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

Interviewee: John Karges
Date: June 8, 2022
Site: San Antonio, Texas
Reels: 3725-3726
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: Karges_John_NCItem15_SanAntonioTX_20220608_Reel3725-3726_Audio.mp3

[Numbers refer to the interview recording’s time code.]

Lee Smith [00:00:16] Where did you grow up?

John Karges [00:00:17] I grew up in Fort Worth, in north central Texas, on the prairies and the forests of the Trinity River bottoms.

Lee Smith [00:00:25] But yes, I heard you say that, that he got you out from California. How did you get out to California?

John Karges [00:00:32] It’s a long story of my career, but I started in my professional career right out of graduate school in Los Angeles, California. And I moved back to Texas. And I was a naturalist at the Fort Worth Nature Center for five years and then joined the Nature Conservancy in California in 1990 and was there for a year before the Texas chapter hired me away as their first West Texas land steward.

Lee Smith [00:00:54] So where’d you go to college and what did you major in?

John Karges [00:00:56] I went to the school for my undergraduate degree at what was then Texas A&I University. It’s now A&M in Kingsville, Texas. And then I returned back to North Texas to the University of Texas at Arlington for my master’s degree.

Lee Smith [00:01:09] Go back in your mind to like your first real impression of nature as a child. Is is there a moment or just a general time that you kind of made a connection?

John Karges [00:01:24] Some of my earliest memories are obviously from family camping trips and fishing trips, trips to the Texas coast, a lot of trips to the Mountain West and enjoying nature along that way.

John Karges [00:01:37] I had a naturalist mom who really helped foment the interest in and the exposure to the opportunities to get out into nature. And then a grandfather that I fished with and discussing nature as we as we fished, or seeing nature as we fished, and fishing was part of nature.

Lee Smith [00:01:55] What kind of fishing were you into? Was it was it freshwater or saltwater or both?

John Karges [00:01:59] I started out with both and mostly bait fishing. Nowadays I’m exclusively a lure or fly fisherman, but fishing with worms for sunfish or trout in the mountains or fishing with dead shrimp on the Texas coast for whatever would eat a dead shrimp.

Lee Smith [00:02:18] Was there ever any, you’ve already mentioned the family mentors that you’ve had. What about a teacher or a classmate in your education end of it? Was there anybody?

John Karges [00:02:32] Well, two things right there that were very influential.

John Karges [00:02:35] One was I was part of a museum science club in Fort Worth that was about the natural sciences. And from that, it transformed into a group called the Student Naturalist at the Fort Worth Nature Center, where I started before I could even drive. So I would be driven out for Saturday mornings for nature activities on the Fort Worth Nature Center Refuge. At that time it was called the Greer Island Nature Center.

John Karges [00:02:58] And the other thing was probably exposure and opportunity in Boy Scouts. And even all the way through scouting to my Eagle, I got a lot of the nature merit badges. And so that was very influential as well as the summer camps of scouting or the campouts on the weekends throughout the school year.

Lee Smith [00:03:14] What was your favorite? Because the Boy Scouts have these different campsites around. Did you get to go to any of those? I think there’s one in the Rocky Mountains.

John Karges [00:03:22] We went to all of the local districts camps around the Metroplex, but the halcyon trip was a 50-miler award at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. And that was fabulous.

John Karges [00:03:33] The other one that was so phenomenal about that was a 50-miler canoeing down the Brazos River in the John Graves stretch of the river, from Possum Kingdom Dam down to below Mineral Wells on the Brazos River. That was very important.

John Karges [00:03:46] And about that time, John Graves’ book, “Goodbye to a River”, John Graves’ book, “Goodbye to a River”, was very influential in my early teachings about the Brazos River and North Texas.

Lee Smith [00:04:07] Was there anything in popular culture? When I say “popular”, it doesn’t have to be like, you know, top ten radio song or anything. But was there anything in magazines or books, any authors that inspired you?

John Karges [00:04:21] I read a lot of the nature books. Mom made sure that I had them. She was a librarian and she she fostered that interest in natural history, but probably very influential. And she tells me that in third grade I said I was going to be a naturalist or a biologist, and I never wavered from that from that time on.

John Karges [00:04:38] And influential components of my life were the Jacques Cousteau specials, the Marlin Perkins and the Wild Kingdom. That’s kind of what I thought I would be.

[00:04:52] We also had an Audubon film series in Fort Worth where guest lecturers would come and they would show a nature movie, but do the interpretation in the present of them interpreting the movie without scripted dialog inside the movie. And those were all very, very influential to me, as was building a collection of books. And today I have a tremendous natural history library.

Lee Smith [00:05:15] So what was your first involvement in conservation work?

John Karges [00:05:21] Probably in 1985 when I … well, actually it even started before that. Let me go back. In high school, I got a halcyon job for a teenager. My very first paying job was as the weekend intern, as a naturalist, at the Fort Worth Nature Center, and then two full summers of working in those summer crews. So I was involved in conservation and nature and interpretation of the environment of north central Texas for the public, and have spent much of my career in interpretation or explaining or garnering empathy for the natural environment.

Lee Smith [00:05:59] Cool. So tell me about the Independence Creek Preserve. What is this place?

John Karges [00:06:05] Independence Creek Preserve is a Nature Conservancy fee-owned preserve along the spring-fed Independence Creek, which is in Terrell County and it is a, it’s a spring-fed creek that is only about eight miles long in its live water or surface water to its confluence with the Pecos River. But it’s all spring-fed. There’s a head spring that’s actually above the Nature Conservancy’s preserve and a very large spring called Caroline or T Five Spring on the preserve, all of which contribute surface water flows to Independence Creek.

John Karges [00:06:39] And its importance is multi-faceted. There are rare species of fish and rare species of turtles, both of which are obligate to fresh water and the quality of the water that’s that’s in the system. And there’s riparian, or riverbank, woodland communities and along that creek that are very important.

John Karges [00:06:58] And then where the Pecos River is met by Independence Creek, Independence Creek is approximately 45% of the flow added to the river. And that clear spring-fed water helps dilute the Pecos, which has a lot of sediments and salinity and turbidity. So it really improves it to the degree of 45% of the volume of the Pecos downstream from the confluence.

Lee Smith [00:07:21] And what is the ecoregion like? I mean, a lot of people know that we’ve been talking to just kind of assume. But but what is this? What is this region like?

John Karges [00:07:32] This is a very arid region. It’s actually the eastern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. But part of the richness of it is the fact that the Edwards Plateau also comes that far west. So there’s a mix of the Edwards Plateau vegetation and plant and animal communities that we know throughout central Texas.

John Karges [00:07:50] There’s the Chihuahuan Desert to the west, and then there’s also even a bit of the Tamaulipas Thornscrub of the South Texas brush lands that contribute to to the ecosystem richness of the area.

John Karges [00:08:02] And that biodiversity is manifested where three ecoregions actually meld. It’s technically in the Chihuahua desert. In Texas, we call it the Trans-Pecos, which just means it’s west of the Pecos River. But biologically, it’s important because of the melding of these three or the convergence or junction of these three ecosystems, each of which contribute biotic components to the to the area.

