The gaping mouth of Bracken Cave, created when limestone collapsed into a sinkhole in this rocky patch of Hill Country millennia ago, reveals only darkness to the human eye. Yet the room inside is filled with the pulsing life of tiny, furry, pregnant Mexican free-tailed bats in April—a massive maternity ward that will, by summer, swell to 20 million after each mother gives birth.

This cave, a few miles north of San Antonio, is said to hold the world’s greatest concentration of mammals in such a compact space.

The sun is still painting streaks across the sky when a few scouts emerge, then suddenly many more follow, expertly forming funnel clouds—bat tornadoes—that allow them to rise quickly and elude waiting predators. 

“Boom, they’re out!” says Fran Hutchins, the director of Bracken Cave Preserve, who has guided groups here for two decades as an employee of Bat Conservation International (BCI), an Austin nonprofit that is the cave’s owner and guardian. “You get that vortex when they surge out of the cave, and then when they reach the tree line, you get that river of bats in the sky.”

I watch with Hutchins and a small group of other rapt humans near the cave entrance, a rocky crevice surrounded by boulders, blooming lantana, and prickly pear. The departing creatures create their own wind, their wings beating out a collective nocturnal staccato.

WHAT IF NEXT YEAR, A MILLION FEWER ARRIVE AND HUMANS FAIL TO NOTICE?

Their speed is astonishing. These are the world’s fastest bats, able to fly up to 100 miles per hour.

Communities of thousands seem to select departure times and strategies based partly on wind direction, rain patterns, and the predators’ positions. Tonight, two pairs of speckled Swainson’s hawks repeatedly charge with war cries and bared talons. At times, the swifter bats, not blind despite the stereotypes, boldly strike back at these larger avian hunters with loud thumps. 

This cavern’s internal temperatures hover around 104 degrees, providing a nurturing space for bat babies, yet any human who dares enter without a respirator could perish in only 30 minutes. Hutchins, a spelunker who has explored this cave with proper safety gear, says bats are somehow immune to the fumes from ammonia and other toxins generated by a 100-foot-deep guano pile that swarms with tiny beetles that consume both fallen bats and their excrement. “That’s housekeeping,” says Hutchins. Tonight, as a bat cave guide, he sports a gray shirt printed with Halloween-style bats.

For a few months each year, lucky humans can gain supervised access by donating to BCI. Though the show typically begins in May, many bats arrived in February this year. Statewide, as global temperatures rise, free-tailed bats have been arriving earlier and leaving later, sparking fear that their food supply and their survival could be affected—particularly given that vulnerable pregnant females migrate as far as 1,000 miles to give birth here and leave with babies mere months later.

Even the adult bats are small: One carefully netted by a BCI employee during my visit fit neatly inside a gloved hand. They’re about the same size as their blood-sucking vampire bat cousins, but they have longer wings. While vampire bats have long inspired fear—despite the rarity of attacks on humans—free-tailed bats have won friends by consuming insects. One study estimated that these bats save Texas cotton farmers alone around $800,000 per year on pesticides.

Bracken is the biggest, but other Texas maternal colonies, including in Devil’s Sinkhole and Old Tunnel state parks, also house millions. And some of these bats’ citified kin, mostly male or mixed colonies, roost below bridges: Austin’s Congress Avenue Bridge, Houston’s Waugh Bridge, and in San Antonio’s Pearl District. 

When BCI moved to Texas in 1984, the urgent mission of its founder, Merlin Tuttle, was to persuade Austinites not to eradicate their bat colony. These days, Texans tend to appreciate the show. They know bats “are not blind; they’re not likely to fly into your hair,” Hutchins tells me. 

The land around Bracken Cave—more than 4,000 acres—has been preserved at great cost and sustained effort by both BCI and the Nature Conservancy. Each organization owns side-by-side preserves, and they comanage a third tract that was acquired to fend off a 3,500-home development proposed in 2013. 

Tuttle retired years ago. Since then, the nonprofit has grown under other directors. These days, BCI funds bat research and conservation worldwide. But BCI’s public face revolves around this one incredible spectacle.

