation in Texas. He was the state director of the TNC at this point. And through Dr. Kitchens, I got to meet Andy and they were posting a job as the director of stewardship. That’s what they called preserve management back in those days. It was the first time they’d posted this job.

Jeff Weigel [00:15:19] And so I applied, thinking no way are they going to hire a Yankee for this job. I, you know, grad school, I spent a lot of time going out to big Texas ranches because we did a lot of burning in our grad department. So I got to go to iconic Texas ranches like the four sixes and several other big ranches. And I learned what grazing management was about and ranch management because, you know, they don’t have that in Wisconsin. So I hadn’t been exposed to that. That really helped me a lot.

Jeff Weigel [00:15:55] And so I applied to that job. And I did have previous experience at TNC, which I guess helped me. And much to my surprise, I got hired. Andy hired me. He was the state director. So I became his first ever director of stewardship in charge of managing the preserves they owned.

Jeff Weigel [00:16:15] I had one other guy that worked for me over in East Texas. He had been there before. And we, Andy left not soon, shortly after that to go work at Texas Parks and Wildlife, initially as their chief acquisition guy. But eventually he became the director of Texas Parks and Wildlife. And he’s been a lifelong friend and mentor for me on all things Texas, because we know Andy’s been such a great influence. He’s written a lot of books. He’s he’s a great thinker, a great speaker and widely regarded as a great conservationist. So I’m glad to call him my friend.

Lee Smith [00:16:59] And loved.

Jeff Weigel [00:17:01] Yeah. And he’s much beloved. He’s still active in conservation, although he’s getting up in years. And, you know, I think he’s enjoying life a little bit, but I still see him regularly. And, you know, he’s got something to add. And I hope I keep doing that, too.

Lee Smith [00:17:20] So so how did … we’re going to get specific now. How did the Davis Mountains Preserve come about? And why is that important?

Jeff Weigel [00:17:27] Well, the Davis Mountains are in far west Texas. They’re what you call a mountain island or a sky island system. It’s a mountain. It’s an isolated mountain range that gets up to eighty four hundred feet. A lot of Texans don’t know that they have mountains, and mountains that tall. They’re not as tall as the mountains in Colorado, but pretty nice. And that elevation allows for a lot of different habitats, because the higher you get, the more rain you get and the cooler the climate gets.

Jeff Weigel [00:18:00] So you you have what they call mountain islands and desert seas in West Texas, where you’ll have a vast ocean of grassland. It’s desert grassland. And then when you start getting elevation in these mountain islands, you start getting trees. Initially, you get pinyon juniper forest at, you know, five thousand, six thousand feet or so. And then you start seeing ponderosa pines as you go higher. And eventually you get up to six, seven, eight thousand feet, you see things like southwestern white pine and gamble oak, which are true mountainous species. And so you get a real range of habitats in a small area.

Jeff Weigel [00:18:44] And because these mountain ranges are isolated through evolution, you sometimes get species that evolve that are unique to those habitats. They’re “endemic”, is the term biologists use.

Jeff Weigel [00:18:58] So the Davis Mountains have this mix of all these habitats. They have a lot of interesting and key species that, you know, are, they might be common further west, but it’s the only place they’re found in Texas. So it’s it’s an interesting place and had been targeted for conservation as long ago as the ’20s when they first started setting up state parks, the first group of parks and wildlife commissioners, I think they called them something different back then.

Lee Smith [00:19:29] Oyster Commission?

Jeff Weigel [00:19:30] Yeah, they had they had a list of places that they thought needed to be conserved in Texas. And the Davis Mountains was on that list.

Jeff Weigel [00:19:40] The Nature Conservancy first got involved in the ’80s. We we are very science-driven. So scientists survey the landscape and tell us where are the important places to work. They identified the Davis Mountains.

Jeff Weigel [00:19:56] And under Andy’s leadership, this is before I got there in the early ’80s, they had started a program where they would work with private landowners. They called it the Texas Land Steward Society. And they would go out and meet with landowners and say, “Did you know you have an important habitat on your ranch or your property?” And a lot of times they would say, “No, we don’t know that.”.

Jeff Weigel [00:20:21] And we would sort of educate them, our landowner contact person would educate them about that and and try to get them interested in voluntary conservation and invite them to join this thing called the Texas Land Steward Society. We would give them a certificate kind of honoring them. The whole idea was to get them interested in conservation.

Jeff Weigel [00:20:43] And it worked. We had probably a hundred people in this Society around Texas by the by the early ’90s. And as you get landowners interested, they might get interested in other forms of conservation that are more legal and permanent, like a conservation easement or even selling you some or all of their land or giving it to you. We’ve had that happen.

Jeff Weigel [00:21:12] So the the first first experience in the Davis Mountains was through our landowner contact program. They went out there and they talked to a guy named Don McIvor. Don owned the highest elevation of the Davis Mountains. He had a 40,000-acre ranch called the You Up You Down Ranch. And his brand is a one upright “U”, one upside down “U”. And he had, his grandfather had initially settled that, or as Don used to say, “He stole it from the Comanches”.

Jeff Weigel [00:21:49] And they had run it as a cattle ranch for all these years. Kind of, you know, he had one cowboy that ran the whole 40,000 acres. So it was pretty lean and mean. And Don, they started talking to Don.

Jeff Weigel [00:22:07] Now I’m going to fast forward to the ’90s, late ’80s, ’90s when I was there. And and we hired a guy who turned out to be very pivotal in all this. Guy named James King. James is of the King Ranch family by descendancy and, you know, had a great, great spirit of the land and conservation and the outdoors and ranching. We hired him as a land acquisition guy. And that was in, I think, 1989.

Jeff Weigel [00:22:42] I got there in ’87 and James and I worked together a lot. And we started focusing on the Davis Mountains. Let’s figure out how to turn this into a big conservation zone by buying land or getting conservation easements.

Jeff Weigel [00:22:59] So James started talking to landowners and our scientists. Mr. McIvor let us visit his 40,000-acre ranch to start doing inventory work. He had never allowed biologists on the property before this. So for biologists, it was like back in the golden era of exploration, you know, with Charles Darwin or something. They were getting to visit land that biologists had not been to before. So they were cataloging all the birds and mammals and so on up there, and I was leading that effort.

Jeff Weigel [00:23:39] While we were doing that, James is trying to find landowners. We were mapping out who owned what land and trying to get to know people and see if anybody was interested in selling.

Jeff Weigel [00:23:49] James found a couple of small pieces of land that that, in fact, the landowner did not know he owned. They were sort of fragments of land that had been left when a bigger piece of land had been sold. And because there wasn’t a lot of accurate surveys out there, you know, sometimes pieces got left and these were pretty small pieces.

Jeff Weigel [00:24:17] So James went to the guy and said, “Oh, did you know you own this land?” And it was up near the top of the mountain range on what we call Mount Livermore, the eighty four hundred foot summit. And he said his name was Harris. He said, “Mr. Harris, do you know you own this land? And would you like to sell it?” And he talked him into it.