Jeff Weigel [00:08:27] John, would you add in here the fact that they also extend into Mexico? Just comment a little on how the Chihuahuan Desert spans the border?

John Karges [00:08:36] Yeah, I could do that.

John Karges [00:08:39] As part of the Chihuahua desert, this is kind of the northeastern corner of it. The desert’s a huge desert. Only about a third of it is in the United States. The other two thirds are southward into Mexico, ringed by the mountains around Mexico, the Sierra Madre Oriental on the east, or Sierra Madre Occidental on the west, and the transverse volcanic ridge at the south. It’s a huge inland desert basin and Independence Creek is on the edge of that, of the northeastern edge of the Chihuahua desert.

John Karges [00:09:10] And the Tamaulipan thornscrub, of course, extends throughout south Texas and into adjacent Mexico into two different states, maybe three different states, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and Tamaulipas.

Lee Smith [00:09:23] It’s what freaked me out was the oaks there. You know, Trans-Pecos, you know, I did not think at all that oaks are there, and that’s that kind of blend that you’re talking about.

John Karges [00:09:35] Well, one of the oaks is exactly that kind of blend. And that is the plateau live oak. Called the plateau live oak because it’s on the Edwards Plateau. We have huge old-growth stands of plateau live oak along Independence Creek in the gravel cobbles where they get the water underneath the surface that’s actually running through the gravels, allowing these trees to get to have trunk diameters of card tables and be several centuries old. We don’t core them to necessarily find out exactly how old they are, but we absolutely are accurate in saying they are hundreds of years old. So that’s one of the oaks. That’s the plateau live oak.

John Karges [00:10:13] But the West Texas or Trans-Pecos or Chihuahua Desert is very rich in oak diversity. And we actually have that manifested on several preserves where there are long lists of different species of oaks, some of them pretty special and some of them very limited.

Lee Smith [00:10:27] And beavers.

John Karges [00:10:28] And beavers.

Lee Smith [00:10:29] There are beavers there?

John Karges [00:10:30] That’s correct. There are beavers there. This is it’s what is generally called the Mexican beaver. And it’s a Mexican subspecies of the beaver and it is a native of the Rio Grande Basin. And because Independence Creek is attached to the Pecos River, which is attached to the Rio Grande, we have beavers in Independence Creek and up and down the Pecos and the Devil’s River and the Rio Grande all the way past Big Bend.

John Karges [00:10:53] But there are beavers in the desert, and it just highlights the importance of wherever there’s surface water in the desert, there is very likely and almost undoubtedly conservation value.

Lee Smith [00:11:07] So what research and education goes on at the preserve?

John Karges [00:11:12] At Independence Creek preserve?

Lee Smith [00:11:15] Yes.

John Karges [00:11:15] Most of the research with which I’m familiar has been either around the water and sustaining the volume and quality of spring water discharge there. It’s a tough nut to crack because the aquifer can be huge. It’s the Edwards Trinity Aquifer complex. It is that complex, and that’s why we call it that, because it’s a mixing of very, very fresh water through limestone karst topography. The basin that captures that water for infiltration back into that system is huge and it’s probably even poorly defined in that area, whereas it’s very well-defined here in the San Antonio and Austin areas because of the the reliance of that water and its sustainability by the major communities, the towns that live on that water.

John Karges [00:12:00] The research that we’ve sponsored at Independence Creek has very much centered around the hydrology, how the water works from groundwater to surface water, the aquatic biota – are there animals living down in the caverns that have flowing water? Are there animals that are spring-dependent like some of our fishes that live in the discharge of these springs?

John Karges [00:12:21] We’ve also done a lot of terrestrial research out there with range management, land management and brush management relative to the deer herd. Do we have too many deer? Do we have not enough deer? Is it good-quality deer habitat. And not that deer is a driver of the system, although it’s important to the Conservancy and some of our sponsors, the habitat quality is a real indication of do we need to do something? Do we have too many deer that are eating themselves out of house and home and competing with each other, rather than having quality healthy herds of deer? So that’s a that’s kind of a bio indicator.

John Karges [00:13:01] And range management, whether it’s a reintroduction of fire on the plateau tops, which were probably a grassland fire predicated, fire-adapted environment. How soon can we safely bring back prescribed fire to the to the upland ranges on the plateau tops?

John Karges [00:13:18] And there’s another aspect of Independence Creek, and that is one of the rarest birds in Texas, the black-capped vireo, has many nesting territories along the creek and up some of the side canyons that are well wooded with oaks and junipers and brushland. So we’ve done a lot of research on that.

John Karges [00:13:36] We also have used long-term bird monitoring out there to indicate, because birds are, pardon the expression, canaries in the coal mine on habitat quality and habitat condition. So we will actually monitor bird populations through time and the distribution of the different species of birds, what their habitat needs are just to get kind of a pulse of what is going on in Independence Creek, what is changing or most likely as as a sentinel feature of what’s changing and therefore what management should we impart?

Lee Smith [00:14:09] So we had several things here about the establishment of it. Was was he good with those?

Jeff Weigel [00:14:14] Yeah, doing great. Yeah.

John Karges [00:14:16] Okay. So. So who were the key players and where did they contribute to the process of establishing?

John Karges [00:14:21] Independence Creek Preserve has had a very interesting history with the Nature Conservancy in the fact that we very first started with an easement on the neighbor’s ranch, the Chandler ranch, at the confluence of the Pecos and Independence Creek. And in 1991, we finalized the easement with the Chandler family by unanimous or shared agreement for the easement language for the 700 acres of their land that would become under Nature Conservancy easement. And we had that for a number of years.

John Karges [00:14:55] And we did not know that we would actually ever be able to build a preserve around it until the Oasis Ranch became available and the Nature Conservancy worked with the landowner, the Roden family out of Midland, for the acquisition of the roughly 10,000 acres of the Oasis Ranch to begin to build a preserve.

John Karges [00:15:18] And not long after that we added the adjacent Canyon Ranch so that now the preserve is around 20,000 acres of fee-owned Nature Conservancy land, two private lands acquisitions adjacent to the easement with the Chandlers and all including the watershed, the lower watershed, of Independence Creek.

Lee Smith [00:15:37] Where does McCurdy fit in with this?

John Karges [00:15:39] Ronald McCurdy is our conservation partner at Independence Creek, and he helped us with the acquisition of the Oasis Ranch in the purchase price of that. And by doing so, he also has earned a, or was granted a lifetime access to the preserve, to the Oasis Ranch part of the preserve, for his own enjoyment, but he’s been very much a conservation partner in land stewardship, deer management and a lot of counsel and involvement with in collaboration with the Conservancy on on the management of the preserve and the use of the preserve.

Lee Smith [00:16:16] How has he been as a partner?

John Karges [00:16:18] He’s, he’s, he’s fun, he’s animated, he’s engaged. He’s innovative and very imaginative. He’s he’s he’s just been a superb supporter and partner. And, you know, there’s there’s give and take because he has rights to the land. The Conservancy has rights to the land. But it it’s truly a partnership.

Lee Smith [00:16:41] So what were the challenges in getting that project done? You started off saying that, you know, didn’t know it was going to well, become a preserve. You know, and then the pieces kind of fell into place.