In April, the Bracken Cave emergence continues until long after sunset. As Jupiter winks overhead, late-departing bats face off with a family of great horned owls.

Most bats easily evade the trio. Their beating wings paint paths on the night sky before they zoom up to 10,000 feet in forays for food that can extend 60 or more miles. Passing planes, reminding us of the nearness of civilization and of San Antonio International Airport, regularly alter altitude or divert flight paths to avoid them.

Tree frogs chirp and crickets trill and, at one point, a chuck-will’s-widow emits its mournful call as the hours-long spectacle unfolds and the scene fades to black.

No one knows for exactly how many millennia bats have roosted here; the guano pile inside nearby Natural Bridge Caverns has been carbon-dated at 8,000 to 10,000 years old. Despite conservation efforts, even Bracken Cave Preserve is no longer a true wilderness: A mere 5 miles away, the suburban sprawl along Interstate 35 has encroached as San Antonio and Austin slowly merge.

As closely as this cave has been watched, an unsolved mystery remains: Where do these bats go when they leave? 

To determine the answer, Kristin Dyer, an Orange, Texas, native who’s now earning her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma, has begun to catch and equip a few Bracken bats with tiny transmitters and antennae. She’s erected a small tower near the entrance of the preserve, and with that, alongside other towers erected in state parks, in Big Bend National Park, and in Mexico, she hopes to track them.

Her aim is to map their journeys—and to help devise strategies to better protect them while they roam.

(Courtesy of Josh Hydeman/Bat Conservation International)

Because of their wandering ways, Mexican free-tailed bats, which don’t hibernate, have evaded mass die-offs linked to an incurable fungal infection, dubbed “white nose syndrome” after its most distinctive symptom, that has killed millions among the seven other North American bat species.

Thanks to their enormous colonies, free-tailed bats are labeled a species of “least concern,” although they, like other bats and birds, have been adversely affected by wind farms. Each year, massive turbines strike down 600,000 to 900,000 bats—as many as 100,000 in Texas alone, according to estimates provided by BCI and by Tuttle. (Texas does not require tracking of these kills.)

Right now, few seem to worry about the free-tailed bats’ future. But what if next year, a million fewer arrive and humans fail to notice? To answer that question, Dyer also hopes to find better ways to count them, a task that’s difficult even with sophisticated weather radar, given this colony’s enormous size and concentration.

“How are we going to know if they are decreasing in population? How do you know the difference between 10 million and 8 million?” she asks. “We could be losing a lot, and it could be having a serious impact on their populations. But we don’t know.”

The post The Bats of Bracken appeared first on The Texas Observer.

You’ve probably heard about the Trump administration’s plans for a border wall through Big Bend. Or its plans not to build a wall at all, but instead to put up a futuristic forcefield of lights and sensors. You may have even heard that public pressure backed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a corner and they’ve scrapped said plans altogether. 

If you’ve been confused by the competing headlines about Texas’ biggest national and state park over the last six months, you’re not alone. Even people like me—one half of the two-person team that broke the story—have been scrambling to keep up. 

Back in October, a row of concertina wire appeared what felt like overnight underneath the Presidio International Bridge. Four separate presidential administrations have tossed around the idea of building a border wall through the tiny city of Presidio, the state’s sleepiest vehicle crossing, but the Big Bend’s generally forbidding terrain and lack of action (around 1 percent of total Border Patrol apprehensions sector-wide) have kept these plans confined to the drawing board. 

The wire fence—described by one advocacy group as “a toothpick pushed top-down through a stretched-out spiky slinky”—was just the beginning. Fast forward eight months, and 30-foot steel bollards are rumbling down the highway and bulldozers are kicking up dust to clear land for temporary RV parks housing hundreds of workers. At least three federal lawsuits grasping for an injunction are in the works, and a scrappy rapid response team has sprung up to hold the line against contractors performing work without permission. 

Still, it feels like every time I open social media, I see headlines from newsrooms hundreds of miles away congratulating my neighbors for successfully fending off the incursion of the wall, with dozens of commenters breathing a collective sigh of relief about the future of Texas’ most remote and wild region. So, where’s the disconnect? 

