This essay was first published in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, 18th edition: Belonging, Summer 2026
I’m up before the sun this morning, as I am most mornings, fresh cup of coffee in hand, heading out to the back porch and the pre-dawn solitude. There’s something about this early hour that’s hard to give up. Part of it is the quiet. My wife and the kids are decidedly not morning people, and the stretch before the day erupts into cooking breakfast and packing lunches and driving to school is mine. I get in a short walk or some meditation, do some reading. Not whatever novel I was reading in the middle of the night before, but something you can pick up, put down, and still carry with you throughout the day. Philosophy or poetry, the kind of thing that doesn’t pull you toward the next chapter the way the latest Jason Kasper thriller does, which, against my better judgment, I was reading at two in the morning, lying to myself that it was just one more page. Six a.m. comes early when you have enough self-discipline to get out of bed when the alarm goes off but not enough to stop turning pages.
But here I am on the porch, just enough sunlight flowing in from the east to illuminate the words on the paper. This morning those words belong to Billy Collins. Yesterday was a few pages of Aurelius’s Meditations, a book I return to often.
As I turn the page and reach for my coffee, which has started to go cold, I hear it. A buzz that flits past my head and locks into a hover at one of the many feeders hanging from our back patio. The first hummingbird of the year. And statistically speaking, the right species — the most common one in these parts, Archilochus alexandri, the black-chinned hummingbird. Welcome back, little friend.
Our house backs up to a creek winding through a densely wooded area, trails carving paths to nowhere through the understory. The creek runs off the San Gabriel River, though “runs” implies moving water. There’s water in it currently, which isn’t always the case. It’s mostly dry except when the hard seasonal rains arrive ahead of the inevitable worsening droughts of summer and fill it for a few days, and the frogs go loud enough at night that you can almost stop hearing the eighteen-wheelers out on the toll road, trucking their goods south into Austin or north to wherever they go. The woods behind our home are part of a MUD — a Municipal Utility District — a piece of land left behind when the development went in around it. When we moved out here it was a much larger area, and we were under the impression it would stay that way. A few years ago, the contractors and the bulldozers arrived and levelled a few wooded acres between us and the highway for the housing development that’s currently going in.
This time of day is the best for catching sight of the local creatures that still live here. Less so than before.
The deer are mostly gone. The coyotes are still here, yipping at night, taking roll call, though not every night the way they did a few years back. Most of what I see in the evenings is on the smaller side, raccoons and possums, occasionally a skunk waddling by without a care in the world, and more rarely, a porcupine. In fact, I’ve only seen one of those here, a couple of years ago, though I hear they’re expanding eastward and are more commonly spotted around the Austin area now. In the mornings it’s the squirrels, the cottontails, the occasional rat snake, and of course the birds. Mornings belong to the birds. The cardinals and the mockingbirds descend on the back lawn like it’s some kind of an avian Woodstock. The blue jays make their entrance, loud as always, and the chickadees and titmice work the lower branches in pairs. A pair of mourning doves sits on the fence line, watching the whole thing unfold. And now the hummingbirds are back, too. Or at least one is. But this little intrepid explorer has discovered an abundant source of food, and the rest of his kind are sure to follow.
I keep a rough mental ledger of the local fauna I see around our once nearly-agrarian piece of suburban life. The deer column has been empty for a while now. The last one I saw in this little wooded corridor was a small doe, maybe four years old, moving west along the dry creek just after first light. She stopped once, raised her head, read the air, and froze. We locked eyes for a minute, and then she twitched her ears and bounded away — not the panicked predator-on-my-heels mad dash through the understory you see when you spook a deer in the wild, but more of a casual I’d-rather-not-be-near-the-two-legged-neighbor who has wandered out of his yard into this small patch of woods that grows smaller by the day. That was about two years ago, and as with most things that come to an end, I didn’t know that was the last time. Though I suspected the day would come. The population had been dwindling as the toll road expanded north from the city, bringing people searching for less crowded places and more affordable mortgages still within driving distance of the jobs they moved here for.
It would be dishonest not to recognise my own place in this. Our home sits on what was once a wild, wooded area where the four-legged and the winged ran the place. To pretend we’re somehow different from the people now arriving in waves would be a lie. We were just a few years ahead of the floodgates opening.
Though we were far from the first.