John Karges [00:16:55] The challenge was the pieces falling in place. We had the opportunity with the Chandler ranch, acquiring that easement, but it was uncertain what else we would be able to do in the valley. And our primary focus was on protecting the water of the creek for all of its conservation values and importance, not only to the Pecos, but intrinsically in itself being all spring-fed.

John Karges [00:17:14] So we had the opportunity to acquire these two adjacent ranches and put together now what is a substantive landscape-scale preserve. It doesn’t mean that it is without impairment. We have no idea what will happen to the groundwater away from our influence.

John Karges [00:17:32] But right now, we’re able to protect at least the spring discharge and certainly staying vigilant to any threat known or perceived that might impair the volume of water that comes out of those springs. And that goes to groundwater issue, that goes to policy. And so it’s got some big challenges, especially in a thirsty state.

Lee Smith [00:17:52] And then down the road you’re talking about it’s uncertain about what’s upstream or in the contributing zone.

John Karges [00:18:00] We know, well, there’s two different scales. We know that the ranch upstream from us is pretty well protected for the actual head spring, the true live water spring that begins Independence Creek. But the basin’s long. It goes 70 miles to the west, almost below Fort Stockton.

John Karges [00:18:16] Now where the recharge zone is is could be even much larger than that, because just saying the basin is part of the recharge, it certainly is. When rains gather over that basin, they create water down the basin, sometimes in epic flash floods.

John Karges [00:18:31] We’ve had flash floods that have gone over and washed out the State Highway 349 bridge. But those are short-term pulses. We have no idea of what they contribute to groundwater volume versus a much larger basin that has infiltration through the limestone to make that spring discharge that we treasure.

Lee Smith [00:18:49] So what is the cultural significance of this area?

John Karges [00:18:52] Well, the cultural significance is maybe as long as 10,000 years of human occupation in the valley. We know of one ancient campsite where there are bison bones that are … it was down in the valley of the of the creek where there was obviously then maybe even more than now, a lot more permanent water. But some of the late Pleistocene megafauna from the ice age may have been represented there, but certainly animals like bison.

John Karges [00:19:18] We know of a number of cultural sites on Independence Creek and the easement that include bedrock mortar, some of which are this deep from where there was a grinding structure in the bedrock with mortar and pestle for grinding maybe acorns or mesquite beans into flour by Native Americans.

John Karges [00:19:39] We have pictographs on some of the rock shelters in the in the preserve.

John Karges [00:19:44] So we have thousands of years of human occupation in an arid land environment in an area that’s very, very rich. Just to the downstream of the Independence Creek, the lower Pecos culture is hugely rich with places like Seminole Canyon State Park and Historic Site, and a lot of the rock art on places like our Dolan Falls Preserve and throughout both the Devils and the parallel Pecos River basins.

Lee Smith [00:20:12] So let’s … you mentioned Dolan. Let’s head over to Dolan. What is significant about Dolan and why is it important ?

John Karges [00:20:21] Dolan Falls has some of the same parallels of importance that Independence Creek does. It’s spring-fed with permanent spring-fed high quality water in both the Devils River and Dolan Springs / Dolan Creek Complex.

John Karges [00:20:34] The setting for Dolan Falls Preserve is that it’s on the Devils River, but it also includes the lower water course of Dolan Creek, and Dolan Creek is entirely spring-fed. Devils River is entirely spring-fed, almost entirely spring-fed for the most part. But it’s the Devils River is only about 45 miles long, from its headwaters down to Amistad Reservoir, where the river’s impounded because the Rio Grande was impounded.

John Karges [00:21:00] And the importance of it is the high quality of the spring discharge over karst limestone with cave fauna, with spring fauna, species of salamander that occurs only in Val Verde County, Texas, and has yet to have a scientific name. There are rare fishes of the Rio Grande fauna, just like with the Independence Creek and the Pecos. There are rare fishes in the Devils River that are obligates on high-quality, well-oxygenated, clear, spring-fed water.

John Karges [00:21:33] So a lot of the Devils River and Dolan Falls conservation value is in that water quantity and quality of being all spring-fed. It has some of the same ecological settings as Independence Creek and the fact that it is Western Edwards Plateau, Eastern Chihuahuan Desert and northern Tamaulipan thornscrub. So you have this huge potpourri of where the three ecoregions meet, each of which contributes biological richness or importance to that watershed.

John Karges [00:22:01] And the Devils River has been touted as one of the state standards for surface water quality against which other state waters are measured.

John Karges [00:22:13] It’s in places where there are springs, the water is so clear I will drink it straight out of the out of the fissure bedrock where it comes from. And you can snorkel it. And it looks almost Caribbean, except it’s fresh water and clear and colder spring water than warmer, slightly warmer river water.

Lee Smith [00:22:33] There’s also an insect that moves through there that connects the Mexican end and goes on up there. I’m talking about the monarch butterfly. How about the monarch butterfly?

John Karges [00:22:51] Well, one of the reasons why the Devils River corridor is important for monarch butterflies is that its watercourse is basically north-south. That’s very conducive for it being in the migratory lane of monarch butterflies, primarily in the fall when they’re returning southward towards Mexico, at which time in October sometimes, the oak trees, again plateau live oaks, will be just festooned with chandeliers of monarch butterflies. I mean, huge clusters, basketball-sized groups of them, where they’ll they’ll overnight in those trees and tens of thousands throughout the woodlands.

John Karges [00:23:24] So it’s a very important north-south corridor for southward-bound monarchs in the fall. And the Pecos is is to some degree, and some of our other Hill Country streams, which are also north-south, like the Frio or the Nueces, also serve as those kind of corridors. And in some years it may be the Devils and some years it may be the Pecos and some years it may be the the Nueces, which makes all of them important.

Lee Smith [00:23:48] Have you ever been there when that’s happening?

John Karges [00:23:49] I have. I have.

Lee Smith [00:23:51] What’s it like?

John Karges [00:23:52] It’s it’s like orange and black napkins thrown to the wind. It’s just amazing. Or tissue paper, something like that. Or confetti. It’s orange and black confetti just blowing through the trees.

John Karges [00:24:05] And sometimes you can you can actually hear their wings flutter when they’re in a big mass, just like you would hear a bee swarm or something like that. But it is really remarkable.

John Karges [00:24:15] It’s a it’s a an animal movement not unlike the spectacles of our bat cave emergences and things like that. It’s a concentration of incredible animals that move across the continent from Michigan and Ontario and Saskatchewan to the transverse volcanic ridge in Mexico.

Lee Smith [00:24:36] Seeing something like that. What kind of perspective does it give you as a human?

John Karges [00:24:43] It’s a perspective is a, it’s a meld of being a scientist and just an appreciator of nature. And the fact that this is just, it’s a trite and overused word, it’s an abused word, but it is awesome. It is awe-inspiring to see that kind of migration of animals that weigh as much as a postage stamp making a continental movement en masse every year.

Lee Smith [00:25:14] So how is this particular, what are the pieces of the puzzle of of Devils River and Dolan Falls Preserve and how has it been protected?