“The world’s smallest Buc-ee’s” near Marathon (Sam Karas)

Part of the issue may be semantic. What counts as “the Big Bend” is up for debate—some people say it’s Presidio, Brewster, and Jeff Davis counties; others don’t count anything north of the Border Patrol checkpoints. Personally, I’d say it’s anything south of I-10 between Sierra Blanca and Sanderson. The Border Patrol itself is much more generous, counting a giant chunk of Texas along with the entire state of Oklahoma as “Big Bend.” 

However you slice it, the part of the Big Bend region most Texans are familiar with is Big Bend National Park, which forms, alongside Big Bend Ranch State Park and the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area and two reserves in Mexico, one of the largest contiguous areas of protected land in the world. It’d be a luxury anywhere, but it feels especially indulgent in Texas, where less than 5 percent of the state is open to the public. 

Yet another point of semantic confusion has come from DHS, which has used the term “smart wall” to refer both to the 30-foot steel fencing traditionally called “border wall” and to other forms of border barrier like patrol roads, surveillance tech, and river buoys. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has put up an online “smart wall” map that’s become an obsessive reference point for people like me, but the agency changes it on a dime with no announcement.

At first, that map showed the national park as slated for “detection technology only.” But, in February, the same month that former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem waived dozens of environmental and cultural resource protection laws, the map shifted—showing a “primary border wall” system cutting off access to treasured tourist destinations like Santa Elena Canyon and the Langford Hot Springs. 

After months of backlash, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott told a reporter in May that because of the Big Bend’s “granite cliffs” over “90 feet tall”—likely referring to the thousand-foot tall limestone canyons that line the river—a physical fence would not be erected in the park. That same month, CBP awarded a $1.7- billion contract to Southwest Valley Constructors, a subsidiary of Kiewit, for “border wall” in and around Big Bend National Park. The agency then clarified to press that this actually referred to smaller vehicle barriers, roads, and tech.

Meanwhile, the state park was originally slated for a steel bollard wall from the park entrance through Closed Canyon, one of the park’s most popular attractions, but former Big Bend Sector Chief Lloyd Easterling promised Presidio County commissioners in March that no wall would be built in the state park. A few days later, Easterling suddenly and unexpectedly announced his retirement. The agency then said that Easterling’s retirement had nothing to do with the wall, and also that—just kidding!—at least two miles of wall would be built in the state park.

In addition to the Kiewit contract, four other border barrier contracts have been awarded for the Big Bend region, going to Fisher Sand & Gravel of North Dakota and Barnard Construction of Montana. Together, the companies will build 175 miles of traditional steel border wall through Hudspeth and Presidio Counties. 

All in all, the Big Bend is currently looking at: those 175 miles of wall, 17 miles of “vehicle barrier systems” in Big Bend National Park and the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area (which could include lights and wired CCTV systems), and over 200 miles of patrol roads “equipped with detection technology” in Brewster, Terrell, and Val Verde Counties.

As a river guide who’s logged thousands of miles running the Rio Grande, the most polite word I can think of to describe the agency’s vehicle barrier plans is “baffling.” Much of the 17 miles presently marked on the map for vehicle barriers is in Mariscal Canyon, which forms the distinctive bend in the Rio Grande the region is named for. It’s around 80 miles from my house as the crow flies, but it takes around 6-8 hours to get there. There are no roads in Mexico leading anywhere near Mariscal Canyon, and the road that leads into the canyon on the American side is so bad that every time I’ve been out there I’ve brought a shovel for the express purpose of building the road myself. 

To spend so much on these barriers—around $2.4 million per annual Border Patrol “apprehension” in the region—is beyond confusing, particularly in a region where both law enforcement and civilians have expressed near-unanimous opposition. Meanwhile, the hundreds of miles of lights that accompany the Trump “smart wall” will threaten the region’s world-famous dark skies, and road construction along the river, where folks have gathered for more than 10,000 years, could wipe out untold historical and archeological riches. And for the more than 400 individual landowners making the choice between fighting the federal government and granting contractors unfettered access to their property, it could mean the death of a unique binational, bicultural way of life. 

