On Bear Branch Creek
By Robert Dailey
A fall breeze, heralding a mid-season cold front, urged me down the embankment toward Bear Branch Creek.
I looked down at the creek. It didn’t seem much. My first impression of it: a ditch named by some developer with poetic delusions.
My second impression: the ditch’s real function was collecting flotsam from the myriad of upper middle class neighborhoods that surround it, carrying it to a far-away pond. It was a façade, I decided, best enjoyed from a distance – a profound disappointment up close.
Nudged by the wind, I stepped down the embankment.
The breeze shushed through the tops of the woods. The wind spread a scent of pine-freshened oxygen.
Bear Branch Creek bottom is not a piney woods, but pine stands do exist here, along with blackjack, red and pin oaks, gum, yaupon holly, parsley hawthorn, sassafras and others. Downy woodpeckers and perhaps red-cockaded ones flit through the trees, clutching to the sides of tall dead loblollies, looking for insects and larvae, building nests. I say “perhaps” about the red-cockaded woodpeckers because I’m still not sure I observed any of those endangered birds this day.
I have a lot of trouble with binoculars. With my $30 pair, I couldn’t even find the tree, much less the bird I was trying to identify. I have the same problem with microscopes and telescopes. I was given a telescope several years ago to enjoy the stars from my Santa Fe garden. The high desert where we lived had little light pollution and was a perfect location, I was told, from which to view the stars. After several hours fiddling with lenses, I found something that I thought was the Crab Nebula. Instead, my wife informed me it was a bonfire made by campers up on a nearby mountain. She added, dryly, that she was watching it with her naked eye. So much for me and lenses.
I know that red-cockaded woodpeckers live in Jones Forest, perhaps another mile north of my position. I did identify a downy woodpecker, but that was only because it was so close it could have bit me if it had wanted to.
On the artificial slope that forms the foundation of the bridge over the creek, a patch of gaillardia partially concealed the stem of a sweet gum seedling. Texas white honeysuckle intertwined the bushy bluestem grass, while “ham and eggs” lantana snuggled up against both.
A stand of Chinese tallow, its leaves turning brilliant autumn colors provided a fall backdrop for the native plants. Ben Franklin introduced these trees, among other things, in 1776. Ben thought the tallow, so named for a waxy substance on leaves and seeds could be used to produce candles and soap. He also thought it was a beautiful plant, suitable for polite post-colonial gardens. He couldn’t have known that it had malicious intent. Chinese tallow eventually stretched along fence lines and rivers, crossed and crisscrossed prairies throughout the Gulf Coast, bullying other plant species out of the way, stealing their nutrients, and crowding out all but the most tenacious vegetation.
Nor could the US Department of Agriculture have known Chinese tallow was a savage menace. When the group promoted planting tallows all along the Gulf Coast, hoping that its proliferation would spawn a massive soap industry in the South, it supplied millions of plants. The USDA made that troublesome decision in the early 1900s, not understanding the ecological damage it was unleashing on the coastal prairies, woodlands and farms from Florida to Texas and beyond. Today, the Chinese tallow (Triadica sebifera) has become the dominant species in many environs, forcing out other species and creating large-scale changes to the native ecosystems.
Chinese tallow grows everywhere along the Gulf Coast – and it’s so successful that it blends in with the other species, a serial killer hiding in a woody crowd.
Near the water’s edge of Bear Branch Creek, native grasses and introduced sedges were flattened by deer who bedded down last night. Ubiquitous plastic bottles and other accoutrements of modern Homo sapiens sapiens littered the ground, collected by recent rains and deposited when the creek’s level fell again.
Within 10 feet of me were six plastic bottles, a Styrofoam cup and a plastic bag.
Hundreds of aluminum cans mulched the ground at a nearby stand of loblolly saplings. The cans, unfortunately, will probably outlive most of the saplings, returning nothing but decaying aluminum back to the earth in a century or so.
Lots of junk along the creek, but signs of wildlife were there too. In addition to the flattened grasses, little paths cut this way and that across a meadow. I could imagine rabbits, skunks, raccoons, possums, armadillos, rodents and other life searching the meadow for their various food stuffs. At nightfall, the traffic becomes heavy, some returning from a hard day at worm-digging and frog-catching, meeting others just going out for dinner.
A shadow sailed across the creek bottom and I looked up. Three black vultures soared above, their heads cast down toward the ground, either hunting or scavenging. I had always thought of black vultures (Gragyps atratus) as only scavengers, but recent reading convinces me that they may also take new-born animals. A report from a Utah farmer indicates that he saw black vultures attack and kill a newly-born calf. True or not, it’s obvious that the three above me had some sort of agenda. I don’t know if they had been scouting separate territories and converged when they saw me, or they were simply searching together along the creek bed. They knew how to ride the thermals. When I first saw them, they were at tree-top level. A minute later, I spotted one of them several thousand feet above me, warm upward drafts carrying it far into the sky.
