Wildlife Research, Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2023 Page: 1
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KK
Quarterly Newsletter of the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute Sprin
at Texas A&M University-Kingsville Volume 2A Historical Sketch of Our Native Seed
Program: Milestones and Stumbling Blocks
by Fred C. Bryant
W ho were the early key players? When I
arrived at CKWRI back in 1996, many of my travels
across South Texas were punctuated by questions
from landowners. One of the burning questions, be-
sides quail management, was focused on "why don't
we have native plants for restoration of roadsides,
pipelines, energy exploration or simply restoring an
old farm field?" My pat answer was, we simply don't
have the plant materials available, except for small
plots about the size of your backyard. Not only that,
but we don't have a seed industry that is focused on
it, especially when they can produce bufflegrass, Old
World bluestems, Bermuda grass and the like. These
are cheap to produce, cheap to sell, they establish
quickly and easily, and unfortunately, some landown-
ers don't care one way or the other.
But our landowners wouldn't accept that answer.
I will never forget a meeting with a few landowners
who frankly said, "why don't you quit whining and
do something about it?" My two early compadres in
the "need for native plants" lamentations were Paula
Maywald, who worked for Bass Ranches, and Dr.
Lynn Drawe, Director of the Welder Wildlife Refuge.
We had many a meeting studying the problem and
trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. We
leaned heavily on the USDA Plant Materials Cen-
ter in Kingsville and what was being done in other
states, like Iowa. USDA had actually developed a
few native seed selections but had not been able to
Editor's note: Dr. Fred C. Bryant is the Director of Development and former
Leroy G. Denman, Jr. Endowed Director of Wildlife Research at CKWRI.Growing out native seeds at the Texas Native Seed nursery in
Kingsville, Texas.
get the seed industry involved in producing them.
Without the commercial industry producing seed at a
large scale (think thousands of acres), we were going
nowhere.
After a small meeting of landowners in 2001, the
Robert Jr. and Helen Kleberg Foundation and the Lee
and Ramona Bass Foundation stepped up and said,
"We will get you started. We don't know if you know
what you are doing, but we believe you deserve a shot
at it." That was the genesis of South Texas Natives
(STN). Not too long after, I requested permission
from the Bass Ranches to hire Paula Maywald as our
leader in this effort. Paula was our first employee of
the South Texas Native Plant Restoration Project (later
shortened to South Texas Natives). Under Paula's
leadership, undergraduate students working for STN
made thousands of seed collections from private
ranches in South Texas. These collections, and collab-
orations with private landowners were the backbone
of the almost two dozen native seed releases made in
the next two decades.1
IA4
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7, No. 1
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Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute. Wildlife Research, Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2023, periodical, Spring 2023; Kingsville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1659814/m1/1/: accessed May 13, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.