Denney Ranch 2 — A History
By Deborah Denney Douglas, M.D.

A fair place to begin the story about Denney Ranch 2 is in Amarillo, Texas under the doubly dark skies of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years. The worst year for dust storms in Amarillo was 1935, when storms lasted a total of almost a thousand hours. Sometimes the storms lasted for days and the blowing dust reduced visibility to zero for hours on end. One of those complete blackouts lasted eleven hours. People went blind from the blowing sand and crazy from the howling wind. Some believed that the world was coming to an end. It was little wonder that my father, who grew up in Amarillo and turned twelve in 1935, yearned for a place with clear skies and trees and grass and water.

I’ll leave out the parts about my father lying about his age and joining the Navy when he was 17 so that he could serve his country during World War II; the part about his going to medical school at Emory; the part about proposing to my mother on their first date and their marriage two months later; the part about rearing four daughters and sending two of us to medical school and the other two to law school. To be sure, those are important parts to another story, but not to this one.

In 1978, when my father was 54 years old, he and my mother bought a 204-acre ranch with a small house and an old barn at the edge of the Texas Hill Country. The neglected ranch’s ashe juniper ("cedar") and mesquite were going to require a lot of work, but the place had the important things: clear skies, native live oak, pecan and cedar elm trees, sloping fields of native grass, even some water. Seasonal Allen Creek crossed near the back of the property. There’s one place along the creek, near a sharp bend, that has never gone dry. On the summer day that my parents closed on their ranch, Dad went swimming there. That was over 30 years ago, and, to this day, our family still calls that place the Skinny-dipping Hole.

For the next twenty years, my parents spent nearly every weekend at their ranch. Although they still lived and worked in nearby Austin, the ranch became the Denney family’s gathering place—the place where we had our family reunions and annual parties. We four daughters brought our boyfriends there, then our husbands, then our families. All of us loved the ranch, but no one cherished it as much as our dad. His reverence for the land was even reflected in his preference for the writings of Loren Eisley and Annie Dillard—authors who articulated the magnificence and mystery of nature.

In 1996, the property just west of the Denney Ranch became available. Despite my mom’s objections, my dad—who was 72 at the time—spent their savings on the property. It was 96 acres of undeveloped land which, like the original Denney Ranch acreage, had been neglected. Dad hired crews to begin clearing the ashe juniper and upgrading the fences on the New 96, as we called it. Tragically, my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor a year after purchasing the property and died in 1998. A year later, my husband also died of cancer. The illnesses and deaths of these two men, Ernest Denney, M.D. and Andy Douglas, J.D., devastated the Denney family. The New 96 was ignored.

I had been widowed for about a year when my mom offered to sell me the New 96. She wanted to build a new house on her ranch and needed the cash. I agreed but with the stipulations that none of my younger sisters was interested in buying the property and that she would accept full market value. I closed on September 29, 2000. There’s also a little swimming hole on the part of Allen Creek that runs through the New 96. I declined to go skinny-dipping there.

I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with the New 96. It didn’t have a house or a barn or a well or a stock tank. If you searched, you could find a bit of rough, uneven road here and there but, for the most part, you couldn’t drive a truck over the majority of the property. There were some nice oak mottes, but these were hard to appreciate because of the ashe juniper, false willow (Baccharis), elbow brush, and greenbriar. A few acres near the creek appeared to have been under plow at some point, but even this area was overgrown with false willow. Since I didn’t want to run cattle or goats, I applied for wildlife exemption status to replace the existing agricultural exemption. Wade Hibler, Burnet County Agrilife Extension Agent, visited the ranch and suggested ways to qualify for and maintain wildlife exemption, but, frankly, the whole process was pretty overwhelming to me. But, that’s where the childhood aspirations of another man enter the story of Denney Ranch 2.

Tom Fisher was born in Indiana in 1959. He and his family moved to Beaumont, Texas when he was still very young, but while he was growing up, they often visited his grandparents’ farm in Indiana. Tom admired the way his grandparents took care of their farm and dreamed of the day when he, too, could own land and maybe even live in the country.

I’ll leave out the part about Tom becoming a champion horseback rider and playing in a band in college; the part about him going to medical school; the part about him becoming a cancer doctor; the part about a marriage that didn’t work out as he’d hoped. To be sure, those are important parts to another story, but not to this one.

CuckooTom and I became friends when we worked together at Southeast Baptist Hospital in San Antonio. After my husband’s death and Tom’s divorce, we decided to make a life together. We spent occasional weekends at my mother’s ranch house and spent many hours “next door”—on the New 96—with loppers, clearing new growth ashe juniper and false willow. It wasn’t long before we realized what a huge job was before us—a job that, at the rate we were going, would take decades. Even with all the work to do, we took time to walk the land and look for birds. (I had enjoyed birding before my father and husband became ill; Tom took to birding and nature photography like the proverbial duck to water.) During those walks, Tom often reminisced about his grandparents’ farm in Indiana. About how peaceful it was. About the huge vegetable garden. About his grandfather’s tractor. Little did I know what a crucial role the memory of that tractor would play in our lives….

