Dark Skies & Rare Insects: A West Texas Preserve Becomes a Hotbed for Research
Stephen Alvarez
Ashley Schmitz checks his traps. One—a vertical chain of green plastic funnels—is attached to a tall ponderosa pine. It stands on the edge of a grassy area in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, where cool green hillsides perch high over the Chihuahuan Desert. Inside the trap, known as a lindgren funnel, Schmitz is surprised to find something he’d been looking for elsewhere: a Euphoria casselberryi beetle.
“The moment I saw it, I said, I’ll be danged,” he tells me later as he recounts the story..