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The Tiny but Mighty Elf Owl of West TexasRoy Rodriguez has seen hundreds of bird species in his lifetime, but the lead interpreter at the state-run World Birding Center, a collection of nine parks and preserves in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, still remembers the first time he saw an elf owl.It was early spring, about 26 years ago, in Bentsen–Rio Grande Valley State Park, southwest of Mission. “I was with a bunch of birders sitting in a circle at dusk, staring at a small hole way up in a tree,” Rodriguez recalls. Their hope was to catch a glimpse of the smallest owl in the world, a puffy, lightly speckled, gray-and-brown bird barely bigger than a house sparrow. “We were getting eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Rodriguez says, “and I was beginning to think…

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meanwhile in texas sky diverA 106-year-old World War II veteran beat his own record as the oldest person to tandem skydive when he jumped out of a plane over Fentress—and was joined in the endeavor by Governor Greg Abbott. Someone allegedly stole a city-owned wildlife camera in Live Oak without realizing it was still sending photos to the police, who identified the man from images of him sitting half-naked in bed and promptly arrested him. The City of San Antonio offered residents H-E-B gift cards, ranging in value from $50 to $300, in exchange for each gun they surrendered, though the drive-through exchange set a strict limit of twenty weapons per vehicle. University of Texas at Austin quarterback Quinn Ewers dedicated the team’s win against Oklahoma State University to…

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redheaded centipedeLatin Name: Scolopendra herosSize: As long as eight inchesHabitat: StatewideWhen Jesse Pye first saw the giant centipede in bed with him, at a friend’s house in San Antonio two years ago, his brain refused to process it. “I thought it might be a stain on the comforter,” he recalls of the dark, golf ball–size object atop the duvet. He leaned in for a closer look, only to recoil as the golf ball unfurled into a seven-inch-long creature with a black body, a crimson head, and more than forty wriggling yellow legs. “Too many legs,” Pye thought. His pulse racing, he snapped some photos before wrapping the centipede in the comforter, like some burrito from hell, and shaking it free outside. The photos were picked up by news outlets…

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The brisket kolache at Taste at 555.A post oak fire burns overnight inside a smoker in the basement of a high-rise building in uptown Corpus Christi. I went searching for breakfast at AEP Texas, an electric utility company, where I heard brisket kolaches (or klobasniky, if you prefer) could be found. Down a flight of stairs from the lobby was a small food court with just one vendor operating (the other closed eight months ago). Taste at 555, which is named after its address, 555 North Carancahua, opened here in 2022. One of the stipulations owner Ricci Neer required in the lease was that she’d be able to bring her smoker, an Ole Hickory model designed to fit under a vent hood. Because, like everything else on the menu, the brisket…

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Lingerie on display at Petticoat Fair.Boobs and Texas go together like barbecue and Dr Pepper. Texas has been home to innovations in breast science, medicine, art, and display. But when it comes to the everyday support of the bosom, innovation is pretty flat. It’s possible that technology peaked with the brassiere. For those of us with big naturals or big enhancements, finding the right one once you’re out of a narrow cup-size range is a big hassle.When I was fifteen, my personal destiny manifested, prompting my grandmother to note that I was “really developing.” The assistant principal at Westlake High called me into the office for not just some offending band T-shirts (that Jane’s Addiction one with the naked puppets, for example) but for the “inappropriateness” of a spaghetti-strap dress…

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Detours Fern Cave Caprock CanyonTexas boasts more varieties of native ferns and lycophytes (“ferny plants” for nonbotanists) than any other state in the continental U.S. As you might expect, you can find them in wetter regions such as the Gulf Coast and the Piney Woods, but they also live in places that seem too harsh for such lush organisms, including the edge of the semiarid Llano Estacado in the Panhandle. There, tucked away in the upper western corner of Caprock Canyons State Park, in Quitaque (about 95 miles northeast of Lubbock), Fern Cave beckons hikers off two of the more challenging trails. A rugged landscape of hoodoos, burnt orange cliffs and mesas, and short-grass prairie (where the park’s famous bison graze) gives way to a shady, verdant sanctuary. Spring…

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stephenville bryan burroughThis week, famed in-depth reporting program 20/20 will feature the murder case of Susan Woods—the victim at the center of Texas Monthly‘s most recent true crime podcast, Stephenville. In the episode, best-selling author and host of the podcast Bryan Burrough explores the diary of the killer himself, as well as the missteps by law enforcement and prejudices of a small-town Texas community that led this case to go unsolved for nearly two decades. Check out an exclusive clip from the forthcoming episode above. The full two-hour episode will premiere tomorrow, January 19, at 8 p.m. CST. If you haven’t binged the full podcast series yet, make sure to listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Story: The Juror Who Found Herself GuiltyMichael Hall breaks down his February 2024 feature, “The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty,” and his quest to find the woman who set an innocent man free—finally reuniting them after more than three decades.

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Save Muny!“Let them play.”That was Austin mayor Taylor Glass’s response in 1950, after it was reported to him that two Black youths, one of whom worked as a caddie at the city’s only public golf course, Lions Municipal, had been detained after starting a round on the fairways and greens that had until then been strictly reserved for white golfers. The mayor’s three simple words made Muny, as the facility is known, the first desegregated public golf links in the former Confederacy and quietly vaulted it into the history of America’s civil rights movement—a distinction that supporters now hope will save the course from destruction and commercial development.Muny was built by the Austin Lions Club in 1924 near the east bank of Lady Bird Lake. Today…

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Key takeways from the DOJ's Uvalde ReportU.S. attorney general Merrick Garland said some victims of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting would have survived if Texas law enforcement officers—who waited more than an hour to confront the gunman—had followed “generally accepted practices.”Those assertions came Thursday after the U.S. Justice Department released a withering report into the hundreds of Texas law enforcement officers’ fumbled response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, finding “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training.”The long-anticipated 575-page report detailed the many catastrophic errors of the May 24, 2022, response, but concluded the most significant was that officers should have immediately recognized that it was an active shooter situation and confronted the gunman, who was with victims in two adjoining classrooms.Garland called the response “a failure that should not…

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