2x6

wildbird

13097712x5

baublits

1109456

719 Water Street Kerrville, TX 830-257-8317

Baublit’sJewelry

i s c e l e b r a t i n g

50+1 Years in Downtown Kerrville

October BelAir Watch

— Sale —

Plus: Enter Battery Contest

to Win a Watch!

2x4

max greiner

1109765

Artists Gallery Gift Shop520 Benson Dr., Kerrville at the

Sculpture Prayer Garden• Original Hill Country Creations• Unique Art, Gifts & Awards• Prints, Drawings & Paintings• Exquisite Sculptures & Jewelry

ORDER ONLINE 24/7

NOW OPEN!

Max Greiner, Jr. DesignsPO Box 290552, Kerrville, TX78029 (830) 367-7874www.maxgreinerart.com® ©

which is available free of charge on the Portal to Texas History. Visit the website to access the Kerr Coun-ty Album at https://bit.ly/2YpP0Ux.

CENTER POINT HISTORYThe Center Point Area

Historical Preservation Asso-ciation Fundraiser will be 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 16 at the Center Point Historical Park, 310 FM 480 in Center Point.

Chili in the Park with award-winning chili cook Gordon Dockery will be of-fered at the Depot Museum at $10 per plate for hot dogs and chili and chips with tea or water and a dessert.

Proceeds will benefit the

Center Point Area Historical Preservation Association.

Anyone unable to attend Chili in the Park but who wants to support CPAHPA can mail a contribution to P.O. Box 610 Center Point, TX 78010. The organization has

nonprofit status and seeks to preserve the history and cul-ture of the area.

Meetings are on the second Tuesday of each month at 6 p.m. For more information, call 210-275-9226

2B OUTDOORS & LIVING WEEKEND, OCTOBER 9-10, 2021 J THE KERRVILLE DAILY TIMES

HistoryContinued from page 1B

I nearly always limit my columns to discussions specifically about the Hill Country, but I thought a few observations about the larger area would be of interest.

Those of us who think mainly about the history of our area tend to think about what the Hill Country was like before and after people of European ancestry moved in, and we envision Texas as being peopled by small nomadic tribes of Native Americans who moved with the buffalo, lived off the land and had relatively little impact on the local ecology.

But that is a relatively parochial view. There were Indian “villages” in East Texas who included farmers as well as hunter-gatherers, as there were in much of the eastern half of North America. And to think about the larger scale, there were the huge cities and civilizations such as the Incas of South America, the Aztecs and Mayans of Central America and the Pueblos of our Southwest.

All of these civilizations had huge farms, many irrigated, where they grew corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and squash. Some domesticated turkeys, many fished streams and rivers.

The ruins of their cities reveal sophisticated civilizations with advanced knowledge of what could be called mechanical and civil engineering, astronomy and agriculture. Neither the North or South American peoples were aware of each other or of the Europeans before Columbus.

So, the Americas were not “empty” when Columbus sailed, nor were they peopled by “ignorant savages” as some explorers referred to them.

But there was a lot that the Europeans had that no one in the Americas had, inlcuding the printing press. This allowed knowledge to be disseminated much more widely and quickly in Europe than in the

Americas, and the average European simply knew more about the world.

Some of the most important things Europeans had that the Americans did not were domestic livestock: horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens. These livestock all

contributed greatly to the ability of Europeans to live in cities and still have plenty of food available.

Raising livestock instead of hunting meant people did not

need to spend as much time just in the pursuit of food. Being able to plow

fields with horses or oxen instead of human power, and to thus raise many grain, vegetable

and fruit crops, was also a great advantage for the Europeans.

The only things close to domesticated livestock in the Americas before Columbus were llamas, which can’t be ridden, can’t pull a plow and can’t carry much, and the turkey. Americans also didn’t have most of the vegetables that are familiar to us today.

What Americans did have was lots more land and lots more game than the Europeans, especially since much of the forests had been cut down in Europe for lumber and farming. But hunting in the Americas was difficult, because Americans lacked guns and horses, so hunting buffalo involved stalking by foot or crawling through the grass and using bows and arrows or spears.

Some important things Americans did not have were smallpox, cholera and measles; thus the Native American populations did not have the immunity to these diseases that Europeans had. Some estimates are that as high as 90% of Native American populations, both north and south, died from these diseases.

Early settlers to the East Coast brought with them the livestock listed previously but also European cereal grains (wheat, barley, oats,

rye) and many vegetables and fruit trees.

Although they didn’t know it at the time, they were lucky they also brought European honey bees (for honey) that pollinated their fruits and vegetables, because native bees did not recognize those plants as food sources and thus didn’t pollinate them.

Unfortunately, Europeans also brought many non-native “weeds” with them as well.

Not everything was transferred from Europe to the Americas. Native Americans gave the Europeans corn, potatoes, tomatoes, sugar and later cotton and tobacco. And they supposedly gave them syphilis.

