 |
CDRI Desert NewsFlash
August 2025
| |
|
This area is part of CDRI's 507-acre site. It fills up when the monsoons arrive.
| |
|
Do you have your tickets?
CDRI's BBQ & Auction is 9 days away!
What are you waiting for?
It's a party y'all! Get ready for a fun-filled evening at the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute’s (CDRI) annual BBQ & Auction fundraiser on Saturday, August 9. The event aims to introduce new attendees to the CDRI site while strengthening existing friendships. It also helps generate operating funds for programs throughout the upcoming year and supports CDRI’s educational initiatives for children in the Texas Education Agency’s Region 18 service area.
As of press time, we only have 39 tickets remaining. Now would be an excellent time to reserve yours!
Tickets are priced at $35. Attendees can look forward to a Silent Auction at 4 p.m. with live music by Rick Ruiz and a Few Too Many, followed by a Live Auction led by Martin Stringer at 5 p.m., and a delicious BBQ dinner catered by Sanchez BBQ at 6 p.m. A beer and wine bar, in addition to non-alcoholic beverages, will be open throughout the event. Did we mention that you get all this for the ticket price of $35?
CDRI will be closed to the public for the entire day on August 9 to set up for the event. Gates will open at 3:45 p.m. with the Silent Auction starting off the fun.
CDRI is located at 43869 State Hwy. 118, Fort Davis, Texas (4 miles SE of Fort Davis on Hwy. 118). Call 432-364-2499 for additional information.
| |
|
Thank you to the following donors who've helped get the BBQ off to a great start!
| |
Cactus Liquors
Cactus Liquors, Marfa, Texas, has supported CDRI's BBQ & Auction since 2021, providing excellent wines for the event and leading the way in showing what support really is.
________________________________________
| |
Glazer's
Beer & Beverage
Glazer's, Odessa, Texas, has supported CDRI's BBQ & Auction since 2022, providing a wide selection of beverages.
________________________________________
| |
Fort Davis
Chamber of Commerce
The Fort Davis Chamber of Commerce is a strong supporter of CDRI throughout the year. They've advertised the BBQ & Auction and will provide the tables and chairs for this event.
_______________________________________
| |
Formerly known as Fort Davis State Bank, Maverick Bank is our local, friendly neighborhood bank. They are continuing in the tradition of Fort Davis State Bank as loyal supporters of CDRI.
| |
CDRI’s 2025
BBQ & Auction Host Committee
The Host Committee is comprised of generous supporters who have donated $250 or more in advance of the BBQ & Auction to help us get "the ball rolling" to produce the best event yet. The 2025 hosts are listed below:
Meredith Dreiss & David Brown
Honorary Members
Anne Adams
Judy & Stephen Alton
Martha Atiee & Michael Carter
Greg Brock
Edwina Campbell
Don Coan & Veleda Boyd
Liz & Rick Culp
Donna Dittman & Steve Cardiff
*Pamela & James Duerr
Lanna & Joe Duncan
Kristin & Tom Feuerbacher
Beth & Larry Francell
Lisa Gordon
*Rick Gupman
Linda Hedges & Rick Reese
*Rick Herrman & Margaret O’Donnell
*Jesse & Jeff Kelsch
Charles Loban
*Jim Martinez & Jim Fissel
Guy & Jane McCrary
Mark Mesch & Susan Thomas
Debbie and Mike Murphy
Joyce & Joe Mussey
Clint Parsley & Alex Albright
*R. Edward Pfiester, Jr.
Rebecca & Sam Pfiester
Susan & Jerry Pittman
Shirley & Mike Powell
Cecilia Riley & Mike Gray
Sheri & Grant Roane
Michael Schramm
Anita and Warren Shaul
Mary & Ken Steigman
Mary & Daryl Styblo
*Pete Szilagyi & Kate McKenna
Dedie Taylor
Suzanne & Steve Tuttle
*Julie & Bruce Lee Webb
Teresa & Jim Weedin
*Joe Williams
* CDRI's 2025 Board of Directors
| |
“Birdie Big Year: Elevating Women Birders”
A talk and a walk led by birder Tiffany Kersten
| |
Photo courtesy of the Brownsville Herald.
| |
The Chinati Foundation and the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute (CDRI) invite you to join renowned birder Tiffany Kersten for her talk “Birdie Big Year: Elevating Women Birders” on Friday, August 15, and a birding walk on Saturday, August 16.