John Karges [00:25:25] It’s been a long and interesting history, somewhat of a mosaic of of land acquisitions, land protections with private landowners.

John Karges [00:25:33] And it really started in 1989 when the Texas Parks and Wildlife bought the adjacent ranch to the north as the Devils River State Natural Area. And then very quickly, in 1991, the first year I had arrived back in Texas, in the fall of 1991, we acquired the 18,000-acre Fawcett ranch, or Dolan Falls Ranch. We bought it from the previous landowner who had bought the heritage ranch of the Fawcett family. So it’s a very important name in Del Rio and Val Verde County.

John Karges [00:26:03] But when we bought the ranch, it was 18,000 acres. So we had an 18,000-acre preserve next to a 19,000-acre State Natural Area. And over time, through a lot of different land acquisitions and machinations, the Conservancy has found a conservation buyer to buy the 13,000 acres of the preserve from us, subject to a conservation easement that we reserved. And that helped us secure the purchase of the full land so that we now have a 5000-acre preserve at Dolan Falls.

John Karges [00:26:36] And in the meantime, we also worked with other conservation acquisitions downriver by buying what was then called the Devils River Ranch, which was 22,000 acres, all of which is now under a Nature Conservancy easement. Part of it is owned by Texas Parks and Wildlife as another State Natural Area, the South Unit, or Dan Allen Hughes Unit, and the remnants of that ranch that were not acquired by the state are conservation easements with the Conservancy. We have an easement over the entire ranch, including an easement on the Devils River State Natural Area, Dan Allen Hughes South Unit.

John Karges [00:27:12] Before that, we had actually even acquired an easement on the North Unit, the very first conservation land of the Devils River, the Devis River State Natural Area, North Unit, or Del Norte Unit. That has a conservation easement on it too. So it can’t be developed to the extent of a state park and loved to death. It’s a natural area and we make that distinction or I make that distinction quite often, and that there are different designations to state lands.

John Karges [00:27:35] There are state parks, state historic sites, wildlife management areas, state natural areas and a couple of others. Each of those designations is very specific on the outcome and goal or target for that land to become.

[00:27:49] A state natural area is supposed to be a state natural area. State park has a little bit more development for the public access and developed campgrounds and piers and picnic tables. But the state natural area is kept primarily in fairly pristine condition as a state natural area.

John Karges [00:28:07] Then, subsequent to the protection of the downstream 22,000 acres, the Nature Conservancy also then secured and protected 87,000 acres in the upper watershed, kind of in a horseshoe around the head of the river. And now we’ve done that primarily through conservation buyers who have purchased the land from the Conservancy, subject to the terms of an agreed-upon conservation easement.

Lee Smith [00:28:34] So where does David Honeycutt fit in that puzzle?

John Karges [00:28:37] David Honeycutt’s land, which is under a conservation easement, is well down river. It’s actually across the river from the south, or Dan Allen Hughes Unit of the state natural area. But again, his land is a crucial tract of bankside river land on the Devils River in a beautiful stretch of the kind of the bedrock gorge of the Devils River.

Lee Smith [00:28:59] So he’s an example of a private landowner that is under a conservation easement?

John Karges [00:29:07] Right. I would say he’s one of the conservation owners and has agreed to an easement and provided us a conservation easement to permanently protect his land.

Lee Smith [00:29:18] How important are those kind of players?

John Karges [00:29:22] Well, they’re crucial. They’re vital. The Conservancy, as well-heeled and well-positioned as it is, can’t do it alone. So it has to do it with partnerships and that that is leveraging our conservation capacity with their capacity and ethics of being a conservation landowner.

Lee Smith [00:29:46] So we kind of covered that. So I’m kind of moving again around to other springs. What is the Diamond Y Spring? Why is that one important?

John Karges [00:29:56] Diamond Y Spring is a particular treasure to me because we had acquired it. Actually, the acquisition of it was very, very informative and a neat story to tell.

John Karges [00:30:06] In 1990, every chapter of the Nature Conservancy added a conservation project on Earth Day of 1990, and Texas’ was Diamond Y Spring Preserve. And it’s in Pecos County, just north of Fort Stockton.

John Karges [00:30:20] Its importance is the fact that it’s a desert spring in a very arid land of the Pecos Plain – arid land, which is meaning it’s very, very dry. So where there’s a spring, there’s a likelihood of conservation value.

John Karges [00:30:32] It’s got a neat story about how we knew it had conservation value, and I certainly can share that. But what was crucial was the Nature Conservancy was actually able to negotiate with the landowner, a long-time Pecos county commissioner and landowner who was conservation-minded, conservation-informed, that he had a rare resource on his land.

John Karges [00:30:52] That rare resource was the spring. But even more important than that, there were two federally endangered species of fish in that spring.

John Karges [00:31:00] The spring, a lot of people would look at it and say, “It’s a hole in the ground with water in it.” It is, but it’s spring-fed and it is the only place on the planet where the Leon Springs pupfish occurs is in that spring pool and the short downstream reach of that flowing water from the springs. So it’s vital to protect that.

John Karges [00:31:20] Not only are the two fish there, but there are other very, very rare organisms. Some of them are federally listed as endangered species.

John Karges [00:31:28] There’s three endemic snails. Endemic meaning they occur nowhere else on the planet. Like the Leon Springs Pupfish does. The Leon Springs Pupfish used to occur in Leon Springs, which is west of Fort Stockton. That spring was dried up in 1950, at the same time that Comanche Springs in Fort Stockton were dried up and everyone actually presumed the fish was extinct, those people who even thought about the fish.

John Karges [00:31:50] And so its rediscovery at Diamond Y Spring immediately elevated in the fish conservation community and with the Nature Conservancy, the importance of that spring.

John Karges [00:31:59] At that time, the Nature Conservancy had a very, very influential and fabulous board member who was Dr. Clark Hubbs from the University of Texas. He was a world expert on fishes, but especially on desert fishes and especially on Texas fishes.

John Karges [00:32:13] He was on the Nature Conservancy board at that time and his influence at the board level and his promotion of water conservation and aquatic biota conservation for Texas really were were seminal and foundational for Diamond Y Springs’ creation, Independence Creek’s protection and the Devils River. He was an advocate for springs with rare organisms in the desert and the importance of aquatic conservation.

John Karges [00:32:40] So in 1990, the Nature Conservancy acquired Diamond Y Spring Preserve by purchasing about 1500 acres from this Pecos County rancher, Mr. M.R. Gonzales. And then years later, we actually bought the remainder of his ranch west of Highway 18, which is Fort Stockton to Monahans Highway, so that we now have about a 4000-acre preserve there.

John Karges [00:33:00] And the the water is everything. The vitality and sustenance of those springs is everything because the rare plant that’s there, the Pecos puzzle sunflower, only grows in the muddy side soils of that spring. The rare snails, three of which are there, and there’s one little tiny crustacean called an amphiphod, they have to be in the water.

John Karges [00:33:23] So water is crucial for those two fish, the puzzle sunflower and all those invertebrates.

John Karges [00:33:28] And I liken the Diamond Y Spring to being kind of the inverse. We all know how special the Galapagos are. They’re an island of rarities out in the middle of the sea. Well, Diamond Y is an island of aquatic rarities in the sea of the desert, so it’s a little bit of an inverse of the Galapagos, but it is of just as much importance.