The horses and guns brought by the Spanish explorers greatly changed life in what would become the United State. It made possible the near elimination of the buffalo and made skirmishes among different tribes of Native Americans and between them and the settlers much more deadly. Iron objects such as axes and plows greatly accelerated the destruction of many forests for lumber and farmland.

So, early America was not empty and without man-made alterations, but the pace of change accelerated greatly after the Europeans “discovered” America. Unfortunately, many Native Americans did not survive to see many of these changes.

A note to all the folks who came by Riverside Nature Center this year to visit with me about nature and native plants — thank you. I enjoyed your visits very much. I will not be holding any more of these one-on-one sessions this year.

Until next time…

Jim Stanley is a Texas Master Naturalist and the author of the books “Hill Country Ecology,” “Hill Country Landowner’s Guide” and “A Beginner’s Handbook for Rural Texas Landowners.” He can be reached at jstmn@ktc.com. Previous columns can be seen at www.hillcountrynaturalist.org.

AMERICANS BEFORE COLUMBUS

American civilizations prior to European explorers and settlers had huge farms, many irrigated, where they grew corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and squash. (Times file photo)

What they had, what they didn’t

➤ Jim StanleyHill Country Naturalist

Jim StanleyHill Country Naturalist

Moth’s larvae among worst pests for U.S. floriculture industryAdam RussellSpecial to The Times

Research is underway to combat one of the most damaging pest insects for the multi-billion-dollar U.S. floriculture and nursery crop industry: the European pepper moth.

Mengmeng Gu, Ph.D., AgriLife Extension specialist and professor in the Department of Horticultural Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M Uni-versity, Bryan-College Station, and co-principal investigator, Steven Frank, Ph.D., entomologist and plant pathologist, North Carolina State University, will conduct the study in both states.

The study’s purpose is to improve integrated pest manage-ment strategies and provide data that can be used to decrease economic losses from the pest in commercial nursery and greenhouse settings.

The European pepper moth was first sighted in the U.S. in 2004, in San Diego County, California. The pest has now been reported in multiple locations from Washington to New York, throughout the southern states and into Canada. Man-agement practices are proving ineffective due to a lack of available information regarding the European pepper moth’s distribution, populations, life cycle, plant preferences or effec-tive insecticides.

“European pepper moths are a huge issue for the nursery and greenhouse industry,” Gu said. “They can negatively im-pact a wide range of plants, and our goal is to control their damage and provide sound best management practices for growers.”

THE DAMAGE DONEGu said European pepper moth larvae, the caterpillar form,

are generalist pests and cause incredible amounts of dam-age to crops ranging from roses, azaleas, chrysanthemums and poinsettias to fruits, vegetables and even row crops. The larvae feed on foliage, fruit, flowers, lower stems and even roots. Infestations can lead to aesthetic damage, stunted plant growth, yield loss and plant death.

“That is the ugly part of this pest,” she said. “The caterpil-lars feed on basically everything, but when you are talking about the nursery industry and especially ornamental plants, pest damages that affect aesthetics or yields, the economic losses can add up quickly.”

Due to their generalist nature, European pepper moths threaten both the nation’s $4.8 billion wholesale floriculture crop industry and $4.7 billion nursery crop industry. The two states involved in the current research project, Texas and North Carolina, rank fourth and sixth nationally for nursery production. Texas growers alone produced nursery stock and flowers with a wholesale value of around $659.4 million in 2019.

PEST MANAGEMENT STRATEGYGu said traps at six nursery locations in Texas and North

Carolina are being used to monitor the distribution and phe-nology of European pepper moths, their preferences and the damages related to crop species and cultivars. The team will also work to determine how irrigation and fertilization prac-tices might influence those damages.

Field work in nurseries will be augmented by laboratory as-says in Texas to determine the differences in the pests’ feeding preferences by providing woody and herbaceous plant species as potential hosts, Gu said. This could help researchers deter-mine the plant species and cultivars most susceptible to the European pepper moth.

The project will also determine how effective different biological and conventional insecticides are for managing the pest. Researchers will experiment with insecticides with a range of active ingredients to pinpoint efficacy and create application strategies under commercial growing conditions.

Gu said it is important to understand insecticide efficacy but also to determine any negative impacts treatments could have on crops.

The project will also have an educational element, Gu said. An online training module will be created to help Master Gar-deners, county agents, growers and other industry profession-als learn how to scout for larvae and signs of damage, how to trap moths, and how to report sightings for distribution mapping.

“This is a much-needed study,” Gu said. “Dr. Frank is a pio-neer in European pepper moth research, and we hope to cre-ate an integrated pest management regimen that will help re-duce the pest’s impact on the nursery industry and beyond.”

Adam Russell is a communication specialist for Texas A&M AgriLife.