Farms and small towns have dotted this landscape for nearly two centuries, and before them, nomadic hunter-gatherers worked the limestone bluffs and the spring-fed waters of Brushy Creek for thousands of years. People have been here, in some form, for over twelve millennia. The Wilson-Leonard site, just a few miles from where I’m sitting, gave up the remains of a young woman buried in a shallow grave roughly eleven thousand years ago. The papers nicknamed her the Leanderthal Lady when they uncovered her in 1982 during construction of a highway that has since been swallowed by other highways. She was buried with a worn grinding stone and a fossilized shark tooth, the tooth presumably traded up from a coast much closer than it is now. Whoever laid her to rest covered her with a limestone slab. They expected her to stay where she was. She did, for eleven thousand years.
By the early nineteenth century, the Tonkawa and the Lipan Apache moved through these hills, before being pushed west by the Comanche, who in turn were pushed out by the wave of Anglo settlers — mostly veterans of the Texas Revolution and families coming down from Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, who arrived in the 1840s and put down a settlement they called Bagdad, a mile west of where I now live. Bagdad died when the railroad bypassed it in 1882, and most of what was left moved a mile east to a new town named Leander, after a railroad official nobody now remembers. The forces that took out a small frontier community a hundred and forty years ago are recognizable. Infrastructure shifts, a town gets passed by, the people who can move do, the people who can’t get left behind. We’re running a faster version of the same script now.
When you walk the creek beds today, particularly after a hard rain, the earth surrenders little signs of all this human history. People who pay attention can find arrowheads, delicate, late-period bird points the size of a thumbnail, or much older dart points used with atlatls before the bow showed up on the continent. There are scatter sites where someone sat and worked a piece of chert into a tool and left the flakes behind. Burned rock middens too, the ancient hearths where thousands of years of meals got cooked. The creek bed turns up new things every time it floods. I’ve found a handful of points over the years, which I mostly choose to hold for a moment and then return to the earth before going on my way.
There are signs of much older inhabitants too. In the limestone shelves of the San Gabriel riverbed, you can find the three-toed impressions of Acrocanthosaurus, a fifteen-foot-tall theropod, the second-largest carnivore in North America after T. rex, and the deep, circular basins left by sauropods that dwarfed everything walking the planet today. To see them is to experience a strange collapse of chronology. You can put your hand inside a footprint left a hundred and ten million years ago, when the Hill Country was soft mud at the edge of a shallow sea. Hard to picture that now, looking out at the cedar and oak.
We humans like to pretend we’re special, and I suppose we are in some ways. We’ve shaped our environment more than any species that came before us, though not always in ways I’d describe as good. To paraphrase Chris Ryan in his book Civilized to Death: progress is the last thing you need if you’re going in the wrong direction.
I think about Austin, thirty minutes up the road. I’ve lived in this area for most of my life, and I hardly recognise the city these days. The once-sleepy college town has been transformed into a rapidly growing metropolis of tech companies with traffic and rent to match. People wanting something quieter have pushed out into the suburbs, and once those suburbs filled up and became an extension of the city itself, they pushed farther out still. Developers buy up farms and ranches, subdivisions go in, and the whole thing creeps another few miles west or north or east or south. It doesn’t stop to ask permission.
The sun is up now, and the air is warming. April, and the recent rains that kept things in check are gone, the highs creeping back into the upper nineties, the humidity lying over everything like the wet plastic bags caught in the branches along the creek. My house is coming alive as the family begins to move about. I close the Billy Collins book, which I realize I haven’t actually been reading, and sit for a moment looking north toward the woods and the highway beyond.
Somewhere in this same patch of ground, eleven thousand years ago, a woman was buried with a grinding stone and a tooth from a sea that no longer exists. Her people had lived here for generations, had memorised this creek and these limestone shelves and probably watched the sky the same way I do in the mornings, waiting for the first light. Like the deer, they were displaced eventually, by drought or conflict or the pressure of other people moving through. It’s the oldest story there is. You find your place, you call it home, and then the world rearranges itself and you either move with it or get left behind. Change is the only universal truth.
The hummingbird is still working the feeder. He doesn’t know any of this, of course, only that something useful is here, and that he arrived first today. By tomorrow, the others will have found it too.
Nicholas Allison is a Guest Contributor for Panorama.