As a survivor of sexual assault, Kersten will also lead her audience through the empowerment, struggles, and healing she experienced on this adventure.
On Saturday morning, at 10 a.m., Kersten will lead a birding excursion through the CDRI Botanical Gardens. Participants can expect to see a variety of bird species, including regional summer residents and migrating birds that are starting their journey south.
Both events are free and will take place at CDRI. Participation is limited. Please register at chinati.org/birds.
About Tiffany Kersten
Tiffany Kersten has dedicated over a decade to environmental education, specializing in bird migration. Most recently, she worked at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and later managed the McAllen Nature Center. After completing her Lower 48 States Big Year in 2021, she founded her own company, Nature Ninja Birding Tours. She primarily guides in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, and currently offers international tours to Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, and Taiwan.
Learn more about Tiffany’s year-long adventure toward breaking a national birding record in Texas Monthly.
| |
The Fall Roger Conant Distinguished Guest Lecture Program will feature Dr. Kerry Griffis-Kyle
We are thrilled to announce Dr. Kerry Griffis-Kyle, Associate Professor, Natural Resources Management at Texas Tech University, as CDRI's guest lecturer for the Roger Conant Distinguished Guest Lecture this fall.
Griffis-Kyle's research program addresses management-driven questions related to biodiversity and conservation in arid and semi-arid systems. Lab work is focused on evaluating how human-created environmental issues are affecting wildlife, wetlands, and species that depend on wetlands, as well as other sensitive natural resources.
Her talk will be focused on the desert environment and amphibians. Please mark your calendar now for what we know will be another fascinating program.
Date: Thursday, October 9
Time: 7:00 p.m. (doors open at 6:30)
Place: The Crowley Theater, Marfa, Texas
| |
When we saw this story in Marfa Public Radio's Desert Dispatch, Volume 54, July 17, 2025, we knew we had to reprint it (with permission) for the Desert NewsFlash. This is an interview with Dr. Mike Powell, co-founder of CDRI, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biology at Sul Ross State University (SRSU), Director and Curator of the Herbarium at SRSU, and author. We hope you enjoy it.
The world of botany in the Big Bend
is something like treasure hunting, by Zoe Kurland
| |
The world of botany in the Big Bend is something like treasure hunting. I had a botanist friend who lived out here and would, at random, receive a message containing specific map coordinates — no names, no identifying information, just degrees sitting in one of those blank swaths of land that Google Maps doesn’t know what to do with.
He’d plug the coordinates into a navigation system and fling his truck towards a little dot on some wide open somewhere in the Trans-Pecos, upon which sat a rare plant: rare for its scarcity, for flowering at the time of year it did, for the fact that it was found somewhere unexpected.
The result of an expedition might be a clipping, which this particular botanist friend would, sometimes, deliver to a mysterious place in Alpine, Texas called The Herbarium.
The Herbarium, to me, sounded something like Narnia — a mysterious door in the basement of an old science building on the Sul Ross State University campus, leading, somehow, to thousands of plant specimens from all over the Trans-Pecos region. A catalogue of the life found on our 19 million acres of desert grassland, scrub, salt basins, sand hills, rugged plateaus and wooded mountains.
The collected specimens are pressed, dried, mounted on papers, and filed into tall cabinets, tended to by two people my botanist friend would refer to as “The Elders” (very storybook indeed) — a retired botany professor and his wife, herself a former high school science teacher.
I finally visited The Herbarium this past Monday, descending the stairs of the Warnock Science building and heading into a room where I spotted the back of Dr. Michael Powell, his head bent over a microscope, meticulously moving tiny seeds onto a waiting notecard.
| |
Dr. Michael Powell, Curator and Director, Sul Ross Herbarium.
| |
Powell is the Curator of the Sul Ross Herbarium, a position he’s held since 1979. He came to Sul Ross in the late 1950s to play baseball, but a botany class with Dr. Barton Warnock, for whom the building is named, quickly changed his course.
