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Up Close with John Karges
By Courtney Leatherman
Nature Conservancy conservation biologist John Karges talks about life in—and the allure of—West Texas, his ability to bring donors to tears and his respect for roadkill.
Everything I know about West Texas I’ve learned in the past 24 hours. Can you take me there?
Let me see if I can paint a picture. We live in what’s called the Trans-Pecos—west of the Pecos River. It’s in the northeast corner of the Chihuahuan Desert, characterized by desert lowland, scrub, vast open vistas, some remnant grasslands. And our mountain ranges are much like the sky islands of southwest Arizona and southeast New Mexico.
You’re responsible for making biological inventories on some 200,000 acres there. What does that mean? If land becomes available for conservation, I get to go out and see if it has merit for action by the Conservancy. Does it have ecological values—species—or ecological integrity, like the health of the ponderosa pine forest in the Davis Mountains?
I’m told the area can be harsh—even downright bleak. And yet you moved here in 1991 as the Conservancy’s first land steward in the region. What attracted you? Two of my most memorable childhood vacations brought me to West Texas. I remember trips to the Big Bend region in 1967, when I was 13, and again in 1972. Just me and my mom, and we were terrified of the desert but intrigued by it. We worried about car trouble on a remote desert road. Were there bandits out there that might harm us? But we just had to see it.
Why? The mystery. The intrigue. The fact that it’s in our home state but so different from the Fort Worth area that I grew up in.
And then you returned when you were studying vertebrate biology in college.
I would come out here snake hunting for the museum at the university. I never dreamed I’d be working the landscape professionally; I thought I was going to be a professor. Once when I was working on the Conservancy’s Independence Creek Preserve, I went back to my old field notes from college in the ’70s. And what a reunion and revelation it was to realize I’d been here 20 years before.
You’ve kept your field notes from college? It’s the archive of my life. I keep daily field notes. I probably have 40 journals. They go back to 1976 and up to a dead gray fox I saw today on my commute.
Why record roadkill? It’s archival history: What did a place look like 100 years ago, what did it look like 50 years ago, what lived there? That may be useful to future land stewards. Some of it helps drive the Conservancy’s thinking. What have we lost and what can we reasonably, practically restore or save? I’ve actually been approached by the American Museum of Natural History in New York about ultimately depositing my field notes there.
That would be quite an honor. Absolutely.
I hear you also know how to tell a good story. Once at the Conservancy’s Diamond Y Spring Preserve—a Godforsaken-looking place replete with oil and gas rigs—you brought donors to tears when you described the restoration effort. And that’s in spite of the smell of crude oil in the air. That was magical. If somebody were just to go out to Diamond Y, they would look around and go, “Why here?” But we have a pupfish that occurs nowhere else on the planet, another fish that’s equally rare, a federally threatened plant and four other species of plants that are rarer than the federally threatened one. Diamond Y is not scenic. It’s not a postcard place, but it absolutely is important and imperiled.
You seem smitten with this place and its wildlife. I’m smitten with everything that moves. One time I was asked which is my favorite preserve. I said “The one I’m on.” The same is true when someone asks, “What’s your favorite bird?” I say, “The one I’m watching.”
But you’re pretty partial to roadrunners. It’s a fascinating animal. I can imitate their vocalization, and I had this one track me down the riverbank when I was canoeing, and we exchanged calls. I don’t have any idea what I was saying in roadrunner-ese, but it certainly elicited a response.
And this talent is not limited to roadrunners, right? You’ve called in kit foxes, gray foxes and lots of different birds. Yeah, I’ve called in zone-tailed hawks by doing a territorial whistle. One time I was with this rancher who is not particularly fond of the Conservancy. I did that on her ranch. She got the best view of a zone tail, and I have a standing invitation to return anytime.
So she’s warmed to the organization? I think she’s just fascinated that I could show her something neat about the very piece of land she’s lived on all her life. And she is a bit more receptive to talking about long-term conservation.
But she hasn’t done a deal with the Conservancy yet? No, it wasn’t a deal sealer, but it certainly was an icebreaker.