Jeff Weigel [00:24:36] So we bought these two little pieces way up the mountainside as our first acquisitions. And then we bought another piece that was a six hundred eighty acre chunk that had been left over from a subdivision.

Jeff Weigel [00:24:51] And that that’s really the threat out there that that the historic ranches, the the owners were getting older and their children, you know, maybe were well-educated. And one was an architect in New York and then the other one’s a filmmaker in L.A. and they don’t want anything to do with cattle ranching. So they’re not going to take over the ranch.

Jeff Weigel [00:25:14] And this left landowners without many options. They could sell to developers who would cut their land up into little ranchettes or ranchitos we call them. Five-acre lots. Of course, that’s not good for the conservation. Or they could sell to a golf course developer. Or they could work with the Nature Conservancy. So we became a sort of viable option to these landowners.

Jeff Weigel [00:25:43] And meanwhile, James is picking up all these little pieces around, acquiring them. We were raising money. Of course, we had to raise the money to buy this land. And our our board was tremendously helpful on that front, helping raise the money and, you know, promote that this is a good project. Kina Forgason, who we interviewed for this project, was very instrumental in helping promote the importance of this landscape and with fundraising.

Jeff Weigel [00:26:13] And so we were we were buying land, we were raising money and we’re piecing together. Our hope was to get a small preserve. There was a concept that was developed really in the conservation world at that time, where you think about a core and a buffer. So you protect the core central nucleus of the landscape and you surround it with buffer lands that might allow more conventional uses that are, you know, managed so they’re sustainable, like cattle grazing or hunting or fishing, things that are compatible with conservation. But you don’t allow things like subdivision of the property or open pit mining or something.

Jeff Weigel [00:27:03] And so that was the idea. Get a core protected area and surround it with buffer lands.

Jeff Weigel [00:27:09] Well, Mr. McIvor, we courted him for a decade and poor James had to drink so much bad coffee sitting in his living room. And Mr. McIvor was, he was a gentle soul. He, his family was from New Hampshire. He actually had a New Hampshire accent. And he’d say, “Maffa, I’m going to Maffa.” And we would say, “Do you mean Marfa?” And but Don was a great guy.

Jeff Weigel [00:27:41] And eventually he his his mother, his mother still owned the land. She lived back east. And Don was the manager of it. And so we had to kind of court Don for many years to think about a conservation outcome. And but his mother, who was in her 90s by then and not well, she still controlled the land, so he couldn’t do anything.

Jeff Weigel [00:28:08] But she eventually did pass. And Don’s lawyer called this. I’ll never forget this because James got a message on his voicemail from the lawyer saying, “We’re ready to sell.” And he called me down to his office and said, “Listen to this message.” And we’re like, “Yeah, the moment has arrived after 10 years.”

Jeff Weigel [00:28:30] So we could, in earnest, negotiate with Mr. McIvor to buy the land. He was land rich and cash poor, like many Texas ranchers. So he wasn’t going to give it to us. He sold us 34,000 acres. He kept about 6000 where his headquarters was located. But we got a conservation easement on that land and we got ownership of the 34, which included the summit of Mount Livermore.

Jeff Weigel [00:29:02] And we were off to the races. We had our core preserve established.

Jeff Weigel [00:29:08] And then in order to fund the project, we used this concept we call conservation buyers, where we would resell land to a conservation-minded person. They would donate back a conservation easement and we could keep our land in conservation that way.

Jeff Weigel [00:29:29] So we we have now 33,000 acres that’s owned by the Nature Conservancy as the core preserve. And around it, we have about 15 landowners totaling another 70,000. And we have conservation easements on all those. So we’ve got 100,000 acres in conservation, which kind of has achieved our goal of landscape scale conservation project.

Jeff Weigel [00:29:58] And the Davis Mountains still goes to this day. We’ve got staff out there. We run educational programs. We have a visitor center that we built years ago. We named it the McIvor Center in honor of Don McIvor, because he could have sold that land for much more money to a developer. But he wanted a conservation outcome. And we were very glad. So we named our visitor center in his honor. He did live long enough to come to the dedication of that center, which I think he enjoyed a lot. He’s since passed away, but he’s a guy I will always think of as somebody who really did a good thing for conservation.

Lee Smith [00:30:43] What what role did Anne Ashman and Jane Schweppe play in that?

Jeff Weigel [00:30:47] So Anne and Jane, we referred to them as the Schweppe girls. Their father, Dr. Irving Schweppe, whom, well, you know, these folks, you knew these folks. Dr. Schweppe was our board chair for the Texas Nature Conservancy in the ’90s. And he he was a great man. He had the most bone-crushing handshake of anybody I have ever met. He was a doctor and terrific guy.

Jeff Weigel [00:31:19] He was he was working to get his daughters involved in the Nature Conservancy, and they had just inherited some money from their mother who had passed away. And he encouraged them to put some of that money to philanthropic use.

Jeff Weigel [00:31:38] So so they contacted us and they met with James and said they wanted to support this project. And if I remember the story right, they were talking about it, and they they wrote down a number on a piece of paper and handed it to James. And that’s what they wanted to donate.

Jeff Weigel [00:31:56] Well, it was a large number, let me tell you. And they they ended up, they were really the the founding donors, you might say, of the Davis Mountains Project. They made a really generous donation, each one of them, that allowed us to help pay for that acquisition of the McIvor Ranch. That was a twelve million dollar purchase, by the way. And we had to raise all that money.

Jeff Weigel [00:32:22] So so the Schweppe girls were the first big donors to the project and have, we’ve had them out there many times. They love the place. They like to go out and visit and remain involved in conservation. And we were so grateful for that contribution.

Lee Smith [00:32:41] And they named a spot after their mom?

Jeff Weigel [00:32:44] Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. I forgot about that. We said, would you like to name something out here in honor of your mother? And so there’s a there’s a kind of a a promontory, a rock that is just below the summit of Mount Livermore. And it didn’t have a name. And so they decided they wanted to name that and they named it Laura’s Rock. Their mother’s name was Laura Randall. And so we now have Laura’s Rock. We have a sign on the trail going up there and a picture of Miss Randall to honor her in that regard. So so, yeah, thank you for mentioning that.

Lee Smith [00:33:29] Now, you’ve painted a fairly smooth process here, but there was some opposition.

Jeff Weigel [00:33:36] Yes, yes. Yeah. You know, it was it was there are a lot of obstacles along the way.

Jeff Weigel [00:33:42] So if you look at Jeff Davis County, just think of the name, the president of the Confederacy. It’s, you know, those are very independent-minded folks out there. A lot of ranchers. The Davis Mountains, which probably probably encompasses 300,000 acres in total, mostly big ranches. But the threat is subdivision, as I mentioned earlier.

Jeff Weigel [00:34:09] And these ranchers had seen things like Big Bend National Park to the south, get established, and the Guadalupe Mountains to the north, get established as a national park. And they were afraid somebody, and that somebody was the Nature Conservancy, was going to come after all this land and somehow turn it into a national park. And so they they were opposed to that idea. That was never our intent, by the way.

