These articles are the newspapers’ copyrighted work, so each is listed here with its citation and a link to the original rather than reproduced. Most link to scanned clippings at Newspaper Archive, which may require an account to read in full.
Feature Stories
The longer pieces, in which Steve is the subject or the guiding voice.
A Naturalist and a Southerner
An interview with the “Vámonos” man
The Rio Grande Review · November–December 1992 · By Bill Young
He was the cover story. The photograph on the front is Steve in his Resistol holding his daughter Jessica, then two and a half, and the interview runs inside while the show was still on the air Saturdays at 6:30 on KRGV. He declines to be filed under any label, saying he is not necessarily an ecologist and refusing the “bleeding heart” category when it comes to wildlife and game fish. It is a contention, the writer notes dryly, that does not survive the fact that he helped engineer an official city bird for Brownsville, working with the ecology class at Homer Hanna High School to convince the City Commission the parrot needed protection.
By then he had made more than eighty half-hour shows, from a hundred miles out into the Gulf to the cliffs along the Rio Grande in Starr County. He talks about the wood-rat hunt at Ejido Pancho Villa as “a good example of a hunter-gatherer society that still exists just a short distance from the border,” about videotaping Coahuiltecan cliff drawings grouped in thirteens, and about the thirty-one-day horseback trip up the eastern Tamaulipas coast: “I just sort of wandered along.” He grieves the clearing of the Tamaulipas brush country, and squares hunting with conservation in one line: “I’m from the ‘shoot ’em and skin ’em school’, but we have to have regulation on both the game and the people who hunt the game.” On Mexico he is unequivocal: “I have gotten more from Mexico than I have given back. That’s for sure.”
The headline is borrowed from William Faulkner, whose work he loved and who described himself the same way. The piece ends with Steve saying he will stay in Brownsville whatever happens: “I’m sure I’ll be able to find something to do when the time comes.”
Out of print. Reproduced in full by permission, with thanks to The Rio Grande Review and Bill Young.
City posts parrot nesting signs
The Brownsville Herald · November 17, 1994 · By Lisa Marie Gomez
City crews spent a Wednesday morning nailing bright plastic signs reading “Parrot Nesting Site” onto dead palms at the Elks Lodge, where the Beautification Committee had counted about a dozen nests. The piece records that the birds and their nesting trees had been protected since a city ordinance passed in April 1992, with a $500 fine for tampering. Steve, identified as an outdoors television reporter, makes the case for finding and marking them: “There’s plenty of food out there for the parrots but there aren’t enough nesting sites.”
Brownsville residents are asked to root out the biggest trees in the state
The Brownsville Herald · July 16, 1995 · By Oscar Cisneros
The Brownsville Beautification Committee asked residents to help hunt down champion trees for the Texas Forest Service’s Big Tree Registry, having noticed that Hidalgo County held fifteen entries to Cameron County’s four. Steve, billed as host of Vámonos, reports that he and committee chairman Guy Huddleston were walking the future site of the Brownsville Botanical Garden when they spotted a likely contender. “The one I saw is the biggest I’ve ever seen,” he said of a wild olive.
The Brownsville Herald · July 30, 1995 · By Anthony Gray
The profile marking the end of his television run, and the single richest biographical article written about him. It opens on the taping of the final episode at Resaca de la Guerra, a flock of thirty red-crowned parrots screeching out of the palms behind him as he casts a line and delivers the sign-on: “South Texas sunset. Red-crowned parrots. I’m Steve Walker. Vámonos.” He is forty-six, wearing a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. cap instead of the usual Resistol.
From there it runs the length of his life: the 1986 start as a Channel 4 nature reporter under news director David Merrill, whose first assignment produced footage of the same parrots; the mule-packing outfit at Zaragoza advertised in the fourth issue of Texas Monthly for six hundred dollars; the Zacatecas mules sold on to government buyers at Piedras Negras for Afghanistan; and the cancellation, after he criticized the bulldozing of a red-crowned parrot nesting site on air and his sponsor pulled out. His summary of that: not even a red-crowned parrot can stand between pizza and beer.
City bird in danger of being taken off birding list
The Brownsville Herald · July 30, 1995 · By Oscar Cisneros
The red-crowned parrot was at risk of being struck from the American Birding Association’s national checklist, on the argument that the Brownsville flock descended from escaped pets rather than wild birds. Removal would have cost the city birding tourism that the Convention and Visitors Bureau valued at more than $5.5 million a year. The article lays out both sides, and reports that Steve was among those helping the birder Brad McKinney assemble the documentation needed to keep the parrot on the national list and add it to the state one. That effort is what produced the protected-native designation three years later.
