As the Wild River Runs
At 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) the golden eagle glides on outspread wings, his head cocked down so he can watch for signs of life upon that motionless desert rolled out like a relief map below him. Largest of Big Bend’s airborne predators, the eagle needs an enormous hunting range, and riding the warm air currents high above the border, he can see it all: the flattopped and arched mountains, the sun-bleached lowland, and the silver Rio Grande disappearing and reappearing as it runs downstairs through steep canyons and open valleys. Tilting his two-meter (7-foot) wings, the eagle slipslides for a closer look into a canyon, spots the wake of a surface-swimming snake, folds his wings, and dives like a fighter jet. Before the snake even senses its peril, it is snatched aloft and hangs wriggling in the eagle’s talons as the great bird, feathered to the toes, lifts and flies up the canyon with mighty, measured wingbeats.
The waters dripping from the hapless snake’s body come from mountains far to the south and north. The Rio Grande begins in springs and snows high in Colorado’s Rockies, but backed into reservoirs and doled out to irrigate New Mexico and Texas farmlands, it may hardly even flow below El Paso. What gives the river a new lease on life is the Rio Conchos. This beautiful stream rises in the western Sierra Madres and flows northeastward across Mexico, cutting canyons of its own and joining the Rio Grande at Presidio, 160 river-kilometers (100 river-miles) above the park. Some geologists say it was the Rio Conchos, and not the Rio Grande, that cut those gorgeous canyons in the park. No one knows for sure. But once the river trapped itself, all it could do was dig deeper and deeper by processes that are still at work today.
A walk along a sandbar will show you that the river functions as a practical sorting machine. The water rolling by is so laden with sediment that you cannot even see rocks 13 centimeters (5 inches) below the surface. On the bar itself a layer of curling and flaking mud lies on top of the larger stones and gravel, which have fine sand deposited between them. The heaviest rocks settle out first, then the sand, and finally the finest particles. Water is a powerful lifting and pushing tool, but these water-borne abrasives do much of the river’s work, wearing out the rock, undercutting cliffs, deepening and widening the canyons. It goes on at normal stages of water where the river runs less than a meter (2-3 feet) deep, during floods when it crests at more than 6 meters (20 feet), and even during droughts when in many places the river is too shallow to float a boat. So in the slow course of geologic time the mountains are worn away, spread across the valleys, and carried out to sea.
The only streams that have a chance of leaving the desert alive are those whose water sources lie outside the desert. There are few such rivers in the world: the Nile, the Indus, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Colorado, and the Rio Grande. And what a wealth of water-loving life the wild river brings to the Big Bend desert. You can hang big catfish by the gills from your saddlehorn and have your horse walk off with fishtail dragging the ground. So the fishermen tell you.
Cotton and food crops grew during the first half of this century at Castolon (top) and Rio Grande Village. Both floodplain settlements are popular stops for park travelers today.
A third riparian settlement, Hot Springs, offered resort accommodations in the 1940s.
Life in this watery world is sustained by a food pyramid based on a super-abundant supply of tiny bottom organisms. A third-meter (1-foot) square of riffle bottom has been found to contain more than 100 organisms. Most are larvae of flying insects: stoneflies, mayflies, dragonflies, damselflies, water and terrestrial bugs, various kinds of flies, midges, and dobsonflies. These curious little creatures have evolved ingenious ways of living, breathing, and eating underwater. Some worm-like caddisfly nymphs build protective cases around themselves, gluing pebbles, bits of shells, and plants together with saliva. They have three pairs of legs up front sticking out of the case and a pair of hooks holding on to it behind, so they can drag their houses with them as they feed. Damselfly larvae breathe through three leaflike gills that project from the hind end of the abdomen, and when warm weather comes they crawl ashore, split their skins, and emerge as gossamer-winged adults. The gills on stonefly larvae extend from the head and thorax, while mayfly nymphs have seven pairs of gills standing out like feathers along the sides of the abdomen. When oxygen is in short supply, mayfly larvae vibrate their gills rapidly so as to quicken the flow of water along their bodies. Some aquatic larvae build nets to catch dinner; a caddisfly nymph may spin a kind of silken windsock that he hangs underwater with the narrow end downstream, using the pressure of the current to keep his prey trapped. Some aquatic larvae eat microscopic plants, some eat insects, and some eat each other. Large dragonfly nymphs may even catch and eat small fish. Larvae are consumed by fishes, frogs, and turtles.