Backlist Reads: Sharon on Roy Bedichek's 'Adventures with a Texas Naturalist'

After sixty-eight years, the University of Texas Press has published approximately four-thousand, two-hundred books on subjects ranging from Indigenous anthropology to hip-hop and rap. We currently have around two-thousand, eight-hundred books available in print, largely thanks to over two-thousand previously out-of-print titles that our Digital Publishing and Reprints Manager Sharon Casteel brought back in print thanks to print-on-demand technology. We asked Sharon to review one of her favorite backlist books, Roy Bedichek's Adventures with a Texas Naturalist.

Roy Bedichek, Texas Naturalist

Roy Bedichek's best-known book, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, was first published in 1947, revised in 1961, and reissued with a new introduction in 1994. It's a lovely collection of observations about the natural world. At seventy years after its first publication, it's also a

An older edition of Adventures with a Texas Naturalist

fascinating record of how much this region has changed.

One of Bedichek's anecdotes is of a pair of Inca Doves nesting at the intersection of trolley wires on what is now part of the University of Texas at Austin campus. Every time a trolley passed—every fifteen minutes during most days, and every five minutes on baseball game days—it lifted the wires, and the nest, up two feet and then dropped it again as it passed. Bedichek was impressed that the doves managed to raise their fledglings despite these regular disturbances. The trolleys are long gone, but Inca Doves still live in the area. In another example, Bedichek writes about six hundred pairs of swallows nesting under the Congress Avenue bridge. The bridge was reconstructed in 1980, and now it isn't known as a home for swallows; it's known as a home for a million Mexican Free-tailed bats. Bedichek would have been delighted.

Many of Bedichek's concerns are still timely today, and not only the obvious concerns about how plants and animals are affected by human activity or how humans cope with separation from the natural world. Did you think that concerns about factory farming are a recent development? (Or, for that matter, that factory farming is a new idea?) Read Bedichek's essay "Denatured Chickens."

What I found particularly interesting about Adventures with a Texas Naturalist: He's writing about the same city and region I live in now, but much of the plant life he describes, I'm unfamiliar with. It's a fun challenge to figure out how much of my unfamiliarity is because the local ecology has changed over more than seventy years, and how much is simply my own ignorance. Take poverty weed, for example. Bedichek describes it as a frequently-seen plant, particularly on abandoned farmsteads; I've lived here for a couple of decades, and even after looking at pictures of the plant I don't recognize it. Is it less common than it used to be, or am I oblivious to its growing in my back yard?

Adventures with a Texas Naturalist is a book I'd recommend to anyone who enjoys nature writing, and especially to people living in the Austin area who want to know more about the natural history of the region.

Sharon Casteel is the Press’s digital publishing and reprints manager. She joined the Press in 1994, two months after Adventures with a Texas Naturalist’s reissue. Her yard may or may not contain poverty weed, but it definitely contains sandburs.

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