John Karges [00:33:51] And other desert springs like that are like that, too. There’s a big spring complex, very famous in Mexico, called Quatro Cienegas. There’s multiple springs in a landlocked desert valley with only one way the water can get out of the valley on the surface. And that has also, it’s been, it has the moniker of Mexico’s Galapagos.

[00:34:11] Well, our Diamond Y Spring is a micro version of that, but very, very important. And other springs west of us, toward Balmorhea are the same way.

Lee Smith [00:34:19] And you said something about discovering its importance was a neat story. Tell me about how it was discovered.

John Karges [00:34:30] If I can tell that story. I love this story. And I actually heard it from the person who who lived the story, was the story. And it was Dr. W.L. Minkley, or Bill Minckley. He was a professor of ichthyology, a fish biologist, a contemporary of Clark Hubbs at UT. But Dr. Minkley was at Arizona State University.

John Karges [00:34:49] And in fact, he was coming back from Quatro Cienegas on a research trip when he blew up a car engine in Fort Stockton. So he was dead in the water with with a mechanic and waiting for an engine to be rebuilt, for his car to be rebuilt. So he wasn’t going anywhere.

John Karges [00:35:04] And he was talking to the mechanic and he said, the mechanic said, “Well, what do you do?” “Well so I’m a university professor and my specialty is rare desert fishes.”.

John Karges [00:35:13] And the mechanic kind of scratched his head and said, “Somebody actually makes a living doing that. What do you mean? Rare desert fishes?” And, you know, “Show me one of those.”.

John Karges [00:35:21] And so Dr. Minckley went to his stranded car, pulled a bottle of pupfish out of the trunk of the car or the back of the car. And showed it to the mechanic and said, “This is the rare fish. This is what I’m talking about.”.

John Karges [00:35:33] And the guy said, “They’re not rare. They’re just north of Fort Stockton here.”

John Karges [00:35:36] Dr. Minckley said, “I’m not going anywhere. You want to show me?” So they jump in a car. They drive eight miles north of Fort Stockton and are seining this little creek. This didn’t have a name on the map. It was called Diamond Y Creek that flows under the bridge.

John Karges [00:35:49] Dr. Minckley seines there. He is smart enough to remember the Leon Springs Pupfish and his jaw drops.

John Karges [00:35:55] And then it became news in the fish community. Dr. Hubbs certainly was super excited about it. Matter of fact, even before the Conservancy, Dr. Hubbs and several other prominent ichthyologists on rare desert fishes worked with Mr. Gonzales on his private land to make a protective berm around the Diamond Y Spring head pool so that if on a nearby oil well or a gas pumping station, there was a breach in it, the surface leakage or the surface flow of any kind of pollutant would not get to that spring. That was even done before the Conservancy was there or as an owner.

[00:36:32] But Dr. Hubb’s advocacy for the Diamond Y Spring as a paramount important conservation site, was very influential to the Conservancy looking at the opportunity to be able to pursue to purchase the ranch as a preserve and and protect the pupfish.

Lee Smith [00:36:49] Well, and Mr. Gonzalez is another example of of a landowner that’s a good component.

John Karges [00:36:54] Absolutely. Enlightened. And, you know, he had to be informed as to what it meant, but he wasn’t particularly worried about the Endangered Species Act and, and was was promoted the research and and then ultimately conservation actions on the place with the berm around the spring and then later as facilitating the the acquisition of the preserve.

Lee Smith [00:37:15] So what were the challenges in getting Diamond Y protected?

John Karges [00:37:21] The acquisition of Diamond Y, like I say, was on Earth Day of 1990. I arrived in West Texas in the summer of 1991. I don’t know really what the funding challenges or the advocacy challenges were in the Conservancy, but to my knowledge it was a no-brainer for the Conservancy to endorse it because of its its uniqueness and its its vulnerability, its fragility.

John Karges [00:37:48] It’s in the middle of a producing oil and gas field. It’s in the middle of a very controversial water right, groundwater rights issue, arena. So the acquisition of the preserve was was again, a no-brainer for for the Conservancy.

Lee Smith [00:38:05] Now, Sandia Springs, let’s must move to Sandia Spring. Why is, well in all these, I mean it’s kind of, again a no-brainer. All of these places we’re talking about have the word spring in them.

John Karges [00:38:19] Right.

Lee Smith [00:38:19] And well, tell me about Sandia.

John Karges [00:38:22] A spring would drive a lot of the motivation for the Conservancy because, as I’ve said, surface water with rare biota or rare animals and plants is very paramount to the Conservancy and often endemic – it’s found nowhere else on the planet.

John Karges [00:38:37] So Sandia Springs was a project. It was actually a fairly small piece of land, but there were two springs on it – East Sandia, and West Sandia Spring. East Sandia Spring is larger and probably more vital and sustainable. We’re actually very worried about West Sandia Spring. But the tract of land had both springs on it.

John Karges [00:38:56] And there’s two things about them that are important, very important. One is that it’s still a spring with nature, the natural native nature to it. The second is that in that basin, this is about what we call the Balmorhea Springs Complex, the most famous two of which are San Solomon’s Spring that’s protected at Balmorhea State Park by Texas Parks and Wildlife. And just to the west of there, a place called Phantom Cave. And Phantom Cave was a spring discharge on the surface.

John Karges [00:39:27] In that whole milieu, there are also other springs, some of which are not yet protected by conservation. We have Balmorhea State Park, which is the state.

John Karges [00:39:36] We have Phantom Spring, which is actually right now the Federal Bureau of Reclamation. It’s one of the very few Bureau of Reclamation lands anywhere in Texas.

John Karges [00:39:47] And then we actually, the Conservancy, was able to acquire Sandia Springs.

John Karges [00:39:52] But we call it the Balmorhea Springs Complex because the whole valley had a series of springs, has a series of springs in it, some of which are protected by conservation, others that are not yet protected by conservation. But every one of them is important.

John Karges [00:40:05] And it was the site and is the site of the Balmorhea Springs complex, both the state park and the Phantom Lake, are the last bastion for the Comanche Springs pupfish. Now it’s called Comanche Springs pupfish, because when it was first found, it was in Comanche Springs, in Fort Stockton, in Pecos County. That population was extirpated. They no longer exist.

John Karges [00:40:25] But the Comanche Springs pupfish, fortunately, was found to also be remnant in the Balmorhea Springs area. So the Conservancy was able to buy Sandia Springs Preserve, which is just on the outskirts of the town of Balmorhea, and protect those springs.

John Karges [00:40:44] It’s it’s a it’s a very small preserve. It’s only, I think in the 2 to 300 acre range, but it does have both springs on it. And then the water leaves the springs and goes back into irrigation canals, lawfully, legally, where water is reallocated to farmers downstream.

Lee Smith [00:41:04] So moving forward, I guess, the interest of the Nature Conservancy would be to secure more conservation easements with the private landowners to complete the mosaic?

