Freakish Storm In South Texas

Written By - Craig Boddington - 05/24/2007

Link to Original Article here

Winter is a wonderful time in South Texas most of the time. Nights can be cold enough that a fragrant mesquite fire feels good. Cold evenings and mornings mean the rattlesnakes won\'t be out (much!), but morning chill soon gives way to pleasant days under cloudless skies most of the time. I\'m sure most of you noticed that this winter just past has been fraught with disastrously weird weather patterns.

While driving across the country. I got stuck in two major blizzards and waited out wind and rain too severe to drive through. While flying – or trying to – I sat in airports and hotels for several days waiting for planes that couldn\'t fly. But surely I could rely on that beautiful South Texas winter weather?

Not this year. In December, on the Killam Duval County Ranch near Freer, we had a couple of days of almost unprecedented high winds followed by a couple of days of steady rain, which is even rarer in that place and time. Rained out? No. Despite the weather some great bucks were taken, and on my last morning, I shot a lovely old buck. This is a great tribute to a wonderful place, but what might it have been like if the weather had been even close to normal?

A month or so later, Donna and I suffered through another three-day deluge in Dallas, then we headed south with an ice storm closing airports and roads in our wake. Provided we could get out from under the storm I wasn\'t in the least worried. Our destination was former Congressman Jack Fields\' Dos Angeles Ranch, deep in South Texas just a few miles from Del Rio and the Mexican border. This is hot, arid country, where we could, instead of chilling out, dry out and warm up.

By the time we reached San Antonio and turned west, it was still cold and windy, but at least it was dry. We had escaped the storm, but not for long. The next day was cold, with low scudding clouds driven by a cruel wind. At least it was dry, and that evening in a sheltered valley, Donna shot her first whitetail. Good thing, because the storm reached us that evening, cold rain quickly freezing.

We awoke to the most amazing sight I\'ve ever seen: South Texas covered by a sheet of glistening ice. The temperature was exactly freezing and stayed there, with icicles shimmering from the eaves of the lodge, and the mesquite and prickly pear covered – completely encased – in sheaths of new ice. It was beautiful in a somber way, and would have been magnificent in the South Texas sunshine. Instead the freezing rain gave way to big, fluffy snowflakes.

It wasn\'t quite cold enough for the snow to stick, and it wasn\'t quite warm enough for the ice to melt, so we spent some time in a wonderfully warm lodge waiting out the impasse. We scotched our plans for hunting quail, partly because we probably couldn\'t find them, but mostly because these warm weather bobwhites had enough problems without us adding to them.

We spent a little time on deer stands – thank God, with a propane heater by our feet – looking at axis deer and whitetails. The sun never quite came out, but a day later, when the skies lifted a bit and the rain and snow seemed to have stopped, we went blackbuck hunting.

Dos Angeles is, in part, typical South Texas brush sloping gradually down to Pinto Creek, an amazing clear water stream where much of Lonesome Dove was filmed. It also encompasses a vast area of open, grassy plains. On these plains ,Jack has one of the finest herds of blackbuck antelope in North America, possibly 500 strong.

You wouldn\'t know it on this day, with the yellow grass and low brush a sea of shimmering ice. We covered a lot of country in a sturdy Austrian eight-wheeled military vehicle, ideal on the slick, barely frozen roads – and I doubt we saw more than a dozen blackbuck altogether. We figured it out by spotting a few sets of black horns among the crystal grass. They were lying down, conserving heat and no doubt completely confused by conditions not seen in a dozen blackbuck generations.

In the late afternoon, a pale sun poked through the clouds, and the animals began to move. They clearly didn\'t like the ice, stepping high as if on a sea of carpet tacks. We hunted them gently, glassing from afar and trying not to make them run. It has long been an article of faith that blackbuck don\'t do well in cold climates and can\'t handle snow and ice at all. I took a monster, the best black, mature ram we saw, but we saw others – still brown and needing a year or two – that were clearly bigger. We left them alone as best we could. Jack was worried, and his hunting manager, Dr. Ken Argo, was nearly distraught.

The blackbuck herd was a prize gem, in place for many years in perfect habitat and hunted very little, but the crown jewel was Ken\'s excellent native bobwhite population, nurtured for years. This ice storm could undo those years of quail habitat improvement, and if it didn\'t melt quickly the blackbuck would suffer as well. It was believed the whitetail and axis deer would do just fine, but that would depend on how long the storm lasted.

In the evening, with the wind finally settling, the bobwhites came out to the frozen roads to pick gravel, probably a good sign, but the blackbuck had already started to die. We picked up three or four along the ranch roads, the only place they could go to get out of the unfamiliar ice. It was a quiet dinner, everyone wondering how great the damage would be.

In the end, South Texas came through.

The morning was cold but calm, and at last a brilliant sun rose in a blue sky, glinting off the snow and ice. We chipped fully two inches of ice off my rental car, and we made our way carefully over hard-frozen dirt and gravel to the gate. The temperature rose through the day, and the ice left, perhaps soon enough. Ken reckoned the total loss of blackbucks at less than a dozen, all apparently healthy animals that seemingly stopped in mid-stride and simply gave up.

As predicted, the hardy axis deer and hardier whitetails were just fine, taking it all in stride. So were the turkeys and most of the rest. As for the bobwhites, only the nesting season soon to come will tell the tale. The winter of 2006-2007 was a bell ringer for bad weather, and we hear much about the human tragedy from the freakish storms, as well we should, but we aren\'t the only species that suffered.