Fur, feathers and fins: Texas Standard’s favorite animal stories from the past 10 years

Texas Standard is committed independent and politically neutral reporting. But we acknowledge a bias: we are, by and large, a group of animal lovers.

Our meetings and daily memos often include anecdotes about our pets or our bird sightings. And, more often than not, a story pitch featuring a creature will get the thumbs up from our editorial team.

As Texas Standard has been celebrating 10 years on the air, we’re gathering up some of our favorite reporting from the past decade. For September, we focused on some memorable animal stories.

10. The long paw of the law: Cat helps Port Lavaca Police Department build community

One of the oldest items to make our list was a 2018 profile of a feline in uniform. Former Texas Standard intern Rachel Taube interviewed Port Lavaca Chief Colin Ragnow:

“I mean, the job is pretty stressful and he just has a calming effect on the office. He will jump between me and the back of my chair. He’ll actually knead my shoulders and kinda set his chin on my shoulder. Which is – you’d have to see it to believe it almost.”

9. A $380,000 longhorn? A look at the never-ending race for the biggest horns in Texas

Texas Standard producer/reporter Michael Marks is overrepresented on this list for good reason. He’s always pitching stories about the creatures of Texas. This one, also from 2018, also features great pictures from Gabriel C. Pérez.

It’s about how and why Texas ranchers are focused on helping their herds develop the longest horns:

“When I got into this 10 years ago, if you had a cow in the 60s, tip-to-tip, it was a big deal… All my cows are in the 70s or I don’t even have them anymore.”

8. Japanese snow monkeys have called South Texas home for 50 years. How?

Since the early 1970s, South Texas has been home to a troop of Japanese snow monkeys. They were moved from their cold mountain home in Japan to Texas after their population grew to the point of being unsustainable.

It’s a lesser-known footnote in the story of Texas that’s fascinated writer Sarah Bird for decades. We spoke to her back in 2023 when her story was published in Texas Monthly:

“I had a tremendous emotional attachment from the moment I heard about snow monkeys. [They] were revered in Japan, and so I grew up on fairy tales about these cuddly little animals. And I always had a dream: ‘Maybe someday I’ll get to hold one.’ Well, I end up at graduate school at UT, in journalism. And lo and behold, they put out an announcement for a snow monkey roundup. And that’s where our lives intersected.”

7. How the U.S. and Mexico have teamed up on Mexican gray wolf recovery efforts

Several of Texas Standard’s animal reporting stories over the past decade involve nurturing populations that have been in decline. In 2022, Martha Pskowski of the El Paso Times had exclusive access to the wolf transfer and joined Texas Standard to share more about the U.S.-Mexico joint effort:

“There’s definitely been a lot of conflict over the years, and that continues. You know, Mexican gray wolves, they’re a really important species in the landscape. So when the wolves are returned, that allows other species that interact with them to also prosper. And when they’re gone from the landscape, that can throw a lot of other species out of whack.”

6. Less than 100 ocelots live wild in Texas. The latest efforts to fix that.

Researchers have also tried to help redevelop wild populations of ocelots. Former Texas Standard intern Sara Hutchison visited the Houston Zoo in 2022 to learn about some of those efforts:

“If we’re successful, we’ll have a new ocelot population somewhere else in Texas that’s not threatened by the same risks as the current ocelot population.”

5. Before there was a longhorn named Bevo, there was a dog named Pig

In 2018, former Texas Standard intern Morgan Kuehler focused in a on a little-known bit of Texas history – the little mutt who served as the “unofficial-official” mascot of UT-Austin:

“I assumed, like most people, that Bevo was the first mascot of the University of Texas football team, but it turns out it was a little dog that was owned by the first University of Texas athletic director. He would just roam around. He would go to different classrooms and check in on students. He started attending sporting events.”

4. Return of buffalo to Texas’ Lipan Apache tribe symbolizes an era of healing

Buffalo was once an essential resource for the Native people who called the lands that became Texas home. In this conversation from 2021, Lucille Contreras, a member of Texas’ Lipan Apache band, talked with Texas Standard about her goal of bringing buffalo-raising and herding back to Indigenous tribes across Texas.

“So these buffalo here are, they’re here as our teachers; they’re here as our relatives. So, we don’t do ranching in a traditional, Western way. We do ranching, we do caretaking, rather, of these bison. So we’re developing a relationship. We will harvest some of them. But because our herd is small, and hopefully we will have – I believe, all the females are pregnant, so next spring it’s going to be pretty busy around here. But our harvests will not be commercial; they will be more spiritual and cultural, to feed our people and the other Indigenous folks throughout Texas.”

3. Protecting Texas’ bighorn sheep requires a hands-on approach

This 2020 reported story by Texas Standard’s Michael Marks required a trip out to West Texas to capture helicopter images (by Julia Reihs) and sound. What’s that have to with animals? It’s a way that Texas Parks and Wildlife personnel help to move around desert bighorn sheep – a population they’re trying to bring back to West Texas.

2. Why is this bird drawing people from far and wide to downtown Corpus Christi?

Back in the fall of 2023, birders in the Coastal Bend spotted one special visitor who was thought to have trekked some 2,600 miles from home – causing quite a stir in Corpus Christi.

Texas Standard digital producer Raul Alonzo was one of many who spent part of his Thanksgiving weekend that year hoping to catch a glimpse:

“I saw the back of the bird as I was approaching from about 20 feet away. And I thought, ‘oh, it’s kind of a weird bird.’ It’s got kind of a puffy, dusty brown back and long tail. And then it flipped around and had this bright yellow belly, and it ran with really long legs across the street. And I just had really no idea what I was looking at at first.”

1. Are Texans ready to live in bear country?

Hunters and ranchers effectively eradicated bears from Texas by about 1950. But there have been recent black bear sightings in East Texas and they’ve begun re-colonizing parts of West Texas.

So will Texans co-exist with the bears any better this time around? The Standard’s Michael Marks reported this story in 2023:

“The bears really seem to really enjoy this area. It is kind of a human interface – it’s not-super populated by any means, but there are people here, and that means attractants. There are dumpsters, there are feeders and stuff, so I think bears are kind of taking advantage of this area.”

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