I can’t tell you how many dozens of afternoons I’ve spent in Santa Elena Canyon, watching kids splash in the water and dare each other to cross the river and touch Mexico. For over a hundred years, the Big Bend has thwarted the government’s attempts to militarize the border, its dizzyingly tall canyons and wild weather prompting millions of visitors to imagine what the border could look like without concertina wire, without drones, without lines of soldiers. But, if the Trump Administration has its way, we might become just another brick in the wall. 

The post What Is (and Isn’t) Happening with the Border Wall in Big Bend appeared first on The Texas Observer.

If Texas is, as its pledge of allegiance states, “one state under God,” this begs a question. What God? Whose God?

For many Texans, it’s undoubtedly the Christian God, because (so they say) we’re a Christian nation. They can point, for instance, to the 190-foot-tall “Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ” near the Panhandle town of Groom, or the Ten Commandments monument recently installed at the Tarrant County Courthouse in my hometown of Fort Worth. (Not to mention the Ten Commandments poster now required to be displayed in Texas public school classrooms.)

But that’s far from the only answer.

Last year, my spouse Eleanor and I traveled to Houston to visit the multifaith Rothko Chapel. We also stopped by the Sri Ashtalakshmi Temple in nearby Sugar Land to check out the recently erected statue of the Hindu god Hanuman. Truly Texas-sized at 90 feet of shimmering bronze, it’s breathtaking. And just up the road, at a Buddhist temple, stands a slightly less gargantuan statue of Quan Am, the “Goddess of Compassion,” 72 feet tall. During our visit, Eleanor and I rubbed shoulders with South Asian and East Asian Texans and visitors from overseas, drawn to these spectacular icons of religious devotion. Attracted by economic opportunity, Asian Texans have brought their religions with them—just as the Spanish brought Catholicism in the 1500s and Anglo-Americans imported Protestant denominations after independence from Mexico.

Yet when we arrived at the Sri Ashtalakshmi gates, we had to stop and have our trunk inspected by a security guard. The temple, we learned, had ramped up security in the face of hostility from local Christians. A pastor had proclaimed Hanuman a “demon god,” and ex-Senate candidate Alexander Duncan asked on X why “a false statue of a false Hindu god [is allowed] to be here in Texas? We are a CHRISTIAN nation.” 

Of course, there’s a simple and very American answer to Duncan’s question: religious liberty, constitutionally guaranteed. But that apparently makes little difference to those who embrace what University of North Texas historian Joseph L. Locke terms “militant Christian faith.”  

Hindu Texans are not the only ones weathering Christian hostility. During the current election cycle, Muslim Texans have faced concerted Islamophobic attacks by Republican politicians. And there’s fighting over the Christian God as well. This year’s U.S. Senate race pits the Trumpian evangelical Christianity of Republican Ken Paxton against Democrat James Talarico’s liberal Mainline Protestant faith and its welcoming, compassionate God.

In short, the question “under whose God” is not as easily answered as some would have us believe. Despite the state’s reputation as “the buckle of the Bible Belt,” Texas religion “contains multitudes,” Locke writes in his new book, One State Under God: A History of Religion in Texas. The compelling work, immaculately researched yet thoroughly readable, brings to light “the lived reality—the blood and sinew—of Texas religion” in all its variety.

Religion “dominates the [Texas] landscape, shapes the culture, and determines the state’s politics,” Locke writes. “Politicians vie for state and national office with stadium-sized prayer rallies. … God and churches and pastors and moral politics and Christian nationalism all drown the state—and much of America—in an ocean of religion.”

Of course, it’s not just any religion that Locke’s describing here; it’s white evangelical Christianity, whose dominance has been so entrenched in Texas politics for so long that it can seem inevitable, like a law of nature. But, as Locke shows, “it wasn’t always this way.”

