About Steve

Steve Walker was born in Austin in July 1948, the son of the Rev. Frank Bishop Walker Jr., longtime pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Brownsville, and Maxine Williamson Walker. His earliest memory was of a high chair in Leon Springs, outside San Antonio, where his father was preaching. He grew up between Uvalde and Brownsville, the “old Texas” that made him, and as a boy he sat among drought-era ranchers listening to their hard, funny talk, a world he carried with him for life. He was an Eagle Scout, and the Scout’s love of the outdoors never left him.

He fell in love with Mexico early, on childhood fishing trips to the Tamaulipas coast with his father. In the summer of 1965, at sixteen, he rode alone down that coast on a borrowed sorrel horse, from a friend’s ranch to the sea and up the shore, living on the kindness of strangers. As a young man he founded a mule-packing outfit in Zaragoza, Nuevo León, guiding travelers deep into the Sierra to see military macaws, wild cats, and country few outsiders ever laid eyes on. He crossed the Sierra de Monserrate, the Sierra Madre Oriental, and the Sierra del Carmen on horseback, ran hunting and fishing camps in Tamaulipas, and for years led horseback expeditions in search of the rare Imperial Woodpecker. He knew the ranchers, the pueblos, and the code of the country as well as any man, and he loved the people of Mexico without reservation.

For eleven years he was a familiar face on South Texas television. He began in 1986 as a nature reporter for Channel 4 (KGBT) in Harlingen, went on to host Border Outdoors there, and in 1992 moved to Channel 5 (KRGV) in Weslaco with Vámonos with Steve Walker, some 156 episodes that carried viewers from Roma to South Padre Island out into the wild country he loved.

Above all, Steve was a protector of wild things. As a naturalist at the University of Texas at Brownsville he led birding tours, and as Natural Resources Officer for the Paseo de la Resaca Project he had a hand in the Bahía Grande restoration. His great cause was the wild red-crowned parrots of Brownsville. Working with a group of high school students, he helped make the red-crowned parrot the official bird of the city in 1992, and those green flocks still wheel over Brownsville at dusk, a living legacy anyone can go and see.

He was also a writer. He authored a book on the birds of the Paseo de la Resaca, was published in Texas Parks & Wildlife, and wrote a trilogy of battle poems that was recognized at the U.S. Army War College. He married Jane Brice in 1981, and together they raised three children.