The Brownsville Herald · November 26, 1995 · By Bob Tonkin
An outdoors column previewing the Lower Laguna Madre Foundation’s Education Days, on the threats facing one of only three hypersaline lagoons in the world: dredge spoil, pollution, and brown tide. Steve appears at the close, as the guide accompanying a two-day university field trip to the Benito Treviño ranch in Starr County, to study native plants as food and medicine.
Los Angeles Times · March 27, 1996 · By Jesse Katz
A serious investigative report on migrant drownings in the Rio Grande. Steve appears as a river naturalist, describing with unflinching candor how the river reclaims those who don’t make it across, and where, in his words, “a human being loses his dignity.”
Los Angeles Times · October 18, 1997 · By Jesse Katz
Steve is the central voice in this story about the tension between protecting the Rio Grande’s rare wildlife, the ocelot and the jaguarundi, and floodlighting the river for border enforcement. He captures the paradox in a line the reporter never forgot: you live with the contradiction. A vivid portrait of Steve the naturalist-hunter.
The Brownsville Herald · May 16, 1999 · By Tim Lopes
More than a hundred children gathered at the Sabal Palm Audubon Center for the fourth Kids Care Conference and left with promises: keep the resacas clean, press city leaders for mini-sanctuaries, build a butterfly garden, put trees in the parking lots. “We want more trees, we want more butterflies and we want more animals,” one girl said into the microphone. Steve spoke to them on preserving the environment, and the photograph on the continuation page catches him mid-sentence, hat on, hands open.
The Brownsville Herald · June 20, 1999 · By Vanesa Salinas
Twenty-four children from the Kids College summer program rode three vans out to Laguna Atascosa, where Steve, identified here as natural and marine history instructor at UT Brownsville, taught them the word cayo, the old Spanish term for the creek draining into the laguna. They found a nest of scissor-tailed flycatcher chicks, coyote tracks left legible by recent rain, and a praying mantis. One girl came away with the lesson the paper made its pull quote: “I learned that when there are animals, you need to be quiet so that you can take a good look at them.” That same week he took them out for deer tracks and an indigo snake, and to the Lomas Preserve for turtles and dolphins.
Brownsville Journal; Colorful Flock Seeks Better Life in a Border City
The New York Times · June 5, 2000 · By Ross E. Milloy
A feature on Brownsville’s wild red-crowned parrots, with Steve as the expert guide. He traces the flock’s arrival to a 1982 freeze and deforestation in Mexico, explains how the birds adapted to city life, and is credited with helping win their protection and their status as Brownsville’s official bird.
The Brownsville Herald · July 14, 2000 · By Daniel Borunda
Three canoes put in on the Rio Grande before dawn for the inaugural Brownsville bird festival, while Border Patrol floodlights still lit the bank. Steve was the tour guide, paddling while the curator of vertebrate zoology from the Houston Museum of Natural Science held a microphone over the water to record a cardinal. The only sounds breaking the birdsong, the paper notes, were traffic on the Mexican side and a single crackle from a Grupo Beta radio. And though no Border Patrol agents were visible, Steve pointed out that they were certainly watching.
The Brownsville Herald · September 10, 2000 · By Daniel Borunda
A front page split down the middle between the case for the $37.5 million Brownsville Weir and Reservoir and the case against it. Steve is the voice of the opposition, photographed looking upriver near the Gateway International Bridge. “It’s a bad idea,” he said, emphasizing the word bad. The paper describes him as a fifty-two-year-old outdoor guide who knew the river from leading canoe trips on it, and reports his concern for the wildlife a dam would reach: the ocelot and the jaguarundi he had defended to the Los Angeles Times three years earlier.
Concept: Scenic waterway envisioned through northern part of city
The Brownsville Herald · July 4, 2001 · By Criselda Valdez
The Paseo de la Resaca development set out to cut a four-and-a-half-mile navigable waterway, Resaca Calmada, running from Hudson Elementary to Americo Paredes Elementary with fourteen miles of hike-and-bike trail alongside. Steve, the project’s natural resources officer, answers the questions a naturalist would ask about moving two million cubic yards of earth: the spoil stayed on site, and the water is runoff and groundwater. “We took no water from the Rio Grande,” he said. Readers of his essays will recognize what came of it. Resaca Calmada is the new water and bare leveled ground that drew the least terns he wrote about.