In the 1820s and ’30s, when Anglo Americans began settling what was then northeastern Mexico, Texas was widely regarded in the United States as godless. That perception wasn’t entirely accurate; the religions of Indigenous peoples who had for thousands of years called this land home found “divinity … everywhere.” (Locke’s accessible discussion of Indigenous religion is a highlight of the book.)

But among the Anglo and Tejano settlers, religion was sparse. One colonist wrote, “there are no churches in Texas, no ministers of the gospel, no religious associations. The people of Texas are very wicked.” Complained another settler: “There is no God in Texas.” 

Though Roman Catholicism was the official religion, to which the mostly Protestant Anglos were required to convert, clergy were few, leaving children unbaptized and marriages unconsecrated. And many white Anglo settlers—ironically, forebears of Texans who today push to undermine church-state separation—despised established religion. 

Once Texas broke free from Mexico and the yoke of official religion, Protestant denominations gradually gained a foothold. “Disestablishment opened Texas’s spiritual doors,” Locke writes, “and new immigrants brought their faiths with them”—not just Protestants but Jews, German freethinkers, and Czech and German Catholics.

Nevertheless, by the late 1850s, most Texans still didn’t attend church services. They stubbornly defended church-state separation and religious liberty well into the 20th century. This was true also of evangelicals, who generally considered religion “a matter between individual souls and God, not governments and citizens,” Locke writes.

So, what changed? How did Christianity become the political weapon we see today? 

Arguably, the roots of this politicization predate the Civil War, in white Texans’ conviction that slavery was God’s will. The Bible told them so. Enslaved Texans, by contrast, heard in the same Bible a gospel of freedom. Locke’s account of the origins and continuing vibrance of the Black church is another highlight. 

However, Locke contends that it was after the Civil War that the politicization of religion, especially evangelicalism, truly surged forward, in the crusade to ban alcoholic beverages. Prohibition, Locke writes, “lured the state’s churches into electoral politics.” Their pied piper was Waco Baptist B. H. Carroll. The bearded patriarch-preacher convinced Texas evangelicals “that there was more to religion than faith alone. There was power.” In the 1870s and ’80s, Carroll worked “to leverage the state’s infant religious organizations into public life.” Prohibitionist preachers soon barnstormed the state. 

Their efforts initially failed. “Most nineteenth-century Texans—including most religious Texans—denounced religious meddling in public life,” Locke writes. For instance, Governor Oran Roberts declared, “This union of church and state is all wrong.” (Imagine a Texas governor saying such a thing today.)

Yet prohibitionist clergy kept hammering away. Prohibition eventually prevailed, not only in Texas but nationally, with the 1919 ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, authored by U.S. Senator Morris Sheppard, of Texas. Prohibition, Locke writes, “demarcated the churches’ new obsession with moral politics.”

Of course, Prohibition ultimately proved unworkable, and after its repeal, some white evangelicals turned their ire toward the New Deal, communism, and desegregation. Still, “many … clung closely to their historical affection for the separation of church and state.” (Case in point: The Southern Baptist Convention, in both 1964 and 1971, endorsed the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decisions banning official school prayer and Bible reading in public schools.) As late as the 1970s, it wasn’t clear religion in Texas would be so wedded to right-wing politics as it is today.

Yet separate tributaries of politicized Christianity began to feed what became the torrent of “hard-edged Christian politics” that would sweep over the state in the 1980s and ’90s, and Locke gives a lively account of the activists that drove its rise.

Today, what Locke labels “a politicized conservative theology and Christianized conservative politics” maintains a “pugilistic hold over political life” in Texas. Yet there are signs its grip may be slipping. Supporters of Christian nationalism in Texas, Locke notes, “are generally older and whiter than the overall Texas population, and their numbers seem to be shrinking.” The fastest growing segment of the state’s population—now around 1 in 4 Texans—don’t identify with any particular religion. And the monumental statues of Hanuman and Quan Am tell their own story about Texas’ changing religious landscape. 

Under the state’s fabled big sky, there’s always been room for a variety of gods. Yet the centuries-old struggle between their devotees continues—some seeking dominance, some jostling for their own place under the Texas sun. Locke’s One State Under God is a superb, compelling, essential account of how we got here.

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