Jeff Weigel [00:34:41] But there is a story where a freshman congressman from El Paso, whose district encompassed the Davis Mountains, his name was Ronald Coleman, if I believe, he instigated a study to look at the Davis Mountains as a potential national park.

Jeff Weigel [00:35:04] That was a big mistake, let me tell you.

Jeff Weigel [00:35:06] They had a public hearing in Fort Davis. I was not there, but I’ve heard, you know, a couple of hundred people showed up and basically told the guy, “We don’t want a national park in our community, so get the hell out of here.” So that sent a message.

Jeff Weigel [00:35:23] And we we learned that. So we thought to ourselves, “Well, if we’re going to do something in the Davis Mountains, it’s got to be a private lands solution. It can’t be public lands.”

Jeff Weigel [00:35:34] And that’s why we decided to set up … You know, the Nature Conservancy, we’re a private organization. The land we own is private land. Some people may not see it that way, but we thought we’d come in.

Jeff Weigel [00:35:50] But initially, when we started showing up in the community, people did not like us. We had an event out there. This would have been in the early ’90s probably. We had a board meeting and a reception in the town of Fort Davis. And when we went out there, we were greeted with these big signs that were put up on fences along the entryways into town from all three directions, saying, “Private lands. Yes. Nature Conservancy. No.”

Jeff Weigel [00:36:24] And so our board members were greeted by that. And they’re kind of like, “Oh, I guess they don’t like us here.”

Jeff Weigel [00:36:30] And so there was a lot of opposition to any kind of change. And they saw us as sort of a stalking horse for the government because we often do buy land that becomes state parks or national wildlife refuges. But in this case, we had no intention of doing that. And it took a long time to kind of show people that that’s not what we were going to do.

Jeff Weigel [00:36:59] And what happened, which is classic in TNC annals, we’ll come into a community, we’ll buy some land, we’ll set up a preserve. The local people don’t know who the heck we are. They say, oh, what’s that natural conservatory group? And we have a hard-to -pronounce name. We stole it from some English organization, I believe.

Jeff Weigel [00:37:24] But the way we overcome that is we use what we call community-based conservation. And what that means is we put staff people in the community to manage that land we’ve owned or interface with the community. And those people become the face of the Nature Conservancy.

Jeff Weigel [00:37:45] So instead of being this unknown distant ogre that’s here to take our land, they now look at us and they say, “Well, here’s a person and they are part of my community and they strive to get involved and engaged.”

Jeff Weigel [00:38:04] And eventually, most of the community members will see that we’re a positive asset. We allow, we schedule open days to the preserves. We have work days. We have volunteer days. We provide educational programming, et cetera. And they see that we have value.

Jeff Weigel [00:38:24] So that opposition diminishes over time. And that’s been the case here. It’s taken 30-plus years. And there still are a few people out there that don’t like us, but that’s just the way it goes, you know?

Jeff Weigel [00:38:40] In the case of the Davis Mountains, a really important moment was James and his wife Tammy decided to move to Fort Davis. They were living in San Antonio and they said, “We’re going to move to Fort Davis.” And they went out there and they raised a couple kids that went to the local schools and they became part of the community.

Jeff Weigel [00:39:00] We had other staff people. John Karges was a scientist for years out there. He’s now retired. He did a lot of great work and he lived in the community too. So all that helps overcome that opposition.

Jeff Weigel [00:39:14] So the University of Texas has the McDonald Observatory sitting on top of a mountain called Mount Locke, which was named after Don McIvor’s mother. She donated the land to the University of Texas where they built that observatory back, I don’t know, like in the ’30s maybe, ’40s, it was a long time ago.

Jeff Weigel [00:39:41] And they have invested tens of millions of dollars in telescopes. They have a very modern telescope up there now called the Hobby, named after Bill Hobby, -Eberly Telescope, which is kind of a cutting-edge scope and do a lot of important research out there.

Jeff Weigel [00:39:58] Well, the reason they’re out in the Davis Mountains is because there’s no light pollution and the dark skies. So here they are sitting in the middle of the Davis Mountains and we have helped protect their investment by protecting all this land around them from development and they appreciate that.

Lee Smith [00:40:21] So how does that night sky, I mean, yeah, it’s great for the telescopes and everything, but how does that night sky impact you as a person when you, especially somebody who’s coming from the city?

Jeff Weigel [00:40:38] Well, it’s astonishing because you go out there and you’re standing outside at night, maybe at the Davis Mountains Preserve, we have a cabin up there at 6,000 feet that you can stay at and you, let’s say it’s September, you step outside, you can hear elk bugling at night and you look up and you can see that incredible swath of light called the Milky Way that you can’t see in the city. So, and you see falling stars frequently because the skies are so dark.

Jeff Weigel [00:41:22] Jeff Davis County, because it values that observatory and a lot of people work there, provides a lot of jobs, they actually have an ordinance about shielding outdoor lights. So even in town, you drive into Fort Davis at night and you think, “Oh my God, did the power go out?” Because it looks so dark because they don’t have big bright streetlights to try to preserve the dark skies.

Jeff Weigel [00:41:48] Now, recently the expansion and boom in the Permian Basin has created a bit of a problem because the county straight north, which is Reeves County, is in what’s called the Delaware Basin part of the Permian, which has been a center of a lot of new drilling activity and drilling, as you know, goes on 24 -7. So they need outdoor lighting and it’s bright as hell.

Jeff Weigel [00:42:18] So the observatory actually developed a program to work with energy companies to get them, instead of having their lights, their portable generator driven lights pointing straight up in the sky, they would turn them down so there’d be a little less light pollution, shield them a little bit. So they’ve had some success in helping to mitigate that.

Jeff Weigel [00:42:46] But light pollution still is a concern for the observatory and we still have land out there we’d like to protect and we’ll continue to look for opportunities there that will, of course, benefit conservation and the dark skies because they won’t be turned into big developments.

Lee Smith [00:43:10] So what was your involvement with the Dolan Falls Devil’s River?

Jeff Weigel [00:43:14] Well, here’s another example of, you know, classic TNC driven by science. Scientists told us the Devils River, which is a beautiful, clear, clean, fairly short river that flows into the Rio Grande right near Del Rio. Well, right there, there’s a reservoir called Amistad Reservoir. That was built in 1969, I think, under Nixon. It’s a pretty recent reservoir that inundated where the Devils and the Rio Grande, the confluence, originally happened.

Jeff Weigel [00:43:54] I know some scientists who are old enough that they saw that before it was inundated and there were rare fish that lived there. There were springs, there were communities that got put under the lake.

Jeff Weigel [00:44:08] But anyway, the Devils River still remains really important. It’s one of the cleanest rivers in Texas. We know that because the scientists tell us that. It’s relatively unimpeded by dams, essentially no dams. There’s a couple of low water ones. And most of the land is still in large ranch ownership. So you have the opportunity to protect it if you do the right thing.

