Bobcat
Golden eagle
Toward twilight the whitetail deer put in another appearance. These dainty little animals are highly territorial, so you are likely to see the same band of bucks in the upper Basin, and the same doe and twin fawns near the campground turnoff. The eastern cottontails, larger than the desert cottontails, also come out at dusk, after spending the day in the very same thickets that the deer come to browse. A little later, skunks may appear. These spotted, striped, or hognosed nighttime foragers are cyclic in their populations, and like the raccoon they have a decided fondness for campgrounds.
In the Basin as elsewhere, many residents are heard rather than seen, especially the tree crickets and katydids that sing their songs at night. The Chisos Mountains even boast their own katydid, known nowhere else in the world, the Big Bend quonker. Scraping its wings together it produces a squeak much like that of a cork being pulled from a wine bottle.
The woods that rim the Basin to the south have a softer, more life-supporting look than the slopes above Panther Pass. They feature the same junipers and pinyon pines and the same pricklypear and century plant, but the difference is the grass. Tall and short, gold and blue, tasseled, tufted and feathered, it grows so thickly under the trees and between the shrubs that it all but covers the ground. You find basketgrass, too, with leaf edges like fine sawteeth and their tips frayed into curls of twine. With such abundant cover animals should thrive, and judging from the scat they do. In the fall the pricklypear is still in fruit, and it appears that everyone is eating brick-red tunas. At lower elevations where the tunas have already gone by, many animals are eating black persimmons.
But strong as the signs of life are, the evidence of death and dying cannot be ignored. You hear the shrieks of some creature on the edge of a little meadow, watch a hawk come to circle the tree tops, wonder who has won that contest as the cries cease and the hawk flies off. You smell the pungent odor of pine resin and follow it to its source, a pinyon oozing crystal drops from dozens of holes. As the sticky stuff ages it turns yellow, and there, mired in the gum, is a small black beetle exactly as some fossil bee in amber. And here is a redberry juniper so strangled by pink tree-thief that the greenest thing on it is the mistletoe cluster.