I followed the creek. I’ve fly fished hundreds of creeks like this elsewhere. Well, almost like this. Most had rock bottoms and most flowed with bone-chilling water. And the prey was trout, cutthroat, brown, and rainbow. Here, the prey was different: blue gill, bass, perch. Even, I’m told, large cichlids, released from aquariums and left free to grow, prosper and replace.
The narrowness of the stream convinced me I could “deadstick” the tiny area with my fly rod, dipping and rolling the line. Deadsticking isn’t much different than using a cane pole to fish with, although it does take a little more skill. I gauged the swiftness of the stream, figuring what it would take to gently mend line so a little fly would appear natural to the game species that lay in the cool coils of the stream. Not that I’d actually eat anything I caught there, but catching and releasing them would give me a better idea of what lives in those waters.
To my left more tallow trees were turning into yellow gold. The leaves on some limbs, having already turned sugary, were bright red.
I crossed two little muddy side streams feeding Bear Branch Creek. It was clear from the tracks that many deer had passed this way since morning, oblivious or simply heedless to the thousands of vehicles crossing the bridge daily several hundred feet away.
I was changing my attitude about this little waterway, elevating it in my mind at least.
I stood on the creek’s edge once again, pondering the fate of a small bright green grasshopper which, spooked by my advancing steps, jumped. In doing so, it missed the long blade of big bluestem grass it was apparently aiming for and landed instead smack in the middle of the stream. Supported by the water’s surface tension, it worked its six legs frantically, attempting but not succeeding in gaining traction. The current carried it forward. A bluegill, holding on the downstream side of a sandy rill and alerted by the movements of the grasshopper, snapped up the little green fellow in a gulp. With a flick of its tail, it settled back into its station, waiting for other tasty tidbits to be carried downstream.
As I watched the bluegill-grasshopper interlude, a movement ahead caused me to look up. A great blue heron (Ardea herodia) was barreling down on me, or at least I thought so. It was flying very close to the ground, and for a brief second, I felt it was aiming its pointy beak straight at my head.
The heron, swooping through the branches of an old oak, did not see me until the last moment. A hoarse croak slipped from it, and it veered away. I looked back to where it had come from. A second heron was just taking off. It had seen the direction change of its mate. It flew in a wide circle to avoid me.
Later, farther downstream, I saw a mass of bird droppings where another tiny gulley dumped into Bear Branch. I assumed the two herons had been fishing there for some time, aided by the shadow of a pin oak leaning across the stream.
I cocked my ear to better hear a small rustling to my left and peered above my glasses. A two-spiked buck looked back at me. It had been feeding in a copse of tallow trees, eating the young fall sprouts, I suppose. Although all parts of the tallow trees are considered poisonous to mammals (birds eat the seeds) evidently this deer did not read the report.
That he was alone spoke volumes. First, he allowed me to see him. I have spotted many deer out in these greenways that connect one suburban wilderness with another. Large bucks with harems are very cautious, though, and I have seen few. I suspect that, being the time of rut, he had either been driven off by a larger, stronger male, or had not challenged one yet. He obviously did not have a harem to protect or hide.
He may also have lost his fear of humans – an individually dangerous condition among wild animals. Since hunting is prohibited in the The Woodlands, the buck’s lack of caution might or might not be a problem. Absence of fear of a human in a non-hunting area is one thing. Absence of fear of a car being driven by a human in a non-hunting area is something else.
As I meandered along the stream, the little buck stayed within 100 feet or so, keeping one eye on the human at his left, the other on his munching. I’ve seen cows more afraid of me than this buck was. Every once in a while he’d glance up and flick his tail.
The underside of a white-tailed deer (Odocoilus virgianus) is snowy white (thus the name). They flick their tail upward, exposing the white, to signify danger. I think, however, this little male was simply swatting mosquitoes. He obviously wasn’t frightened - at least not of me.
He crossed over the creek, keeping the water and the creek’s steep sides between us. But he also didn’t run away. As I walked down the creek, he grazed along the other side. A half hour later, he had meandered to the edge of the woods. He drifted into the underbrush, then sidestepped into thicker, higher growths, eventually slipping into the woods.
Something was peppering the water, and I realized it was tiny droplets of rain, too small for me to feel, but large enough to cause ripples in the stream. Larger drops fell now, hitting the paper of my notebook and my glasses.
A great white heron, head crooked back, yellow beak leading and long, skinny, black legs trailing, flew overhead.
I turned and headed back to the bridge, hoping to beat the worst of the rain. The sky was blue black, and the clouds hung low. Mosquitoes had emerged, looking, I suppose, to get in one last meal before the cold front arrived. The air was heavy, but the pine scent lilted through it. And I must say, although I loathe Chinese tallow, they did look lovely in their gold and red.