Jeff Weigel [00:44:35] And we got interested in that place, I’m trying to think. Well, when I got there in ’87, it was on our list of places we wanted to work on. And Texas Parks and Wildlife had established a natural area out there called the Devils River State Natural Area, 19 ,000 acres with a lot of Devils River frontage.

Jeff Weigel [00:45:01] And they had contacted TNC to see if we could help them buy an adjacent ranch that was 18,000 acres. Again, James King, he went out with the Parks and Wildlife people to look at it, to start that process. And I’ll never forget this. He called me from the field. This is pre-cell phone, I guess. And he said, “Weigel, you’re not going to believe this place. Parks and Wildlife wants to buy it and add it to the park. But the hell with that, we’re going to buy it and turn it into a Nature Conservancy preserve.” Said, “You got to get out here and look at it.” Because I was the science guy that the board listened to.

Jeff Weigel [00:45:44] And so I went out and I’m like, “Holy cow.” There was Dolan Falls, which is the highest volume waterfall in Texas. It’s not super tall, but it’s pretty pretty incredible.

Jeff Weigel [00:46:01] And here’s all this amazing habitat. As a biologist, I was blown away because that part of Texas, it’s where the Texas Hill Country, the Chihuahuan Desert and the South Texas brush country all come together. So it’s like God scooped up a big assemblage of all the vegetation from those three places and just dumped it out on the Devils River. Because you can go there and see plants like mountain laurel that’s common in the Hill Country. You can see a lot of Chihuahuan Desert plants like guajillo and cactus, lechuguilla, all these Chihuahuan Desert plants. And you can see South Texas brush species all mixed up together into this one habitat. And really, it’s just amazing. It was amazing to be as a biologist to see all that in one place.

Jeff Weigel [00:47:01] Plus this incredible emerald-colored river flowing clear and clean. And probably the best swimming hole in Texas is right at the base of Dolan Falls.

Jeff Weigel [00:47:17] So we commenced that negotiation and James got us a deal. We bought 18,000 acres, if I remember right, it was $3.2 million, which for us was a lot of money.

Jeff Weigel [00:47:33] I remember we sat down with our, James and I and our chief fundraiser, who I believe was Molly Stevens at that time, and our state director, who I think was David Braun in that era. And we basically held hands and jumped off the cliff. We decided we were going to go for it.

Jeff Weigel [00:47:56] We were going to go borrow the money. TNC has a fund called the Land Preservation Fund. It’s an internal bank, basically. You can apply to borrow money. And the idea is so you can get access to capital right away if there’s a piece of land that is urgently needing to be bought or whatever. You have to pay it all back through fundraising with interest. It’s very business -like.

Jeff Weigel [00:48:24] So we said, “We’re going to go for it.” And we bought the Dolan Falls Preserve and yee -hah, beautiful place. That was in about ’91, I think.

Jeff Weigel [00:48:38] And in ’97, I think, we were able to sell 13 ,000 of those 18,000. It was all the back 40, basically. None of it was riverfront. We kept all the riverfront and we sold the 13,000 to our neighbor, Mr. John Eddie Williams, who is a lawyer from Houston who had just bought 5,000 acres for a deer hunting ranch and he wanted more country to raise deer. So we sold him the 13,000.

Jeff Weigel [00:49:10] What did we accomplish there? We got a lot of capital back that we could recycle into conservation and he gave us a conservation easement on that land so it’s forever protected.

Jeff Weigel [00:49:23] The proof is, or the point is, you don’t have to own land in order to protect it. There are other tools like conservation easements.

Jeff Weigel [00:49:31] So we now have a just under 5,000-acre preserve called Dolan Falls Preserve. It has a couple miles of river frontage, great fishing.

Jeff Weigel [00:49:43] I’m thinking about, you know, one thing we often do on our preserves and one of our key things is to promote and allow scientific research on our properties. It’s really part of our charter. We had a guy named Riley Nelson who was a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas who was an aquatic ecologist and he undertook a study of the insect fauna of the Devil’s River.

Jeff Weigel [00:50:17] And he, there’s a protocol established by the EPA where they measure water quality by what insect life lives in a particular water body and he and his students went out and sampled all the aquatic insects and compared it to that standard. And they concluded this water, this river, is of the highest water quality as measured by this EPA protocol and some of the cleanest water in Texas. So, we have scientific proof that that is the case.

Jeff Weigel [00:50:52] And we want to keep it that way so that’s why we’re trying to undertake a program that is still going on today to work with landowners in the state. The state has two preserves out there now, Devils River State Natural Area. And they bought another ranch further down the river. I think that was about 17,000 acres and that’s protected and we have conservation easements with a bunch of landowners totaling around 150,000 acres along the Devils corridor now.

Jeff Weigel [00:51:29] Another nonprofit called the Devils River Conservancy was created about six or seven years ago and they’re working in the area and we work hand in hand with those guys to promote conservation. And any landowner that’s willing to work with us, we’ll work with them if they want to do an easement or they just want technical advice, whatever.

Jeff Weigel [00:51:53] Well, now another threat has emerged out there in the form of wind turbines which there’s an investor, he happens to be a Chinese guy, who’s been buying land out there for the purpose of installing wind turbines. Now the Nature Conservancy is in favor of renewable energy at the broad conceptual level but it all depends on where do you put it? Where do you put your solar farm? Where do you put your wind turbines?

Jeff Weigel [00:52:28] And we have a program called Site Wind Right which is an analysis of the entire Great Plains including Texas which maps out where are the best places to place these things based on things like biodiversity. You know, don’t put it here because there’s a big bat cave nearby or don’t put it here because there’s a big wetland. And we’re kind of helping Devils River Conservancy with scientific information to keep wind turbine development off the river corridor and that’s showing some pretty good results. DRC is doing a great job with that and we’re helping out and we’ll see where it all goes. It’s still a work in progress.

Lee Smith [00:53:20] But this site is a good example of a multi-partnership between an NGO, a state agency, private landowners.

Jeff Weigel [00:53:33] Very much so. It’s a classic example of you know.

Lee Smith [00:53:38] So tell me why that’s, how finding the best, how does TNC find the best combination of partners for a specific site?

Jeff Weigel [00:53:51] So, I’ll say again every place we work it’s driven by science and if you look at the entire state of Texas – we actually have a map that shows the areas that are conservation priorities and that’s maybe 10% of the landscape – so we’re not interested in every acre in Texas. So science is the lens that we look through first and if it’s a priority area then we’ll start looking at it and go, “Hmm, how do we approach this? Let’s figure out who owns the land.”

Jeff Weigel [00:54:22] So we’ll map out land ownership and see, “Well, it’s ranchers own a lot of it or maybe there’s some state land here or the General Land Office owns part of it.” Okay, that’s part of the formula for success is working with them.

Jeff Weigel [00:54:39] And then we look at what’s the tool we want to apply. Do we want to buy land and turn it into a TNC preserve or do we want to use conservation easements which prevent development but the private landowner still owns the property. They just can’t do certain forms of development and that’s a little less expensive for us because owning and managing land is pretty costly, so we only do that in the most important places, or the most important parts of an important place. So we undertake that analysis – what’s the approach.

