By Jeff Pfaller
A pack of javelinas trot into the harsh light of my headlights, their eyes like pools of mercury as they stare back at me. I am the intruder, the unexpected one. The night belongs to them. But on this evening, the glittering blanket of stars overhead connects us both.
It’s the type of moment that brings astronomer and artist Tyler Nordgren’s words into sharp focus.
“Half the park is after dark.”
When the sun dips below the Chisos, Big Bend National Park transforms. Shadows lengthen, the world holds its breath, and the sky unfurls with countless secrets.
However, most tourists leave public lands after sunset and miss incredible experiences. For the intrepid visitor or photographer, this means that you can have popular places like the Window Trail and Santa Elena Canyon to yourself.
Your reward for staying up past your bedtime or getting up early is a starscape stretching from horizon to horizon. Looking up at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Or feeling the hairs on your arm stand up at the sound of a pack of coyotes howling at the moon rising over the desert.
Back at the road, the javelinas trot onward after quickly assessing my threat level. Clearly, I’m not noteworthy. But this is my first time seeing this species. I’ll call my kids later and tell them about how I saw the titular characters in The Three Little Javelinas, a book we’ve read dozens of times before bed. For me, it’s one more incredible memory made in the dark at Big Bend National Park.
Why do dark skies matter to the Big Bend Wilderness?
Far fewer people experience public lands at night, so many wonder if it’s important to invest in things like shielded lighting and preservation of structure-free landscapes. But it’s a critical element of the desert ecosystem.
It’s almost impossible to find a natural rhythm more universal than the day and night. It’s not just nocturnal animals like owls and bats that rely on darkness to hunt and forage. Daytime animals’ circadian rhythms need the darkness to recover and evade predators. Many birds and insects also rely on the stars in the sky to navigate their migration routes.
Nocturnal pollinators propagate throughout the park and can be disrupted by light pollution. It attracts them away from their natural habitats and disrupts their behavior. Anyone who’s seen a frantic swarm of insects around a porch light can confirm this phenomena.
For many species, darkness is quite literally a matter of life and death.
And it’s not just the animals, but the plants too. The vegetation grows, flowers, and supports the pollination cycle based on the movement, and absence, of the sun.
So much of the life that happens after dark is unknown to us. Similar to the deep ocean, observing night time creatures and plants is more challenging than their daytime counterparts. In many cases, we’re not quite sure what we don’t know about life after dark. It’s more likely than not that we don’t fully grasp the benefits of our symbiotic relationship with many of these organisms.
For flora and fauna in Big Bend, the wildest landscape in the state of Texas, darkness isn’t the absence of light. It’s the rhythm of the wild.
Yes, there are roads and buildings inside Big Bend National Park, and of course lights. But more than 90% of its 801,000 acres are undeveloped, and therefore, dark.
Preservation of the night sky at Big Bend, the darkest of all the national parks in the lower 48 states, depends on good lighting practices in the developed areas. The NPS is strongly committed to keeping those undeveloped areas undeveloped and free of light pollution. Preserving these lands in perpetuity is the best way to make sure our grandchildren and their grandchildren can still gaze up at the stars.
Humans would be lost without the dark
Nighttime is critical to humans too. It’s hard wired into who we are and played a key role in our success as a species.
We spread across the Earth using the stars in the night sky as our guide. Countless ships carrying entrepreneurial humans forged new paths and thrived using these points of light as navigation. Quite literally, we would be lost without the stars.
It’s also woven into our hearts and souls. There is not a single culture on the face of this planet that doesn’t have a tale about the stars. The moon has been elevated to god-like status in the stories we’ve told ourselves over and over throughout millennia. Dark skies are how we formed bonds when we came back to the safety of the village after a day of hunting and foraging. It was the inspiration for our myth making. It is as much a part of our DNA as anything else.
If we lose our connection to these stories, who will we be? If we lose that which thrives in the dark, how much will the vibrance of our natural world be dimmed?
Want to help protect dark skies in Big Bend National Park?
Keep Big Bend Wild’s goal is to assure permanent protection from development and the inevitable lights that come with it for the vast majority of the still-undeveloped areas of the park. A key strategy is designating those areas as official wilderness. Those areas would always welcome dark sky photographers and other adventurers eager to get off-road and into the backcountry.
20% of the profits for every sale of Dark Skies: Rare Phenomena in America’s Public Lands purchased through the link on the Keep Big Bend WIld website directly support conservation efforts of Keep Big Bend Wild to assure the permanent protection of the undeveloped areas of the park. Our goal is to keep them not just wild, but dark.
About the book: If you’ve ever stared at the stars and felt something stir inside you, this book is for you. Dark Skies is more than a photo collection. It’s a portal into the rare, the unexplained, and the unbelievable. It captures the ephemeral wilderness of our public lands in a way you haven’t seen before. It’s my love letter to the American park system, and donating a part of every sale is my small way to say thank you to our beautiful country.
20% of the proceeds purchased from this link are directly donated to KBBW
About the author:
Jeff Pfaller is an award-winning photographer and has visited all 7 continents, all 50 U.S. states in the U.S, and over 20 countries. He funds his wanderlust and parkaholic habits as a content strategist. He lives in Chicago with his wife, three children, and rotating menagerie of animals. His latest landscape photography book, Dark Skies, seeks to help people experience public lands like Big Bend in a new way by celebrating rare moments in the night sky.
Comments are closed