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Chihuahuan Desert grasslands are the main winter home for birds known as grassland specialists – chestnut-collared and thick-billed longspurs, lark buntings and horned larks, Sprague’s pipits and diverse sparrows. These birds are deeply imperiled, and supporting them is a top priority for West Texas conservationists.

Big Bend Ranch State Park is promoted as “the Other Side of Nowhere,” and the park’s River Road – FM 170 between Lajitas and Redford – fits that billing. It’s a breathtaking landscape of volcanic badlands and imposing canyons, and it can seem like a timeless wilderness, untouched by history.

Extreme drought tests nature’s resilience. And birds are a particularly vivid example of how the creature world responds to drought, and to a landscape recovering from it.

Owl sightings aren’t unusual in West Texas. You might spot a great horned owl in Alpine or Marfa, a barn owl in a farm building in Presidio or a burrowing owl on the Marathon grasslands. And the irresistible elf owl – which, at less than 6 inches long, is the world’s smallest owl – summers in Big Bend.

The Trans-Pecos is Texas at its wildest, and, though many of its creatures are secretive, the region stands out for the glorious diversity of its wildlife.

Órale, the onda in Caló this week is the verb traquilear. It comes from the Romaní word, traquí, which means to become depressed, distant or despondent. Along the Rio Grande today, however, it means to make the people around you feel bad by putting them down or slighting them, whether kin, loved ones, mere acquaintances, or total strangers standing next to you. A traquilero(a) is someone who goes from place to place or relationship to relationship causing fights and then carrying with them the baggage of those fights from the past. More than a lifestyle, to traquilear is a bad habit, perhaps also a psychological condition—a syndrome. It’s not necessarily an aggressive posture, just conflictive. It can be passive aggressive. “What do you think of my lisa, esa?” “Bad taste, ese. I’d never wear something gatcho like that.”

Órale, the onda this week of Caló is tando. It means hat, but not just any type of hat. It’s the kind of a hat you would wear to go dancing, that is, a broad-rimmed black fedora or a tightly knitted straw Panama. Either way, you strap a big feather on the side of your tando so it se watch de aquellas. What do you call a cap? A cachucha. A work hat? A sombrero. A porkpie hat? A tapita. Neither of them would do to throw chancla at the bule. Only a tando a toda madres will do.

At the threshold of Far West Texas, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands contain some of North America’s most remarkable rock art. Here, where the Pecos and Devils rivers join the Rio Grande, on cave walls, prehistoric hunter-gatherers painted more than 350 rock-art panels of a distinctive style.

Órale, the onda in Caló this week is neta. In modern Spanish it means net, as in bottom line after negatives and positives are counted. In Caló, it stands for “what you really mean.” It’s a relatively new term in Caló. It’s a term you use to cut through rhetoric, jargon or double-speak. It asks for a summary and commitment as to where somebody stands on a given issue. “You say you don’t have a big problem with it, but I want you to tell me a la neta if you like it or not.”

Wildfires burn landscapes, but they also sear themselves into memory, and many Big Bend National Park enthusiasts remember the South Rim 4 Fire of April 2021. It began near a backcountry campsite, suggesting a possible human cause, and burned across 1,300 acres of the Chisos Mountains. It was the most intense blaze in the storied range in decades.