Jeff Weigel [00:55:21] And we talk to other scientists and other landowners and other state, you know, maybe the Texas Parks and Wildlife people. And then we start talking to landowners and say, “Hey, are you interested in working with us?” And oftentimes that is a process that might take years because you have to develop trust that you’re not there to try to you know screw them out of their land or something. You’re going to be an authentic player. You’re going to use legitimate business tactics. You know, you’re going to go with fair market appraisals and land sales and all that stuff.

Jeff Weigel [00:56:00] This is where TNC, as a very business -like organization, I think shines because we are able to do that. But like I say we don’t invest in an area, especially if we’re looking at it as a landscape-scale project like the Davis Mountains or the Devils River. We go in there thinking we’re going to be here for the next 50 years piecing this together because it takes that long.

Jeff Weigel [00:56:26] You know, as I mentioned, the Davis Mountains, we first started the landowner contact work in the early ’80s and we’re still working to piece that one together. Devils River, I would say we’re maybe 40% done and we’re 30 years into that one. So, you know, we got a lot more work to do.

Jeff Weigel [00:56:44] And you must be patient, because an important concept in conservation, I feel, is that everybody wants the big idea, the transformational thing that’s going to achieve this big huge deal. And that’s not how conservation works most of the time. Sometimes you come up with a really good big idea but most conservation work is done incrementally with little bits over long time periods. And you have to commit to that long-haul approach. You’re not going to get there by just one giant thing that you do once. You’re going to have to do many many small things that add up to a big thing if you stay with it.

Jeff Weigel [00:57:35] So I feel like it’s important that you stay with these projects for decades because it’s going to take that long.

Jeff Weigel [00:57:44] What about Mr. Honeycutt? How does he fit into this story?

Jeff Weigel [00:57:48] Well David is, he’s a board member. He actually just rotated off our board, but he served for a long time and he’s an oil and gas guy. He’s got his own company. If I think hard I’ll remember the name.

Jeff Weigel [00:58:06] But David is, he’s very much interested in conservation himself and he understands the role of the corporate sector in helping with that. So he’s a landowner out on the Devils River too. He bought a piece of land himself kind of as a retreat, a second home. And he donated a conservation easement on it to the Nature Conservancy a couple years ago. He also is a donor. He makes contributions to the Nature Conservancy so that helps. He did his easement. He’s a spokesperson.

Jeff Weigel [00:58:48] And he gets his employees involved. His headquarters, I believe, is in Austin so he gets his employees out to our preserve up in Austin which is called the Barton Creek Habitat Preserve. It’s about 4,000 acres right on Barton Creek out on the west side of Austin. And we’ve had a number of employee work days where he brings his people out and they help build a trail or clean up trash or cut brush or whatever.

Jeff Weigel [00:59:20] So he’s contributed in many ways – as a landowner, as a donor, as the head of his company, and he’s a great guy. He just rolled off our board but I’m sure he’ll stay involved.

Lee Smith [00:59:35] Didn’t, wasn’t there a possibility of Devils River becoming a state park or something like that.

Jeff Weigel [00:59:41] Well there was there was a, so another one of our big supporter,s a gentleman named Rod Sanders. He’s from Dallas. He’s a home builder. He has his own company. And he likes to buy ranches. He’s bought, we’ve known him for gosh 30-plus years, and he’s bought a number of ranches and we have been able to get conservation easements on those ranches. So he’s a, he’s what we call a conservation buyer and he likes to do easements.

Jeff Weigel [01:00:14] He’s a tough negotiator, let me tell you. He had a 17,000-acre ranch downstream of Dolan Falls Preserve, but on the Devils, and he sold that to Texas Parks and Wildlife as a as a second protected area on the Devils River.

Jeff Weigel [01:00:35] There was a controversy about all that because initially they were going to do some kind of a land swap where I think they were going to trade the original Devils River State Natural Area to Mr. Sanders for his other ranch and some people … That that wasn’t a great idea in my opinion.

Jeff Weigel [01:00:56] So they, Carter Smith, the head of Parks and Wildlife, who used to be our state director by the way, they decided that wasn’t going to work. So they just went with we’re just going to buy this second piece of property and and establish a second unit of the Devils River State Natural Area.

Jeff Weigel [01:01:16] So they of course had to raise the money to buy that land. And David Honeycutt was one of the major donors to that project. He helped fund that, as did John Eddie Williams, our neighbor that we sold some land to. So the landowners along the river who understand the value of protecting and conserving lands out there, they actually ponied up, we would say, put some money on table to help make that happen.

Lee Smith [01:01:49] Dan Allen Hughes?

Jeff Weigel [01:01:52] Dan Allen Hughes did it. And I believe his father, also named Dan Allen Hughes, was one of the donors as well.

Jeff Weigel [01:02:00] So they all came together. And Carter kind of led that effort. It was a magnificent effort because he was able to put together a pretty big amount of money in short order in order to get that land protected.

Lee Smith [01:02:14] And so what work has TNC done on the U .S.-Mexico border lands?

Jeff Weigel [01:02:20] Well, I’ll try to frame this up. I guess it was back in the ’80s and ’90s, TNC started looking at landscapes in a different approach, using what we called ecoregions. Up until then, each state had its own business unit of the Nature Conservancy and they worked within their state boundaries. Well, ecosystems don’t follow political boundaries. So our scientists started saying we’ve got to start looking at what we call ecoregions, which will cross political boundaries as we do our conservation planning.

Jeff Weigel [01:03:01] Well, it just so happens that Texas has three major ecoregions that we share with Mexico. One is the Chihuahuan Desert. Another is the South Texas Brush Country – the scientists call that the Taumaulipan Thornscrub. And the Gulf Coast Prairies and Marshes, that narrow band along the entire Texas coast, part of the Louisiana coast and part of the northeastern Mexican coast.

Jeff Weigel [01:03:33] So we started developing plans for these ecoregions. Well, that sort of forced us, for the first time ever, to start thinking, “Oh, I guess we got to talk to these Mexican scientists too.”

Jeff Weigel [01:03:46] So we started doing that and that started building relationships. And TNC had been working internationally before this but never across international boundaries much.

Jeff Weigel [01:04:01] So we found out that there were a lot of shared ecosystems or connections like the Laguna Madre, which is an important coastal wetland system. It starts at Corpus Christi, Texas, goes all the way along the coast to the border at Brownsville, and then it keeps going all the way along the Mexican coast down to Tampico, Mexico. So it’s one big, one big ecoregion and if you’re going to do conservation, you got to think about the whole thing because the redhead ducks, something like 80 % of the continental redhead ducks, spend the winter in the Laguna Madre. They don’t care if they’re in Mexico or the US. They just need food and water.

Jeff Weigel [01:04:47] And so we started doing this planning. Then that led to doing conservation work.

