Kickapoo Cavern State Park

This was the Seargeant Ranch, 6,368 acres straddling the Kinney and Edwards county line about 22 miles north of Brackettville. Tommy Seargeant sold it to the state in December 1986; it opened on a limited basis in 1991 and fully in 2010. The park carries the name of the Kickapoo but is not a Kickapoo place. The Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas is a living, federally recognized nation whose reservation lies on the Rio Grande south of Eagle Pass.

Three landscapes overlap here, the live oaks of the Edwards Plateau, the cactus of the Chihuahuan Desert and the thorn brush of the South Texas plains, and about 240 bird species have been recorded, half the number that regularly occur in all of Texas. Birders come for gray vireo, varied bunting and Montezuma quail. Papershell pinyons survive in a few patches, left from a cooler, wetter West Texas about 10,000 years ago.

The park has twenty known caves, and entering them without a guide is not allowed. Kickapoo Cavern is about 1,400 feet long, carved over some four million years in 105-million-year-old Devils River limestone; when the water table dropped, the passages collapsed, so the floor you walk on was once the ceiling. Tours go every Saturday at 1 p.m., ten people at most, by reservation. Stuart Bat Cave, slightly shorter, holds up to a million Mexican free-tailed bats from about mid-March to the end of October, and on warm evenings they pour out at dusk to hunt.