Court: Dispute settled after birds were accused of disturbing traffic
The Brownsville Herald · July 15, 2004 · By Pate McMichael
Animal control accused a pair of peacocks of creating a traffic hazard on Coffeeport Road, and Steve turned up in municipal court as expert witness for the defense. He testified that so far as he knew the birds had never killed a human, adding, “And I doubt if they pose any real danger to the Republic.” Asked by the paper whether a crosswalk might ironically encourage them to cross, he answered: “At least they look both ways when they cross. That’s more than you can say for most kids.” He argued too that peacocks are cleaner and smarter than the Muscovy ducks the city already tolerated at its intersections, a bird he had taken a swipe at in print before. The charges were dismissed, and the defendant’s neighbor credited the judge’s leniency to Steve’s testimony.
The Brownsville Herald · November 17, 2004 · By Criselda Valdez Villarreal
The sequel, four months on: two “Peacock Crossing” signs went up on Coffee Port Road, made by an Indiana sign company that had never built one before and thought it an interesting challenge. Steve, still the expert witness of record, explained that peacocks have long served as a traditional ranch watchdog. “They are tough,” he said. “They are like a fighting rooster to the fourth power.” But no threat to anyone: “They’ll defend themselves, but they don’t go looking for trouble.” The point of the sign was plainer than that. “We just want to give people a heads up (that) this big crazy bird might be standing in the road, and he’s not going to move because you’re heading towards him.” The photograph shows him beside Emilio Diaz, who is holding a peacock named Buddy.
The Brownsville Herald · April 22, 2007 · By Victoria Manning
A feature on the Bahía Grande restoration, with a front-page photograph of Steve out in the field, spreading native Sacahuiste grass along the channel to prevent erosion. Documents his hands-on role in one of the largest estuary restorations in North America.
Short items, photographs he turned up in, and one advertisement of his own.
Big rack fever strikes South Texas
The Brownsville Herald · November 13, 1994 · By Bob Tonkin
The sports editor’s outdoors column on the opening of deer and turkey season south of Highway 90. Steve is not in the story itself; he is in the photograph that ran beside it, kneeling behind a heavy-antlered mule deer with his rifle across his knee. The caption: “Steve Walker, producer of the Valley television outdoors show Vamonos, poses next to a mule deer that he bagged during recent hunt in mountains of Idaho.”
The Brownsville Herald · September 5, 1997 · Photograph by Brad Doherty
The caption as it ran: “Fisherman Steve Walker casts a lure into the Laguna Madre just after sunrise Thursday as he tries to land redfish or seatrout. Faint sunshine peeks through clouds just before a thunderstorm rolled toward shore over South Padre Island.”
The Brownsville Herald · May 12, 1999 · By Tim Lopes
A short piece on an education program at the Sabal Palm Sanctuary that put local schoolchildren in contact with community leaders to work out ways to tune in to nature. Steve was one of the leaders.
The Brownsville Herald · January 28, 2001 · Photograph by Brad Doherty
The caption as it ran: “Steve Walker and taxidermist Rene Escamilla stand on either side of a rattlesnake that measured un-skinned 7′6″ and weighed 27 lbs. According to Walker, who killed the snake near Cruillas, Tamaulipas, Mexico, he ‘got it lined out-running, straddled it and hit it with a barreta fence post.’”
The caption as it ran: “Hudson Elementary fifth-grade students, with financial and technical assistance from Bill Hudson and naturalist Steve Walker, have been installing a butterfly garden near the school’s playground. The garden is laid out in the shape of the star of Texas and is named ‘Caroline’s Garden’ after Hudson’s aunt, Caroline Firestone.”
The Brownsville Herald · January 26, 2011 · Photograph by Brad Doherty
The caption as it ran: “Hundreds of Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks line the resaca along Resaca Drive near Boca Chica Boulevard Tuesday. Local environmentalist Steve Walker says that 50 years ago, the species was not found in Brownsville. The ducks were common in northern Mexico and over time have pushed north throughout much of Texas as far west as Uvalde and north to San Antonio and into Louisiana.”
He wrote about these same birds at more length in his essay Whistling Ducks: “The Black-Bellied Whistling Duck is not a migrant, it is an immigrant.”
Letters Steve wrote, and letters others wrote about him.
Beware of People Selling Parrots
The Brownsville Herald · July 28, 1995 · By Jimmy Medellin III
A letter on the parrot trade, written by one of the Hanna High School students who, three years earlier, had worked with Steve to initiate the city ordinance protecting the red-crowned parrot. A Jimmy Medellin is named among the students in the 1992 city proclamation.
