All Creatures, Creepy and Strange
Our many encounters with the wildlife in Texas
My reflections on living in Texas are back. I have enough for a few more posts before I start reworking and revising to turn it into a book. Enjoy these monthly installments for the next few months.
“What is that?”
My husband Jeff and I were walking our dog around the RV park where we were temporarily living while we waited to close on our new house. We were new to Texas and enjoying the evening reprieve from the heat, although it is still unbearably hot in August, even when the sun goes down. I was both mesmerized and disgusted by the creature we saw walking along the pavement, a bright street lamp lighting its way.
Jeff looked down. “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like a crab but it’s too big to be a bug, right?”
It took us a Google search, but we finally discovered we had just had our first encounter with a crawfish.
Within our first year of living in Houston, we would learn just how important the crawfish is to food culture in the Gulf region. Organizations had full crawfish boils, one could buy crawfish for lunch outside of H.E.B. all summer long, and it was as popular as Tex-Mex and barbecue.
Jeff quickly learned to love it, but I never did. The smell from a single Styrofoam container of crawfish would send me running out of the room and I quickly disposed of the trash outside whenever he was done eating.
And that little crawfish was our introduction to the wildlife of Southeast Texas.
Shortly after we moved into our house, we met tree roaches and tiny lizards. We found the roaches in kitchen cabinets and climbing up the walls in our upstairs bedrooms. They left behind droppings reminiscent of our struggles with mice when we lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. When we tried to hit them with our shoes, they would fly out of reach, their expansive wings helping them buzz over our heads. We finally started paying for regular bug control to keep them out of our house, slowly realizing there was no other way to get rid of the large pests.
The tiny lizards were a different story. We would occasionally find one that snuck into the house, climbing along our windows or resting on the windowsill. But more often than not, we discovered them in our backyard, climbing on the palm trees right next to our pool or up the garage walls. They weren’t pests; they were adorable and a part of our daily lives. I laughed when my sister and brother-in-law visited from Idaho and my brother-in-law spent a significant amount of time chasing after the little creatures. He was fascinated by a creature that had become a part of our daily lives.
We saw armadillos everywhere we went. While we camped at McKinney Falls State Park just outside of Austin, one rustled a bush and scared me late at night. I was convinced it was a coyote or some other dangerous animal when the small creature waddled out from underneath the brush and wandered away. In Houston, they were common roadkill. In the state parks, families of armadillos would gather before walking across our path. They were as cute as they were strange.
For the first time ever, we had close encounters with alligators. On our first Texas camping trip, we enjoyed the trails and green vegetation in December, until we discovered signs warning us of the possibility of alligators in the area.
To say I freaked out a little would be an understatement. I suddenly had visions of my small children or two dogs (one still a puppy) being dragged out into Lake Conroe and drowned so they could be a meal for a hungry gator out on a winter prowl.
We didn’t see any alligators on that trip, but the longer we lived in the Houston area, the more comfortable we got with them being a regular part of living in the Gulf region.
We went to Brazos Bend State Park to actively pursue them out in nature. We took our kids to the nature center where they could pet baby gators far too small to cause them any harm, and then hiked the trails where we could walk right by them hanging out in the water or directly along the shoreline, completely oblivious to the state park visitors twenty feet away.
But our gator encounters didn’t stop there. We watched them swim underneath the dock while Jeff and the kids fished when we camped at Huntsville State Park. My daughter almost hit one on the head while we kayaked at Sea Rim State Park. (For two funny gator-related stories involving our daughter, check out my book The Life I Never Knew I Wanted.) Jeff took me back to Brazos Bend for a day hike early in 2021 when I needed healing time with nature, and watching the gators swimming alongside families of turtles, and cranes flying overhead recentering me in ways I didn’t know I needed at the time.
Like with the tree roaches, not all of our natural encounters were nearly so romantic. I’ve always had a fear of snakes, and I quickly learned to pay attention to the colors on snakes. After all, “Red on black, you’re ok Jack. Black on yellow will kill a fellow.”
I hated it when my kids would wander off into the brush, convinced they would come into contact with a copperhead or rattlesnake.1 I avoided any snake that appeared to be black, unconcerned with whether it was a water moccasin or rat snake, and instead just concerned myself with whether it stayed far away from me.
When Hurricane Harvey hit, we heard stories about alligators that had been found in the water in places downtown and I paid attention to warnings about water moccasins swimming around in flood waters. Our neighbor told us he thought he had seen a water moccasin swimming in the water flowing through our backyard, but waited to say anything until after our kids had all been playing outside on the playset in the still pouring rain.
Somehow, we got through six years of camping and exploring across the Lone Star State without a single significant snake encounter, and for that I am eternally grateful.
We learned to live with the many creatures around us, including the rats that crawled in our garage attic and left far too many droppings to count. And no, we didn’t consider rat poison, especially after one of our dogs cheerfully brought us a couple of rats on different occasions, proudly dropping them on the floor in front of my husband as he sat watching television in our living room and once bringing me a dead one while I tried to get his attention outside. It was not a moment I wanted to relive ever again.
And fire ants? Well, those little demons are so special they deserve their own chapter.
All of the creatures—creepy, strange, and sometimes cute—just added to our unique experiences living in Texas, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
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My fears were both reasonable and a little ridiculous. After all, we now live in central Indiana and there are both copperheads and rattlesnakes in our southern state parks.