John Karges [00:41:17] That would be really that would be that would be very challenging for the Conservancy because much of the intervening land between the springs, you really couldn’t connect much of the land for springs because a lot of it is either active or former farm fields, and the price might be prohibitive for the conservation yield of continuity for them. Much more important to the Conservancy is the sustenance of groundwater and the vitality and availability of groundwater. So if we don’t have the groundwater, we don’t have a preserve that has viability to it.

John Karges [00:41:49] And in the case of those things that drove the conservation, which were aquatics – fish, invertebrates, aquatic plants. So we don’t really know of a lot of expansive capacity or availability in the Balmorhea Springs area to protect intervening lands or watershed lands.

John Karges [00:42:11] And that’s a real challenge and conundrum to the Conservancy is how much is enough? What can anybody, any conservation afford to do and what are the key crucial values that have to be protected. In springs, it’s absolutely the protection of the sustenance of groundwater and therefore spring discharge.

Lee Smith [00:42:35] Where are we at now? Sandia. And so who were the key players in getting that put together?

John Karges [00:42:47] In Sandia Springs, it was primarily the Conservancy and the private landowners from whom we acquired it. You know, we may have gotten some federal grant money through a program that assists endangered species to help us acquire the land. But primarily it was negotiation between the Conservancy and the landowner, with some financial assistance from the agency in charge of natural resources and endangered species.

Lee Smith [00:43:16] So what is an environmental water transaction and how does that fit in?

John Karges [00:43:21] Ryan was supposed to answer that question very adroitly for you yesterday. That’s not actually, it is not my arena. I know a bit about it, but that’s not my arena.

Lee Smith [00:43:29] Okay. So now we’re going to Davis Mountains.

John Karges [00:43:33] Okay.

Lee Smith [00:43:33] What is the Davis Mountains Preserve?

John Karges [00:43:35] The Davis Mountains Preserve is a crucial highland conservation project that is a combination of both the Nature Conservancy’s preserve and conservation easements with landowner partners surrounding the preserve.

John Karges [00:43:48] It protects the highest part of the Davis Mountains in a contiguous landscape between the preserve and our neighboring lands. For the most part, there are still crucial acquisitions that could be pursued to fill in the jigsaw puzzle.

John Karges [00:44:06] But right now, it’s at over 100,000 acres of conservation protection with over 33,000 acres as the Nature Conservancy’s fee-owned preserve, including the summit of Mount Livermore, Baldy Peak, and then another 70,000 acres of surrounding conservation lands with private landowners.

John Karges [00:44:22] And its importance is the fact that it is a montane sky island in the northeastern Chihuahuan Desert.

John Karges [00:44:29] A sky island just means that it’s a huge mountain promontory that juts up out through the desert plain. So it really is an island, a forested or wooded island, in the sea of the desert where there’s more scrub or grassland or cactus vegetation.

John Karges [00:44:44] And because that elevation where the mountain range, from the desert floor to the top, is is almost a gradient of 5000 feet, you go up through grasslands, then you go up through open woodlands and you go up through closed woodlands and finally into forest and then up to the tops of the mountains. So we have all the elevational bands of habitat zones that you would find in desert mountain ranges.

John Karges [00:45:06] And the other four sky islands or five sky islands and other four sky islands in West Texas are the Chisos Mountains which are protected in Big Bend National Park, the Guadalupe Mountains in the National Park, and then the Chinati Mountains, which are southwest of the Davis Mountains on the Mexican border, and then the Franklin Mountains near El Paso.

Lee Smith [00:45:27] And how are these like these kind of stepping stones?

John Karges [00:45:33] No, the primary way they are stepping stones is for migratory wildlife and.

John Karges [00:45:41] These sky islands are oriented across the Trans-Pecos from the Chisos at the South to the Davis in the middle to the Guadalupe Mountains into the north, and very importantly to the north of the Guadalupe Mountains are the Sacramento Mountains in central New Mexico. And from there the Sangre de Christos which go up from New Mexico through Colorado. And these mountain ranges, as the front range of the Rockies, actually go all the way to Alberta, Canada.

John Karges [00:46:06] To the south of us, just across the border from the Chisos in Big Bend National Park, there are the Maderas del Carmen and the Sierra del Carmen, another sky island that you can see from the Chisos from the Big Bend National Park in many places. That’s another mountain range that is huge. It’s partly volcanic and partly limestone.

John Karges [00:46:24] And from there, there are more sky islands southward into Mexico, into the state of Coahuila, all the way down to the city of Saltillo, New Mexico. In Saltillo, Mexico, those mountain ranges become virtually contiguous, and that is the Sierra Madre Oriental, or the Eastern Sierra Madre of Mexico.

John Karges [00:46:44] On the west side of the Chihuahua Desert I mentioned earlier, the Sierra Madre Occidental, that’s the western mountain range that occurs all the way from virtually the Arizona Sonora border southward and deep into Mexico. And they’re connected by the transverse volcanic ridge.

John Karges [00:46:58] So these mountain islands and having these uplands kind of surrounded by arid lowlands are sky topped by migratory birds. So we know the Davis Mountains and the Chisos and the Guadalupes are very important for northward-bound neotropical birds that have spent the winter down in Latin America and will nest in the summer in the Rockies. They will island-hop from one forested mountaintop to the next, moving northward every year in the migration. They do the same thing in the fall on the return flight.

John Karges [00:47:28] And what they have to have is they are montane forest birds. They have to have forests up in the mountains, pine and oak and juniper and pinyon forests, where they find the food so that they can refuel between the next hop to the next island, sky island or mountaintop. And so that is a very, very important corridor for migratory birds.

John Karges [00:47:48] The other thing that makes the Davis Mountains and the Chisos and the Guadalupes so interesting is it’s a meld between the Rocky Mountain portion of the Pacific Flyway, which is a major continental bird migratory route. Well, these mountains in West Texas are part of the Rocky Mountain component of it. Just to the east of it they’re in the Great Plains, which is the Central flyway. So we get a melding of montane birds and plains and grassland birds in West Texas that add to the richness of of the mountains.

John Karges [00:48:19] And that gives us a lot of the context of the mountain tops. And I frequently talk about the five “Bs” for the mountaintops. There’s birds, bees, butterflies, bats and bears and bighorns, that’s six, that that will use these mountaintops and rely on rely on the montane forests of the mountains.

Lee Smith [00:48:40] You see that and, you know, from, I guess we’ll say, the base and you’ve got this desert and this island and it seems like it’s isolated, but what you’ve just described is an international inter- or multi-ecoregion connection. So how does that perspective … you might think you’re in a in an isolated deal and you are in a certain way, but you’re also connected across the planet.

John Karges [00:49:18] Across three countries and the middle part of the continent. So it goes from from the neotropics, which are actually all Central America, not just Mexico, but it goes from southern Mexico and Central America to Alberta, Canada. And therefore, you have multi states across all the states of Mexico, all the states of the United States and the provinces of Canada in that North-South corridor.

John Karges [00:49:43] And the conservation of them has pretty much been done individually by the entity that has the mountains. In Texas, it’s the sky islands with the National Park Service helping them, helping out with the two sky islands on either side of the Davis Mountains.