“You can combine your scientific interest with getting in the field,” he said. “Just think how neat that is: climbing mountains, camping in the wild and collecting plants.”
After leaving to get a masters in botany at UT Austin, Powell returned to Sul Ross to work as a professor, eventually taking on the herbarium curator role and co-authoring the definitive guide to Trans-Pecos plant life. “The interest never ends for me,” he told me. “I guess a lot of plant nerds are that way.”
Powell guided me over to a random cabinet and opened it to show me endless folders containing flattened and preserved Trans-Pecos plants — branches covered in crinkling flowers, furred leaves, spiny stems. There are specimens dating as far back as the late 1800s. Powell has collected many himself, along with his wife and field assistant, Shirley Powell.
For decades, the Powells have visited every ecosystem of the region to hunt for specimens for the herbarium: hiking mountains, traversing the desert, and camping in remote areas to collect new plants to mount and file away in the herbarium.
| |
The Powells don’t work alone; the herbarium relies on a powerful team of plant-minded folks. Powell says the herbarium is, for the most part, a volunteer effort, aided by the botany students that come through the doors of the university. He estimates the effort has resulted in a collection of 100,000 specimens, making the Sul Ross herbarium the 4th largest in the state (out of 27 in Texas). And what’s done in the herbarium is not just the work of condensing myriad Trans-Pecos ecosystems into navigable cabinets, but condensing time itself — recording how our natural world has changed over the years, especially now, as climate change impacts the ways in which these plants are growing.
As a lover of archives, I was totally delighted. Being in the herbarium felt like being in the most fun and, dare I say, whimsical of archives, in which a record would correlate not to a book, but a literal piece of pressed life. Meandering the cabinets is like interacting with the wild world of the past.
I compared the herbarium to a library, and Dr. Powell concurred for the most part, but noted a key difference:
“ You could get rid of a book, wouldn't make any difference – maybe to the library, or to somebody, but it's not like this. This is a record you can't replace. Every single specimen is a record that can't be replaced.”
Each specimen is a timestamp of the moment in which it was collected. As Powell flips through a folder of specimens, and I see a range of collection dates: 1957, 1982, 2012. Each specimen is a specific historical record, revealing past plant distributions, documenting changes in species over time, and offering insights into plant morphology, genetics, and even interactions with other plant and animal life. And, herbariums help us look towards the future too, giving us the tools to identify newly discovered plants. Powell was actually instrumental in the identification of a recently discovered composite specimen, delightfully named the Wooly Devil, which made national news.
“We've had a bad two years 'cause of the drought,” said Powell. But he says he and his wife Shirley are still out in the field a lot, doing the work, though the adventures may look a bit different these days. Less uphill meandering.
“I'm pretty close to the highways nowadays, “ said Powell, laughing a bit.
The highways, Powell says, are some of the most useful collection areas — that’s where the rain runoff goes — and also, these days, the most accessible. Most of the land in Texas is privately owned (about 93 percent).
“As a researcher, it's a problem,” says Powell. “It has been a problem forever… In the earlier days the ranchers were as interested as anybody else in what they have on their land. They were glad to have a botanist go on their land and take care of it.”
Powell says the Endangered Species Act turned the tides — while the ESA doesn't directly prohibit collecting endangered plants on private land, state law can override and limit the kind of access one has to plants. While access can be a problem, Powell clarifies that ranchers and other private land holders have played essential roles in plant species and ecosystem conservation, protecting the delicate ecosystems they have on their land through decades, if not centuries, of stewardship.
Powell walks me over to the area where they press the specimens: rectangular wood frames with old newspapers in between (The Big Bend Sentinel, specifically — Powell says that’s the only paper that’s the right size), bound tightly together, sitting over an incandescent bulb, flattening and drying out various specimens.
| |
Plant samples being pressed.
| |
Powell opens a piece of newspaper, no larger than a pocket square, revealing a dime-sized flower, its petals a brilliant yolk-like yellow, carefully flattened. “ This is from a species that was never collected where this was found.” He’s clearly excited.