Jeff Weigel [01:04:53] Here’s another example, the golden-cheeked warbler, which is the only bird that nests exclusively in Texas. It nests in the Texas Hill Country in the Oak-Juniper Woodlands. It’s only here for about four months every year. The other eight months, it’s down in Central America and Mexico in this huge forest we call the Maya Forest because it’s the heartland of the Mayan people. It’s a tropical forest in southern Mexico, western Belize, northern Guatemala, one big chunk that’s pretty intact. That’s where they go spend the winter.

Jeff Weigel [01:05:34] So you can do conservation all day long in the Hill Country of their nesting habitat, but if you don’t protect the forests on their wintering ground, you’re not going to get the job done. So we had to work across boundaries.

[01:05:47] So we did a lot of work on the golden-cheeked warbler in the Texas Hill Country. So we started making connections with conservationists down in the Maya Forest, and I was lucky enough to be involved in a lot of that because I got interested in the tropics in Mexico and I learned how to speak Spanish after I was 40. That was a challenge, let me tell you, and started working with these people and these programs.

Jeff Weigel [01:06:15] And so we did a lot of great work. We got work done on both sides of the Laguna Madre. We got a protected area decreed on the Mexican side, 500,000 acres. We worked on golden-cheeked warbler stuff. We worked on protecting the Janos Grassland out in northwest Chihuahua state of Mexico because it’s part of the continental mix of important grasslands that are in the US, Canada, and Mexico. And you have to protect pieces of all of those if you’re going to get the full specter of biodiversity.

Jeff Weigel [01:06:52] So we developed a lot of relationships with Mexican NGOs and scientists, and it’s important that we keep working with these folks because they teach us, we teach them, and we do exchanges to see each other’s projects and learn about things and, you know, let’s keep that going.

Lee Smith [01:07:15] So tell me about the Clymer Meadow Preserve. How did that happen?

Jeff Weigel [01:07:19] So that’s a grassland. I’m sorry I walked over you.

Unnamed Speaker [01:07:23] Mention the name when you start talking.

Jeff Weigel [01:07:26] Clymer Meadow.

Lee Smith [01:07:30] Do it again. I was talking.

Jeff Weigel [01:07:33] Is a Blackland prairie. So if you look at grasslands across the entire continent, you have, at the broad scale, if you’re in Illinois or Ohio, you have what’s called the Eastern Tallgrass Prairie. And then you move west into, you know, the Dakotas and western Minnesota where I initially worked. You have tall grass and mid grass prairie. And then you go further west to say eastern Colorado, you have the short grass prairie. Well this all because the rainfall is high in the east and low in the west, and so you can grow more grass, taller grass in the east, less so in the west.

Jeff Weigel [01:08:11] Clymer Meadow is a type of tall grass prairie in a high rainfall zone on a specific soil called the Blackland. It’s a very heavy clay soil that some people call it gumbo soil, and homeowners don’t like it because it shrinks and swells because of all the clay, which wreaks havoc with your house foundation if you’re built on a Blackland Prairie.

Jeff Weigel [01:08:40] So the original Blackland Prairie was mostly found in Texas in a narrow band from Dallas down through Austin to San Antonio, basically the I -35 corridor. And it sits, the Blackland soil was really good for growing cotton back in the day. So 99.9 % of it got plowed up for agriculture or was turned into a city.

Jeff Weigel [01:09:11] So it’s a rare type of, grasslands are one of the rarest types of habitats anywhere in the world because they’re productive for ag, so they get plowed up. And the Blackland is especially so.

Jeff Weigel [01:09:25] So once again our scientists identified this place called Clymer Meadow, which is named after a local person that lived up there, as one of the biggest remaining chunks of Blackland prairie. And so this was in the ’80s under Andy Sansom, and we had a board chair then named Mickey Burleson who was very much an advocate for prairie conservation. This was before, right before I arrived.

Jeff Weigel [01:09:52] They went out and did the classic TNC things, figured out who owns the land, started talking to landowners, and in 1986 they bought, Andy bought three pieces of what’s now Clymer Meadow to establish that preserve. So that preserve was established.

Jeff Weigel [01:10:15] It was also kind of important because they ran what we call a capital campaign to raise the money for it, which is where you bundle up several acquisitions into one campaign that you present to donors. They called it the Texas Native Meadows Campaign, and they marketed that out to donors as that, and they were able to raise all the money they needed to buy that land at Clymer Meadow.

Jeff Weigel [01:10:43] And we still have that as a preserve today. It’s, I think it’s a thousand acres now. We’ve been able to acquire most of the remaining Blackland Prairie.

Jeff Weigel [01:10:53] We burn it, which is what you do to keep it in prairie, to keep out invading woody species, trees that in a high rainfall zone, they like to encroach into your prairie. So you have to manage it through burning or haying in order to keep that out, and we’re doing that.

Jeff Weigel [01:11:11] We have a preserve manager that lives and works up there. He does the community-based conservation approach I was telling you about. So folks in the community don’t think we’re some loony toons out here doing whatever.

Jeff Weigel [01:11:27] We, you know, allow visitation and education and all that, so it’s a great place. Really important.

Lee Smith [01:11:33] What is the Native Prairie Association?

Jeff Weigel [01:11:35] So the Native Prairies Association of Texas, NPAT we call them, is an NGO. I don’t think they’ve been around too long. I’m certainly not the expert on this, but they’ve been really effective because they’re Texas -based, as you can tell by their name, and they are interested in prairie conservation. And they’ve been able to muster the resources to acquire and protect some prairie lands. They have some conservation easements and we often work hand-in-hand with them where we might help them negotiate an easement because we have professional negotiators, Jeff Frensell, David Bezanson, who do that stuff and we’ll help them and then they hold the easement.

Jeff Weigel [01:12:23] So we work together to achieve more grassland conservation. And they have a lot of volunteers that can go out and do things like dig up exotic plants that we don’t want or help with burns, whatever. So we work really well together with these guys.

Lee Smith [01:12:45] How does Nash and Texas City Prairies fit in?

Jeff Weigel [01:12:49] So if you look … earlier, you know, I talked about the broad tall grass, mid grass, short grass. If you look down at a closer look at grasslands, and there was a Ph.D. Student at Texas A &M, his name was David Diamond, he studied under a pretty well-known grassland ecologist there, Dr. Fred Smeins. He used to be on our board too. And they looked at all the grasslands in Texas and they quantified what was unique about each one and they came up with sort of a classification system where they identified, well this is Blackland Prairie and it’s based mainly on what soil they’re on and also species.

Jeff Weigel [01:13:35] So you got Blackland Prairie in that swath I talked to you about. You’ve got the coastal prairie which is, if you look at the coast, if you’re standing on the beach and you walk inland, first you’re going to see things like salt marshes and then when you get 20 miles inland from the coast you start losing the impact of the Gulf and the breezes. And you start to see, in some areas, forest and, in some areas, grassland.

Jeff Weigel [01:14:06] So that’s called the coastal prairie and that exists in a band that goes basically from Shreveport to Houston to Corpus and it’s inland, it doesn’t go all the way to the coast. It’s also prime ag land so a lot of it’s been plowed up and it’s an ecosystem with few remnants and in great danger you might say.