John Karges [00:49:57] And northward into New Mexico, it’s primarily national forest land, probably to the Canadian border. And then in Canada, I’m not sure what landscape-scale conservation are, but there are Canadian national parks like Banff and Waterton Peace Park right across the border from Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana.

John Karges [00:50:20] In Mexico, of course, there’s there is a lot of conservation focus on the mountains of Mexico. And a lot of that’s done by either federal decree and designation of conservation lands and/or private ownership of people with the capacity to own a mountain. That’s how a lot of the conservation work has happened in in Mexico.

Lee Smith [00:50:43] How does that inform us on a on a kind of a macro scale about the way that nature doesn’t have a boundary?

John Karges [00:50:59] Well. I think that informs us about the nonexistence of boundaries in nature by the conservation successes and measures of both protected acreage and also the monitoring of the viability of the native fauna. So, if we’re if we’re using birds as an indicator of how healthy are the forests, how healthy are the bird populations? That’s that’s part of the way that we can monitor it if we have.

John Karges [00:51:28] Well, there’s another aspect. I think I mentioned the bears, but we know now that bears are moving back into the Davis Mountains. They’ve been well-established over the last three decades in the Chisos Mountains because just south of them in the Maderas del Carmen and the Sierra del Carmen, the Serranias del Burros, which are the mountains you see southwest of of Del Rio. And to the south of that, there’s another sky island called the Sierra Encantada. It’s the third largest, metapopulation of black bears on the continent.

John Karges [00:51:57] So when those bears are doing well and they are numerous, new young bears that can’t get hold of territory, are looking for a new place to be a bear. So they move on northward to the Chisos or to Val Verde County, and then from there on to the Davis Mountains.

John Karges [00:52:12] It’s really tough to measure conservation successes in one capacity.

John Karges [00:52:18] One of them is we know we know the benefit of acres of conserved land, protected land by by NGOs like the Nature Conservancy or state parks or federal parks or national forests. We know that that expanse can be a metric of conservation success, but we also need to know how sustainable and and viable those lands are and whether there’s change relative to climate change. We’re dealing with a long-term drought, a very severe drought now in Texas. And some of these are symptomatic of global changes, but very specifically changes at the site, the thinning of the forest, the forest health.

John Karges [00:53:01] So there’s two different ways to measure. One is just spatial expanse of protected lands and the other is what’s the quality and and durability of those protected lands.

Lee Smith [00:53:12] How did the Schweppe sisters fit into that?

John Karges [00:53:15] Well, their gift in honor of their late or departed mother was foundational in actually the seed money that helped the Nature Conservancy build the Davis Mountains Preserve.

John Karges [00:53:28] We we did it over a course of years, and we started with two small, two small acquisitions, the first about 600 acres in the upper Davis Mountain resort. The next were about 300 acres in two different tracts on either side of Mount Livermore.

John Karges [00:53:42] And kind of like our story with Independence Creek, it wasn’t really a preserve or project until we were able to work with the McIvor family to acquire the You Up You Down historic heritage West Texas ranch. And at that time, the Conservancy had just 12,000 acres. Now it’s 33,000 acres of our fee-owned land.

John Karges [00:54:02] And Anne and Jane’s donation helped us acquire that initial 12,000 acres to really jump start the Davis Mountains preserve.

Lee Smith [00:54:13] And then what happened after that?

John Karges [00:54:15] Gosh. Well, lots of different other transactions. Some lands have been donated back to the Conservancy that were under easement. We actually, in one case, have an easement on our own land. So we need to monitor ourselves and make sure we don’t build a Hilton or an airport.

John Karges [00:54:33] The land ownerships have changed quite a bit. Some of the lands have been recombined. One single owner might buy two of the lands that are subject to conservation easement. Each of the easements is still separate, but now it’s under a single owner’s management.

John Karges [00:54:48] And, you know, it wasn’t instantaneous. It was ah, it was ah, over a couple of decades that we were actually able to acquire the 33,000-acre preserve and the 70,000 acres of private lands in conservation. And it’s been, it’s been pieces and bits added on over time. It wasn’t ever a single acquisition. It was one that the McIvor Ranch that actually started it.

Lee Smith [00:55:20] What is your favorite part or place out there.

John Karges [00:55:24] The one I’m on.

Lee Smith [00:55:25] At the moment?

John Karges [00:55:29] At the moment. Yes. I don’t have I, I don’t have a particular canyon that’s a favorite.

John Karges [00:55:36] First of all, any canyon’s different. If I took it yesterday, I’d see different things today. And if I took it in the fall, I’d see different things than in the spring. So, I don’t, I can’t and won’t choose a particular favorite place or even preserve. I like being on the one I’m on.

John Karges [00:55:56] First of all, with years of heritage and blood, sweat and tears and toil on each of them, they all have importance to me and they all have discoveries – the number of scientific and other types of discoveries we’ve made on preserves – an old homesite or a bear hunter’s cabin or something like that have all been pretty special.

John Karges [00:56:17] And to get back to the question of research, we we’ve had a number of research projects on West Texas reserves over the years. We always open the door to appropriate research projects with either academic or agency partners. And oftentimes, to answer a question that we needed to answer to better direct our stewardship.

John Karges [00:56:39] So if it was about land management of forest health, what is the forest doing? We would call in forest experts to help us with guidance or counsel or do the research. What’s going on with the forest? What do we need to know and what can we do to make management more effective at scale and cost of investment?

John Karges [00:56:57] Sometimes it’s as simple as inventory. What kind of rare insects occur in the Davis Mountains? We’ve got a project, the Nature Conservancy has a project out right now with an entomologist who was out there in late winter looking at beetles in pine logs because nobody’s ever looked at the beetles in pine logs in late winter in the Davis Mountains. And he, I think he actually has a couple of, if not more, of new species to science.

John Karges [00:57:22] We had a researcher years ago in the Davis Mountains, took a car battery and a black light up to an aspen grove at night, and he turned on the black light for moths. And that night he discovered a moth that was new to Texas. He discovered a moth that was new to the United States. And he discovered a moth that was new to science, because nobody had ever black-lighted Davis Mountain’s aspen groves at night.

John Karges [00:57:47] And so there’s a novelty in the inventory aspect of research where we build the list of what occurs on the preserve, what should. In some cases, the research leads to, how well is that doing? Is it a Ponderosa pine forest that’s healthy? Is it a Ponderosa pine forest that needs help? Is there something we can do to augment that forest sustainably?

John Karges [00:58:09] So we’ve had numerous research projects on the preserves.

John Karges [00:58:14] And a couple of things about that. When a researcher can approach the Nature Conservancy about doing a project and the Conservancy assesses the the, the quality and priority of the project – is it good science? Is it a priority need for stewardship or information?

John Karges [00:58:30] And then they apply for a permit. We issue a permit just like the state or the national park would. And from that research we also can get publications. And if the researcher publishes, which we ask for them to publish, it has to be publishable research or it needs to be, ought to be, should be publishable research, as well as a document of utility to the Conservancy or information of utility to Conservancy.

John Karges [00:58:55] And for years, we had a modest pot of money with the Nature Conservancy. It was called the Small Grants Research Project. And we would actually advertise that this money is available, but then we would ask for competitive proposals from researchers who would apply to us, and we would we would value and rate their proposals before we made the awards. And that helped us get a lot of research done.

