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Órale, the featured Caló word of the week is troca. It comes from the English word truck. Toca has become such a favored word that it’s used extensively outside of Caló. You hear it throughout Mexico and Central America, as well as the US side of the Rio Grande.

The garden’s namesake was a passionate advocate for our region’s plants. Manning, who passed away September 8th, managed the Sul Ross greenhouse for 18 years, worked as a teacher and consultant and, with her partner Cindi Wimberly, founded Twin Sisters Natives. That business offered plants Manning had cultivated, with careful expertise, from seeds she’d collected.

Grasshopper mice are fierce, if diminutive, predators, that routinely dine on scorpions, centipedes and other venomous prey. And as they set out on their nightly hunts, they emit a long, piercing cry. It’s been called “a wolf’s howl in miniature.” Listening closely to these desert mice reveals the surprising world of “bioacoustics.”

Visible in the park’s southeastern corner, near the hot springs and Boquillas Canyon, the Boquillas Formation is a series of limestones and shales, in white, tan, yellow and brown. These rocks were laid down in shallow ocean waters across 10 million years, and they abound in fossils, which capture the emergence and extinction of countless creatures.

Órale, the onda this week in Caló is the word grifo. In modern Spanish it means a tap or faucet. But in Caló it means someone who’s either sick with the gripa (flu) or deeply under the influence of drugs. The general idea is that flu and drugs lead to the same presentation. The drugs that may be causing someone to be grifo are called grifa, and there’s no distinction between any particular drug, that is, they’re all grifa. And when someone takes them and acts crazy, it’s said they’re engrifado or beyond being merely grifo.

Though it’s certainly the most famous dinosaur, much about T-Rex, and its broader tyrannosaur lineage, remain a mystery. Now, scientists are taking a fresh look at tyrannosaur fossils from Big Bend National Park.

They’re irresistible to children, but their flashes can enchant an observer of any age. Fireflies seem like magic. They’re mostly associated with sultry summer nights in the eastern U.S. But they are found in the arid West, including in our region.

Órale, the onda this week is the word picudo. It comes from the modern Spanish word pico (peak) and means beaked, peaked or pointed, as in a stork or mountain peak. In Caló, it means someone who’s eloquent or a quick-witted talker. When you have something to say and can’t articulate it yourself, you recruit a picudo to say it for you.

The Pecos County dinosaur prints are the most prominent in our region. But there are more than 50 such sites in Texas, from the Hill Country north to Fort Worth, and Dinosaur Valley State Park.

Órale, Caló’s going romantic. For the rest of the year, all the episodes will be romantic anecdotes, although the words and expressions themselves may not necessarily be romantic. The hope is that talking about this subtle and nuanced dimension of human existence will deepen your exposure to Caló.Although Caló’s a dialect of a language spoken around the world, its expression along the Rio Grande reflects the unique experience of life in the barrios in that long valley. How does romance occur in that reality? The only distinction from other cultures is that romance is considered a susto (spell). In other words, it’s a caused outcome, not a destined or natural one, where parents, other kin, strangers, and even passing spirits can cast spells, as well as the romantic partners. Then once set loose, the susto takes its own course, and the outcome is uncertain.The word of this episode is borrado(a). In modern Spanish, it means erased. In Caló, it means someone with light eyes—except blue. It’s not a pejorative. The moniker merely points out a class of people who stand out because of the color or their eyes. For there are desirable and undesirable borrados (as).