Jeff Weigel [01:14:32] So Nash Prairie was protected for many years by being on a ranch called the Kittie Nash Groce Ranch and we had been trying to protect it for 40 years, literally, and we were able to negotiate a deal to buy it back in 2011. It’s only 400 acres but it has close to 250 different plant species on it so it’s very diverse and very important.

Jeff Weigel [01:15:01] We now own it, we manage it with fire and exotic species control and we use it as a seed source to collect seed and use to restore other areas that used to be prairie into grassland. So it’s really important for that.

Lee Smith [01:15:23] How does Columbia bottomlands fit into this?

Jeff Weigel [01:15:26] So the Columbia bottomlands is an important area south of Houston where you have three rivers. You have the Brazos, all flowing parallel northwest to southeast. On the easternmost you have the Brazos, then you have the San Bernard, then you have the Colorado. Each one of those river bottoms originally had bands of forest, live oak trees and other oak species and many many other tree species. And in between those rivers, on the higher ground, you had prairie. And that’s where Nash Prairie occurs.

Jeff Weigel [01:16:09] So you got this mix of forest, grassland, forest, grassland. And the people who track and study songbirds like the golden-cheeked warbler (well that’s not a good example), but you know every sparrow, oriole, vireo that nest east of the Rockies in the North American continent, they nest there and they go to the tropics for the winter, down to the Maya forest.

Jeff Weigel [01:16:41] And in doing so, they have to have corridors of habitat or stepping stones of habitat in order to stop and refresh themselves, feed, shelter from predators, get water. And those forests along those rivers because they they run kind of north -south that’s the same direction the birds are going when they migrate to the south in the fall and when they migrate to the north in the spring. They pass through this forest area.

Jeff Weigel [01:17:15] So the scientists they originally figured this out by looking at birds on weather radar. They learned how to identify birds on weather radar. They now can tell what species they are on weather radar. It’s quite amazing.

Jeff Weigel [01:17:30] And they started figuring out you can protect nesting grounds and wintering grounds but you also have to protect the migratory corridors.

Jeff Weigel [01:17:39] Well that’s what the Columbia bottomlands is. That was a name invented by biologists because there used to be a town called Columbia that was the first capital of Texas, by the way, after the Texas revolution. And “bottomlands” referring to the river bottom forests.

Jeff Weigel [01:18:02] So they, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, has worked on this for 30 years. They’re buying pieces of that forest to set aside as migratory habitat for these 200-plus species of songbirds that pass through in the spring and the fall. Some actually stay and nest in there.

Jeff Weigel [01:18:26] So the Nature Conservancy got involved in this. We had a big donation from an energy company called BHP. It’s an Australian company and they helped us acquire land. They wanted to work in that habitat, that zone, because it was close to their employee base in Houston. So we said, “Oh we can do that. Give us some money and we’ll go out and buy some land and set up some preserves.”

Jeff Weigel [01:18:51] We did that. We have one called Brazos Woods that sits along the Brazos River. We have another one called San Bernard Woods that sits on the San Bernard River and they’re both forest lands that protect migratory bird habitat.

Lee Smith [01:19:13] What was TNC’s involvement in Matagorda Island, and why is that important?

Jeff Weigel [01:19:14] Matagorda Island is a coastal barrier island, it’s all sand, along the middle part of the Texas coast. It’s close to 40 miles long, probably two to five miles wide. So it’s pretty skinny and it’s got important dunes and beach habitat. Things like piping plovers, which is a rare bird that spends the winter in Texas, live on the beaches.

Jeff Weigel [01:19:40] And, you know, coastal barrier islands are also very important for protecting our Texas coast from things like sea level rise and storm surge so they should be conserved and left intact instead of being built upon and you know that’s a whole other problem, but.

Lee Smith [01:20:03] And the backside has …

Jeff Weigel [01:20:07] And the backside has wetlands for whooping cranes where they spend the winter and other wading birds. So it’s a pretty important place.

Jeff Weigel [01:20:17] It had been a base for the US military, years ago. They had a bombing and gunnery range out there where they would fly airplanes and pilots would get to practice bombing. They dropped like sacks of flour or something and tried to hit targets on the island, as I understand it.

Jeff Weigel [01:20:39] But during the Vietnam War it had become kind of an R&R spot for brass that would come over from Vietnam and go out there and go fishing and duck hunting. And this is a story you should get Andy Sansom to tell because Andy was a young man, he was working in Washington for the Interior Secretary. I think his name was Rogers Morton, if I remember right, but I may have that wrong. And the Interior Department had caught wind that this place was being used for junkets. They had a big airstrip out there so they could land big transport planes.

Jeff Weigel [01:21:24] And so he dispatched young Andy Sansom down to Matagorda to see what was going on. Well Andy saw what was going on and he came back and he reported or wrote up a report or something saying this is being used as a junket place and they, the Interior Department, I guess, decided that was no good. And anyway Andy became a political liability and basically got canned over this by telling the truth.

Jeff Weigel [01:21:57] And but it did lead to this land eventually being turned into a refuge, managed by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the U .S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But you can go out there today and see the remnants of the airstrip and all the old military buildings and stuff but it’s a state park and a national wildlife refuge. So that was not TNC but that was kind of preamble to all this.

Lee Smith [01:22:26] Well I thought you all got it and then flipped it.

Jeff Weigel [01:22:28] The other end of the island there was an 11,500-acre ranch owned by a guy from Dallas named Toddie Lee Wynne, your classic wealthy Texas guy. And he had bought this place when years earlier he was duck hunting down on the coast and got caught in a storm and they ended up on this property sheltering, and they liked it. So they bought it. So he built this big lodge out there – mahogany paneling, guest rooms, airstrip. And it was his, you know, Texan retreat.

Jeff Weigel [01:23:08] He would fly his DC. The story we heard is he would fly his own DC3. He owned it. He wasn’t flying it. They would send that down to the island with all the the his, you know, cooks and people. They would go to the island. Start getting ready for the big guy to show up. And then the plane would go back to Dallas and get him and his guests. And they’d come to the island. And it was a big retreat.

Jeff Weigel [01:23:33] But Mr. Wynne, for reasons I don’t know, this is right when I got to TNC, he was, he had decided to sell it. And TNC was playing the role of being the negotiator for this deal which we would eventually transfer over to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. But Mr. Wynn didn’t want to work with them because they were the government. So we came in and we negotiated that purchase and we bought that 11,500-acre ranch.

Jeff Weigel [01:24:07] But Fish, as we call Fish and Wildlife, Fish didn’t have enough money yet appropriated from Congress to buy it all back from us. So we kept that lodge for about six years and we ran it as a guest lodge. And we would take donors out there to try to court them and schmooze them and you know feed them good food. And if they were bird watchers we could show them you know 150 birds, species, in three days because there was so much diversity out there. So we we were able to corral a number of donors by using this lodge.