John Karges [00:59:16] And one of the nice things from my career is, although I was not an academic, I got to sponsor a lot of the research and actually helped direct and participate in the research. Got a few publications with my name on it, but more importantly, the Conservancy got a product that was either usable or toutable for the Conservancy.

Lee Smith [00:59:34] Well, and there’s a facility there to facilitate this kind of research – in the McIvor.

John Karges [00:59:40] The McIvor Conservation Center serves a lot of different purposes. It can be an event center, it can be a classroom, and has been many, many times a classroom, a visitor reception site for when the preserve has open weekends or open days for hiking. And it also has very good accommodations for researchers. We’ve had researchers in and out of the McIvor Center for, since it was built.

Lee Smith [01:00:08] I think, Anne was talking about, and it kind of goes into, you know, just having that infrastructure there allows these guys to go out and shine the light.

John Karges [01:00:19] Absolutely.

Lee Smith [01:00:20] Because it’s so isolated.

John Karges [01:00:21] It’s so isolated, and it’s got the space and all the facilities for what I would call semi-residential occupancy. So the researchers could come in on schedule for a week. They would have it, their facilities, exclusively used for a week. There might be another activity coming in the day they leave that’s the next activity. And it could be anything from the Texas Forest Service working on pine forest health to to a school group coming in for the day.

Lee Smith [01:00:55] So how does this fit in with the McDonald Observatory?

Speaker 2 [01:00:59] The Nature Conservancy work in the Davis Mountains, and a lot of that specific language of the easement has been to guard against night lights that are superfluous or pointed upward instead of downward.

John Karges [01:01:14] And so the Conservancy has worked very closely with both our conservation easement partners and our own operation, its own operation of the preserve, to to guard against additional light pollution sources for the quality of viewing for McDonald Observatory.

John Karges [01:01:32] And McDonald Observatory is very appreciative of that fact. They acknowledge the fact that some of the lands will never be developed with floodlights or ranch yard lights.

John Karges [01:01:42] And we are very, the Conservancy, is very guarded about excessive light. We have a policy by which they turn off the porch lights if nobody’s going in and out of the door. If you don’t need it, don’t use it. It’s not needed.

Lee Smith [01:01:59] Can you remember the first time you were out there and looked up and just had to stop and stare.

John Karges [01:02:08] I was afraid you’d ask that. No, actually, I don’t remember.

John Karges [01:02:14] I mean, I bask in it every time I get the opportunity. You know, there’s nothing like being in the night sky of the Davis Mountains, say, in the Perseid meteor shower.

John Karges [01:02:25] I was one time out there actually near Marfa and the Marfa lights very, very close to some of the Nature Conservancy’s work in the Marfa Grasslands, where it was in August, it was the middle of the Perseid meteor shower. We had cloud-to-cloud lightning over the mountains of Mexico. There were any number of satellites in view at the time. The sky was full of the Perseid meteor shower and we saw the Marfa lights, whatever they are. And it raised the hackles on the back of my neck. Like that ain’t nothing I know and it ain’t where there’s light supposed to be.

John Karges [01:02:58] My recollection of the night sky in the Davis Mountains, if it’s clear viewing, any night is phenomenal.

Lee Smith [01:03:11] So how does the expanse of that area, just the sheer scale of it, what does that do to your sense of self? How does it inform you as a human being on planet Earth?

John Karges [01:03:28] For one, the expanse of undeveloped landscape and the massive expanse of the ranch lands out there, not yet divided, not yet loved to death, not yet carved up to death like the much of the Hill Country is, gives me a semblance of the intactness of Texas that we don’t have many places left, not even on the Panhandle until you get to Palo Dura Canyon or Caprock Canyons. You know, it’s fertile farmland of the Great Plains.

John Karges [01:04:00] In the Trans-Pecos, we still have vast expanses of rangeland in the Marathon basin, the Marfa grasslands, the Sierra Blanca grasslands. And then we’ve got the sky islands. And even if they’re even, if it’s not one of the big four – the Chisos, the Guadalupe, the Davis or the Chinatis, we’re still got basin and range topography that just gives me expanse, the feeling or perception of expanse of Western – Western wildland rangeland, with pronghorns and mule deer. And just I won’t say that it’s a place where the hand of man has never set foot, but it is close to it.

Lee Smith [01:04:47] And so how does that give you a connection to the world that you don’t get anywhere else?

John Karges [01:05:01] One of the ways it does that is the sense of satisfaction of being part of a conservation movement that has had expansive accomplishment for the for the entire planet. That’s a tougher nut to crack because the world is changing so fast that I’m hoping that conservation has a durability over the next century. I won’t live to see it, but that’s it.

John Karges [01:05:27] And so much of conservation is predicated on hope and therefore endeavor and effort. And, you know, I want to believe that much of our conservation work does have the permanence and durability, at least for the foreseeable future. 500 years from now, we can’t imagine.

John Karges [01:05:44] Well, I think academically, the access to preserves for research on natural areas has been so, so vital. The academic community has relied upon the Nature Conservancy to have natural lands with ecological function and intactness for research questions of either stewardship or inventory.

John Karges [01:06:08] In the conservation community, I think there are a lot of perceptions that the Conservancy has done admirable and even enviable work because of our capacity to work across landscapes and at scale and in multiple arenas. Some arenas, other conservation organizations may be more effective at. But the Conservancy, in doing what they do best in land protection and long-term viability, durability of the conservation projects has been admirable, admired by, and enviable to the other NGO partners.

John Karges [01:06:45] And the Conservancy I think also has had some some some very good modesty or humility in saying if it’s not the Conservancy, maybe it’s this other conservation partner that can help get the project done.

John Karges [01:06:57] My advice to young conservation professionals, pre-professionals, is to have a broad education in conservation planning and strategy. And this includes spatial capability, the GIS frameworks that we’re using now.

John Karges [01:07:14] And that is all seminal to building a framework for expansive conservation and durability. What needs to be protected and where is it, and how do we link it together to try to make landscapes? Landscape connectivity and landscape durability are very important. Those those kinds of new analytical skills in what what’s vital to conservation and how do we get there would be good for a young conservationist.

John Karges [01:07:42] There are a lot of young pre-professionals in natural resources field that are very specialized on this species or maybe even this kind of habitat. I would actually urge a young conservationist to get as broad a holistic introduction and skill set as possible to be most effective in the conservation arena, the professional arena, going forward.

Lee Smith [01:08:07] And what is your outlook on conservation, moving forward? How are we doing?

John Karges [01:08:20] My outlook for conservation’s future is very good for what I can foresee as the future – a 20- to 50-year horizon. Beyond that, in this rapidly, dramatically changing planet, I just hope that much of the biodiversity can persist.

John Karges [01:08:39] The planet will still exist, natural ecosystems will exist. Novel ecosystems, we’re making daily. They will persist and they’re going to continue. We’re going to get new species brought from one continent to another continent.

John Karges [01:08:54] Giving them the space to live will be so important at the very intimidating, consumptive per capita level of a planet with a huge population of humans.