The Brownsville Herald · August 6, 1995 · By Evelon Dale and Mike Garcia
Two letters the paper ran side by side after the cancellation. Evelon Dale, a port commissioner, called it “a loss for the entire Valley,” noted that Steve had produced 156 episodes in six years, and credited him with opening “many eyes as to what we have in our own back yard and the treasures we have that we should cherish.” He hoped Channel 5 might yet find another sponsor. Mike Garcia of Brownsville wrote that the show had kept the tourists who visit from the North and the South interested in the place, and signed off: “Many thanks Steve. Hope to see your show again soon.”
The Brownsville Herald · August 10, 1995 · By David N. Scott
A reader wrote in after the cancellation to argue that Steve had lost his show simply for stating a fact: that a protected red-crowned parrot nesting site had been destroyed, when the red-crowned parrot is Brownsville’s official bird and its nesting sites are protected by city ordinance. The writer praised his record of educating the Valley about its own wildlife, contrasted the distributor’s concern for paying customers with its indifference to the birds, and suggested, half in jest, that the parrots themselves ought to boycott the company.
The Brownsville Herald · November 15, 2001 · By Steve Walker
Written two months after September 11, and the closest thing to a public account of the mule business he described years later to his family. He recalls that in the 1980s two Texas congressmen, Jim Wright of Fort Worth and Charles Wilson of Lufkin, were personally responsible for supplying the anti-Soviet mujahideen with what he calls arguably the most effective non-lethal aid of that entire war: mules. What was needed then and now, he argues, is reliable transport in a country of mountains and very few roads, and not just any mule will do. American animals need grain in the belly and iron on the foot, which will not work in Afghanistan. What works is a mule with a soft foot like a burro’s, adapted to range browse, and to find one you go to Zacatecas, Durango or Chihuahua.
He closes by looking past the hardware: “I know that the British and American SAS and SEALS and Rangers are as tough as they come, but so are our enemy. We need some ‘born in the saddle’ boys with us. To beat the Taliban, it will take other Afghans, mounted to ride them down.”
The Brownsville Herald · October 11, 2002 · By Steve Walker
A short letter passing along a story he had heard on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, which ran interviews with World Trade Center survivors on the first anniversary. One man was Tejano, and worked the occasional night shift at the Trade Center with other Tejano employees. On their breaks they would meet on the roof of the south tower and tune in Texas radio, because they could not get enough Tejano and Norteño music in the city. On a clear night, Steve writes, the south tower stood high enough that they could hear, in the man’s own words, “all the way home.” In closing the man asked the broadcaster to play a Tejano song for the Texas raza who died there. They did.
The Brownsville Herald · November 2, 2003 · By Steve Walker
A field naturalist’s warning, written for anyone with a palm in the yard. Brownsville, he reports, has a critical infestation of Japanese black beetles on its fan palms, the Sabal, Chinese and Washingtonia alike. The beetle strips the leaf and the palm dies. He tells you exactly what to look for: an insect about the size of a .177-caliber pellet, black, leaving a dime-sized ball of desiccated fiber stuck to the fan behind it. He had seen infested palms on city property and in private yards from downtown out to FM 802. His closing line is pure Steve: “All of us need to help pull the wagon on this beetle or we will lose our fan palms.”
The Brownsville Herald · January 16, 2006 · By Steve Walker, signed “Vámonos”
Forty years of watching the animal, set against a federal tick-eradication program. Of all the exotics in Texas, he writes, nilgai are the smartest, the toughest, and have been here the longest, some eighty years. He offers the evidence: a helicopter cull at the El Sauz Ranch near Port Mansfield killed forty-five the first day, and by the second the antelope had learned the sound of the rotors and simply lay down and hid. After a week of expense and no more kills the ranch gave up, and the surviving females went straight into estrus to replace what had been lost.
He doubts hunting will contain them either, on this side of the river or the other. “We could strip search every ejido between Matamoros and Tampico,” he writes, “and not find one rifle that could handle this animal.” The Department of Agriculture, he concludes, is wasting its time and our money, since ticks travel on a two-legged host as easily as a four-legged one. His verdict: “My money is on the nilgai.” Then, unable to resist, he signs off with a parting shot at a fellow letter-writer: “And keep printing Bill Fulcher’s letters. His is the voice of the modern Democratic Party.”
The winners of the 1963 Conservation Essay Contest, announced by the supervisors of the Southmost Soil Conservation District. Third place in his age division went to Steve Walker of Cummings Junior High.
An award for extemporaneous speaking, won at a competition while he was at Cummings Junior High. Anyone who heard him tell a story later will find this unsurprising.
Prize money in the junior division of a writing contest sponsored by Scholastic Magazine. His topic, at fourteen, was “Hunting Javelina in South Texas.”