Before I went on a guided hike at Ray Roberts Lake State Park, the most I could tell you about this area was that Pilot Point, Texas, has some really scenic views.
But now, with a hike through the Randy Bell Scenic Trail at the Isle du Bois unit under my belt, I can tell you that Pilot Point is located in the Eastern Cross Timbers, an area interspersed with forests and prairie glades.
I can also tell you that the post oak, also known as the cross oak, is a noble and prolific species of tree that provided the area’s early settlers with absolutely vital building material.
And finally, I can tell you prairie grasses can not only survive the occasional wildfire; they actually thrive after a fire.
Learning on My Feet
I took an afternoon hike with interpreter Kelly Lauderdale a few weeks ago. Our path through the woods was punctuated with tidbits of topical information from her on anything in front of us.
“Who do you think shredded all of my leaves?” asked Lauderdale. She pointed to the post oak above us, whose foliage was covered with crudely chewed holes. The answer: caterpillars, involved in an evolutionary race against time.
“When the caterpillars hatch out, they are racing to eat as much as they can as quickly as possible so that they can go into their pupal stage, become butterflies, and on and on,” she said.
The caterpillars are hampered by birds, hunting for food for their own young, and by the trees themselves, which are working hard to push toxins, called tannins, out to their leaves. These tannins will poison and kill caterpillars who feed on them.
“The caterpillars kind of instinctually know that their time is limited and the trees know what they have to make happen so that they don’t literally get eaten alive,” Lauderdale said.
The Natural Order of Things in the Cross Timbers
The Eastern Cross Timbers is full of this kind of push-and-pull.
Baby fawns developed white spots to mimic the look of sunlight broken through the foliage of the woods. This helps them stay safe during the day when their mothers leave them unattended to search for food.
Turkey vultures have bald, featherless heads to keep themselves clean and free of leftovers from the carrion they eat.
And the prairies that cut through the woods in random swatches do so because of wildfires, said Lauderdale.
“Prairie grass loves fire,” she said. “Before settlement, the prairies would regularly burn, and the fire would invade the forest and keep these prairie glades open and clear. Fire’s OK, and fire’s healthy.”
A Slow Burn
Today, park managers conduct controlled burns at Ray Roberts. The fires burn through invasive woody shrubs that would otherwise choke out the prairie grasses. Fires also clear out the undergrowth that thrives around the bases of trees. Larger trees generally escape fires with some mild charring, and with regular fires, the prairies get to remain as small oases from the growth of the timbers.
“Historically, when people were exploring this area, they talked about how hard going it was getting through the forest,” said Lauderdale. “It was dense forest with these trees and all this knotty, thorny greenbriar that made passing through really, really difficult, but then they’d reach these openings in the forest and they were really thankful for them.”
Our hike was full of examples of the intricate, complicated nature of this ecosystem. Each organism plays off of the others in a mind-boggling way.
“Mother Nature rarely gets it wrong,” said Lauderdale.
A Guide to the Past, Present and Future
Lauderdale rarely gets it wrong either. She carries a field guide with her to help identify local flora and fauna, in the rare case that she isn’t sure what she’s looking at. Otherwise, her seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the area suffices. She knows it all, from the reasons that prairies need fire to survive to the colonial history of the region.
“When people moved here and settled this area, post oak was the main resource for building homes, structures of any kind,” said Lauderdale.
“Post oak literally provided the homes for the people who moved here, the true pioneers that were building something from wilderness.”
Who Named the Cross Timbers
Lauderdale even has theories on the origin of the name “Cross Timbers,” which is historically contested.
“Cross Timbers is a name, and its origin appears to be Texan,” Lauderdale said. “Where it actually came from is kind of questionable. It first appeared in writing published in 1832.”
Washington Irving is the first person to have recorded the name in a publication. He wrote about the region while exploring the nation’s prairies for his book, “A Tour in the Prairies.” Irving used the name because it was already common at the time; where the name ultimately came from is unknown.
“People have hypothesized that the name Cross Timbers came from people moving from the east, westward,” Lauderdale said. “Anyone coming from the forests of the east would have had to cross a band of woodland timber before being able to move further westward.”
That is, however, Irving’s best guess, which leaves the arena open to any other guess that might be more well-founded. That means that whatever guess you like the best becomes the most valid.
“What I like the best is that the name Cross Timbers comes from the cross oak, because the post oaks were so prolific,” Lauderdale said. “When people wrote about exploring this area and experiencing this area’s wilderness, they’re always talking about the oak trees. Being that it’s a cross oak and they so dominated the region, to me it seems like the simplest explanation.”
This article originally appeared in the Pilot Point Post-Signal.
Heather Michelle Tipton 