Jeff Weigel [01:24:48] And it was kind of a unique thing for the Nature Conservancy because we’re not in the hotel business. But here we are running this lodge. It was really expensive because it’s out on an island. You had to, they, the Fish and Wildlife Service, wouldn’t let us fly planes because it would disturb the whooping cranes. So you had to boat everybody out there. And everything on an island is more expensive. And it goes to hell faster in that coastal environment. So you were painting the place and fixing it up.

Jeff Weigel [01:25:22] But we ran it with great success, I think, to our mission for those years. And then we eventually let the lease expire and sold the rest of the land to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So now it’s all part of the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, harboring the wintering whooping cranes which have grown in number now. So that’s succeeding.

Jeff Weigel [01:25:45] And that lodge was abandoned. And it’s now just a ruin. It’s barn owl habitat. So all that mahogany paneling and all that stuff just is rotting out there on the Island. But that’s what it should be. It needs to be a wildlife refuge and it is. So that’s the Matagorda story.

Lee Smith [01:26:08] So who are some notable landowners and what sites have they played a role?

Jeff Weigel [01:26:13] Anywhere in Texas? Well, that’s part of the fun of this business is you get to meet so many interesting people, landowners that have, you know, they’re they may be multi -generational on the land so they have a lot of history and passion for their place, ranchers.

Jeff Weigel [01:26:35] I’m thinking about one guy who was a little different. He owned this place that’s now called Diamond Y Spring, a preserve we own out near Fort Stockton. And it’s a desert spring. It has a couple rare fish that live in it. It’s the only known location for one fish called the Leon Springs pupfish, and so it’s super important to conservation.

Jeff Weigel [01:27:01] It was owned by a guy from Fort Stockton named M .R. Gonzalez. He’s a Mexican-American guy and very interested in conservation. James and I met him when we were negotiating. We bought this in the early ’90s, I think.

Jeff Weigel [01:27:17] And M .R. was just so passionate about this land and he ran a few cows. But he didn’t want to damage the spring. And he was he was a very interesting guy. He was a county commissioner out there. He was one of the first Mexican -American county commissioners in in that county. What county is that? Pecos? I can’t remember. But got to know him.

Jeff Weigel [01:27:43] Don McIvor I mentioned before. You know, we couldn’t do this. Texas is, depending on whose number you use 95 to 97 percent privately-owned, so you have to work with private landowners to achieve conservation. So we do that a lot. And we get to meet a lot of interesting characters in the process.

Jeff Weigel [01:28:05] I’m now thinking of a Mexican guy we worked with in the Mexican Laguna Madre. He was kind of a bi -national dude. Pure Mexican. His mother lived in Monterey, Mexico. He lived in Brownsville, Texas. You know, bilingual. He could operate on both sides of the border like there was no border there. And his family had a ranch in the Mexican Laguna Madre. And we, James and I, worked with him a lot to help him with biological surveys and how do you do conservation. And just another fascinating character we got to meet.

Jeff Weigel [01:28:44] And there are so many of those.

Lee Smith [01:28:49] Hmm. So what are TNC’s fundraising strategies? Do we need to go there?

Jeff Weigel [01:28:53] Well you know TNC’s really good at fundraising. That’s what what sets apart TNC in in the conservation world in the nonprofit world. We’re driven by science and we we stick to that all the time. We know we operate in a business-like manner. And we know how to raise money, because we have a whole cadre of professional fundraisers. I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of that in my day.

Jeff Weigel [01:29:28] But we just we we, I mentioned earlier, the capital campaign concept. We’ve used that a lot, where you you take a bunch of projects all over the state and you bundle them up into one kind of marketing package and you give it a name. Like we had one year, “Saving the Best of Texas” campaign.

Jeff Weigel [01:29:52] You you you have a board, you have board members who chair that fundraising committee. That one was run by Dick Bartlett who was a board member. He used to be the head guy at Mary Kay Cosmetics. Very very passionate guy.

Jeff Weigel [01:30:09] And you start going out and talking to donors. And you you got to, I’m sorry to say it, but you gotta sex it up a little. You know how salesmen say, “You sell the sizzle, not the steak.” And we’re really good at that. So we go out.

Jeff Weigel [01:30:26] But I’ll tell you the best way, and one of my most favorite things to do, in my role is take donors out to the projects and show them. This is what we’re trying to protect and you can help us. And you want you want you want them to experience the joy of giving.

Jeff Weigel [01:30:44] And we are often able to do that and so we can raise a lot of money and then we can do more conservation. So that’s the key.

Lee Smith [01:30:56] So what advice do you have for young people coming to the field of conservation.

Jeff Weigel [01:31:04] Well you should probably listen to the old folks but not too much, those who preceded you. Respect history, learn history and I mean history of conservation. And I mean by that everybody from, you know, people like John Muir and Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. Learn about them and know what they did and what they achieved and respect that.

Jeff Weigel [01:31:33] But you have to carve your own path in your world and, you know, be curious be curious. You have to learn about so many things that are not conservation, you may think are not conservation-related, but they are, because you got to know how the world operates. And by having an open, curious mind, you’ll get there. That’s something I got from my mother. She was insatiably curious and always asked. That’s why I ask a million questions about everything and because that’s how you learn. And you read a lot.

Jeff Weigel [01:32:10] And the other thing, as my colleague Sonia Nahara said in her interview, get out in the field. When you’re a young conservationist, you should be spending 80 percent of your time in the field. As you advance in your career and you’re maybe doing more administrative stuff or whatever, you still got to have some field time to keep you sane and connected. So make sure you do that.

Lee Smith [01:32:37] So what about the future of conservation? What’s your outlook on that?

Jeff Weigel [01:32:43] Oh I’m a perennial optimist. So I feel like, in spite of all the pressures we see that are you know causing more development and and climate change, you know, I’m I’m optimistic that humanity is going to figure out a way. It’s it’s going to be some part technological and part behavioral. You know we’ve got a we’re going to have some techno solutions to things but we can’t put all our marbles into that game.

Jeff Weigel [01:33:12] We’ve got to think about ways we can change our behavior a little bit. You know, fly less maybe. And and don’t do things that look like great solutions, easy fixes, but don’t really accomplish a lot, like, “Oh well, we recycle.”

Jeff Weigel [01:33:31] Well that’s not going to get us there. You really should instead of thinking about we recycle plastics, and you should be thinking how do we make less plastic in the first place, because recycling plastic is not going to get you there. So, you know, you got to think about effective solutions and get out there and apply them.

Jeff Weigel [01:34:00] And you know have faith. The writer Edward Abbey, who’s one of my heroes, he was a bit of a curmudgeon but he wrote a lot of good books “Desert Solitaire” and he invented the “Monkey Wrench Gang”, the fictitious group of eco warriors that went out and did things like cut down billboards with chainsaws. He said something to the effect of you can be a warrior for conservation all you want and work hard in the trenches, but you have to take time to get out in nature to refresh yourself and appreciate that, or you’ll you just won’t be as effective, so you so you got to do that.