The wildlife and plants of Palo Duro Canyon — the aoudad sheep on the cliffs, wild turkeys and roadrunners, mule deer, and the Palo Duro mouse found nowhere else on Earth.
As you drive the floor, keep your eyes moving, because this canyon is full of life, and some of it will surprise you. Up on those steep rocky cliffs and ledges, watch for a stocky, shaggy, reddish-brown wild sheep with big swept-back horns — that's an aoudad, a Barbary sheep, originally from the mountains of North Africa. They were brought to Texas for hunting decades ago, took one look at these cliffs, and decided this canyon was close enough to home. They scale the sheerest rock like it's nothing.
Down here on the floor, the canyon belongs to the natives. Watch for wild turkeys strutting through the mesquite in noisy flocks, and for the roadrunner — yes, the real thing, a scruffy, fast, comical bird that would rather sprint than fly, running the roadsides after lizards. Mule deer slip out to browse at dawn and dusk, big jackrabbits bound across the flats, and if you're out at night you might hear the coyotes strike up. Overhead, turkey vultures and hawks ride the canyon's updrafts.
And there's one little resident you'll almost surely never see, but I want you to know it's here, because it's special: the Palo Duro mouse. It's a small, big-eared rodent that lives in this canyon and just a couple of others nearby, and nowhere else on the entire planet. This one crack in the Texas plains is the whole world to that little creature. That's the thing about an oasis like this — it becomes a refuge for the rare and the out-of-place, from African sheep to a mouse that calls one canyon home. Keep rolling toward the Lighthouse trailhead; that's where the big hike begins.
Photo: The High Fin Sperm Whale · CC BY-SA 3.0
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