NPR
written by Wade Goodwyn
Tuesday February 2, 2010
Changing The Landscape
He cleared much of the juniper ash. He bought barrels of grass seed — throwing $5 handfuls of it into the wind from the back of his tractor. He carved plateaus into his hillsides to hold the rainfall, letting it filter down into the aquifer below. He planted hundred of trees.
It took decades of careful work by both Bamberger and nature, but now 3,000 people a year visit the ranch to see the results.
Chad Norris, aquatic biologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, says the changes wrought by Bamberger are felt almost all the way to Austin. "What he does here affects the quality of the water running off the land, and in that respect, it affects everyone downstream."
Some of those who come to learn are new landowners who've made their fortune in Austin's high-tech industry. The locals call them "Dellionaires" because the first wave worked at nearby Dell Inc. These owners buy property not to make money off of it, but for recreation; and Bamberger's message of habitat restoration resonates strong.
Mark Zuzanek is a software engineer who is attending his fourth workshop here. He's already taken the Ranch tour, the Trees and Shrubs Workshop, the Native Grasses Workshop, and now he's back for the Water Workshop.
"I come here to learn, in a very short period of time, what it has taken these people 40-plus years to learn," Zuzanek says.
The traditional ranchers have been far more skeptical. Bamberger sounds too much like an environmentalist to them. But two years of serious drought have started to change that.
Jacque Couser has more than 1,000 acres outside New Braunfels, Texas, and reaction to a drought has put her best grazing land in jeopardy.
"We had to keep the cattle in one area, and now it's severely overgrazed. You can kill the land just like you can kill anything else," Couser says.
Oryx, Bats And Friends
If some Texas millionaires buy hill country property to build 20,000-square-foot homes, private runways and swimming pools that would make a Roman emperor blush, Bamberger is role-modeling a different way to show off.
He's organized dozens of other landowners to plant a beautiful but highly endangered tree called the Texas snowbell. He's turned a square mile of his property into habitat for the highly endangered scimitar-horned oryx, which has disappeared from the African Sahara. Turns out Texas hill country is the perfect habitat for a small herd of oryx, and there are so few left that Bamberger trades breeding-aged males with zoos around the world to enhance the world population's genetic diversity.
Then there is what was considered Bamberger's folly. In 1998, he decided to carve out a three-dome cave into one of his hillsides and line the ceiling with gunite. The ranch staff rolled their eyes when he told them he wanted enough room for a million Mexican free-tailed bats. For years, no bats came. But slowly, they began to find Bamberger's cave, and now as many as 400,000 bats make their summer home there. The cave is called a "Chiroptorium" — a term his wife and son came up with that combines Chiroptera, the scientific order bats are in, and auditorium.
If you think it's all good and well for a wealthy scion to restore his little piece of Texas hill country paradise but that it's beyond the means of the average landowner, Bamberger and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department want you to stop making excuses.
"You don't need a bulldozer. You need a chainsaw, wheelbarrow, axes, hand tools, and a lot of friends coming out from time to time, and a little time," Bamberger says. "You can buy used equipment — don't waste your money on new — and you can accomplish on your property what I've done here."
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