I haven’t seen the South American maned wolf yet but for several years I’ve sighted what looked to me to be a gray long legged bobcat with a tail about twice as long as the indigenous bobcats which abound in great numbers here. It also has a pronounced hump at the shoulders which give it the appearance of a mini sabertooth cat. It’s rather insolent and bold often appearing in broad daylight to give that What-are-you-looking-at-punk? glance before proceeding on at a leisurely pace. A friend I used to work with said he’d seen one up in Oklahoma and was of the opinion the beast was a hybrid between bobcat and feral domestic cat. To me that might explain the long tail but not the long legs. Finally I found information that it might be a lynx. This had never occurred to me as I’d always thought the lynx was only found much further north like Canada and the northern tier states. Not so, it seems there’s always been a population of them in East Texas and like the pumas I suppose their range has extended to my area or they’ve merely reoccupied it from colonial times. We used to have jaguars before the Anglos arrived but they were exterminated and I haven’t even heard rumors of any being sighted in recent times.

A South American species showing up here isn’t very surprising. I mentioned the two coatis that were here when I arrived. The armadillo, fire ants, and old time big red ants are all immigrants from South America. The little black parrots that made such a nuisance a few years ago infested my mother’s back yard in Garland, 7o miles south of here for a few weeks. I’d seen them in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and on the Rio Sabinas below the El Cielo cloud forest very near the Tropic of Cancer. I was quite surprised to see them this far north then but such sightings have lost much of their shock value since then.

Never before seen insects put in a frequent debuts here on Caney Creek, the most recent being a black and indigo butterfly that is native to Northern Arkansas and a strange little iridescent green bug a friend had also seen in Florida. When I was very young my grandparents captured what we thought was a black tarantula and kept it in a jar of alcohol for a while since tarantulas were not common in that part of Texas then. Many years later I recognized it as a banana spider that must have hitched a ride on a banana boat from Central America. When I arrived here on the creek there were hoards of multi-colored tarantulas that used to caper and cavort through the yard but they all disappeared along with the armadillos and big red ants when the fire ant invasion came. The armadillos and red ants made a return but so far the gaudy tarantulas have not. I would love to see the ocelots return but the pitiful remnant of Texas ocelots are barely holding on at the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge near Rio Hondo on the Gulf coast and they are currently threatened by a proposed fracked gas terminal at the edge of the refuge.

With recent changes in the climate, palm trees and alligators are becoming more common up here on the Red River. Can monkeys be far behind?