As we’re talking, Powell’s wife and field assistant, Shirley, comes in and takes a seat at a computer. She does all of the mounting at the herbarium.
“She won’t tell you, but it’s an artistic event,” said Powell. Shirley sort of waves him off. She’s being modest– the mounting is so clearly an art, arranging the specimens (which can come in all different sizes, or simply in pieces) on large sheets of cellulose paper, taking care to display all of their features, imagining how one may view them in the future.
Walking around the herbarium, I felt deeply moved by the work, the process of collecting, drying, gluing, and preserving. There’s a way in which it feels like many of the real parts of our world are slipping away — so much is virtual, digital, a scrum of pixels waiting to be snatched out of liminal space, the indefinite dark. The herbarium stunned me with its sheer tangibility. Paper, plants, timestamps from forever ago, captured and placed lightly atop one another in the sage green cabinets.
| |
Mounted and framed plant samples.
| |
“Do you plan on doing this until the end of time?” I asked.
“Until I go away?” he asked. “Yeah, I do. As long as I can walk around. I just love what I'm doing and somebody needs to do it.”
It’s been raining in West Texas for the last month or so. Driving back to Marfa from the herbarium, I was surrounded entirely by green, like a giant shag rug had been thrown over the desert. It looked, suddenly, full of a different kind of opportunity. I imagined botanists ambling over the hills, hugging the highway, all hunting for specimens, capturing this precise moment in our world’s history.
| |
This story and photos are by Zoe Kurland, Senior Producer, Marfa Public Radio.
This story was shared by Marfa Public Radio, Desert Dispatch. To subscribe, click here.
| |
The Botanical Gardens receive a donation
of Chinquapin Oaks
CDRI has received seven young Chinquapin oak trees from Cyndi Wimberly. Cyndi donated these in memory of her long-time companion and late wife, Patty Manning. Cyndi and Patty grew the tiny trees from seed, which are now planted in the Chinquapin Grove inside the fenced Botanical Gardens. We look forward to watching these little seedlings grow into mature trees that will someday provide ample shade for future visitors.
| |
What's the story about the large rock?
We hear this question quite often. The large rock in question is the one that you'll see to your right as you drive up to the Powell Visitor Center.
| |
Some people have surmised incorrectly that it rolled off the hill, known as Clayton's Overlook. But in a conversation with CDRI's first Executive Director, Denny Miller, we finally got the story about where this rock came from.
Clayton Williams had close ties with CDRI's founders Jim Scudday and Mike Powell. It seems Williams was somewhat of a kidder and had a history of successful "wild" ideas of raising money to pay for the land. For this particular year, Williams talked Denny Miller into going to his ranch in Brewster County, finding the largest rock Miller could find on the property, and bringing it back to CDRI to sell to the highest bidder at the annual fundraiser.
Miller brought some of the Sul Ross football team with him to Williams' ranch to retrieve the rock. When he decided on the one, the boys helped load it onto the trailer. From there, Miller drove it back to CDRI and left the rock where it sits today.
At their annual fundraiser that summer, which was always attended by oilmen from across Texas, Williams stood on the rock and auctioned it to the highest bidder. That very generous bidder was Walker Wilson of Overton, Texas, who paid $25,000 for the rights to the rock.
This story brings to mind a quote from former President Bill Clinton: "If you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, it didn't get there by accident." Although this quote is often used in political discourse, in this case, you can say the same about a rock appearing in the middle of a field. It didn't get there by accident.
| |
Stubbs the cat, the
self-appointed greeter,
is waiting for the next
visitor to arrive. She takes her job very seriously.
We're looking forward to seeing you
at the BBQ & Auction on August 9!
(For those who were wondering, Stubbs goes home to
the Maintenance Building each evening, where we know she's safe.)
| |
|
|
|
Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, P.O. Box 905, Fort Davis, TX 79734
432.364.2499
www.cdri.org
|
|