On our way back to San Antonio after a weekend of working on the New 96, Tom said that he wanted to drop by the John Deere dealership in Marble Falls. I figured he wanted to look at chain saws. When we got there, though, Tom walked right past the chain saws and out to the lot where they kept the tractors. He looked around for a few minutes— long enough for a salesman to walk outside. The man said, “Can I help you?” to which Tom said, “I’d like to buy that one.” Tom was pointing at a John Deere 5310 tractor. (We’re not talking about a riding lawnmower. We’re talking a big tractor.) At first I thought that Tom was joking. When I realized that he wasn’t joking, my next thought was that he’d lost his mind.

The salesman asked Tom, “Well, Sir, would you like to at least start it up and drive it around the lot before you buy it?” to which Tom answered, “Oh, hell, no. I don’t know how to drive a tractor. I might tear something up.” At that point, the salesman seemed to share my concerns about Tom’s mental status. He offered to show Tom some smaller models, but, no, Tom wanted that one—the one with the front-end loader. And, yes, he’d be needing a shredder, too. Later, when we were alone, I asked Tom about these seemingly impulsive purchases. (Actually, I opened the conversation with, “Have you lost your mind?”) It turned out that Tom had been considering buying a tractor for a number of months—which gave me some comfort about his losing his mind. Still, I remained dubious about acquiring a big tractor. It wasn’t long, though, before I had to eat my words. That tractor turned out to have almost magical powers for transforming the New 96 into Denney Ranch 2.

After Tom learned how to drive his tractor, he set about improving the habitat of the New 96 with an eye towards attracting more birds and wildlife. He shredded fields of false willow which helped re-establish native grasses. He graded roads which gave access to the back reaches of the ranch so that we could clear ashe juniper. He moved piles of brush and shoved aside limestone boulders. He disked the overgrown fields by the creek and planted food plots for the wildlife. (Notice that all of these jobs required different implements. The people at the John Deere dealership got to know him pretty well.) There was still a lot of “ground work”—work that is done on the ground with hand tools—but Tom and his tractor did the heavy work. It was as if sitting on his tractor gave Tom the vantage point necessary to see the potential of the New 96.

In 2004, we had a well and a stock tank dug, and Mr. Odell Mallett built a house for us. Other major improvements soon followed: a rain water collection system, a high-fenced vegetable garden, a gravel road to the house, a solar-powered well to augment the stock tank, wildlife feeders, a drip watering station for birds, groomed trails in the best birding areas. In early 2006, I moved to the ranch full-time. Tom continued to work three days a week in San Antonio but opened an office in Marble Falls (25 miles away) so that he could be at the ranch Wednesday night through Sunday morning. Somewhere along the way, we started calling the New 96, Denney Ranch 2. We also started calling it home.

In early 2007, we hired a crew to help clear the ashe juniper in areas alongside and across Allen Creek. Besides benefiting the native trees and grass, this also greatly improved the views from the existing birding trails. Later that spring, we welcomed a group of friends to the ranch for a weekend of birding. The success of that weekend nudged us toward the idea of opening the ranch to visitors. That summer, I got some chickens—in retrospect, as much a watershed event as the tractor purchase. The purchase of a big tractor showed Tom’s commitment to restoring Denney Ranch 2’s native habitat. The decision to keep chickens showed my commitment to a rural rhythm of life.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, chickens lay eggs. Because I pamper my chickens, they lay a lot of eggs. Furthermore, because of the chickens’ contribution to the garden’s soil and their consumption of garden pests, our vegetable garden thrives. Selling surplus eggs and vegetables dovetailed with the idea of inviting birders to the ranch so, in March 2008, we began opening our gate to visitors on Saturday mornings. After I attended a series of classes led by Miles Phillips, Nature Tourism State Program Director, Tom and I decided to extend our hours and actively promote Denney Ranch 2 as a birding and nature photography destination. The suggestions and support of Teri Freitag, Burnet County Tourism Director, were particularly useful during this phase. Bird and wildlife habitat improvement is never done, though, and we continue to depend on the advice of many people, including Master Gardeners, Master Naturalists, Agrilife Extension agents, and our rural neighbors. We attend workshops and read books and magazines. We also welcome suggestions from visitors. Whenever it is even remotely justified, Tom buys another tractor implement.

People are sometimes skeptical about our decision to share Denney Ranch 2 with “strangers.” They warn us about being sued or about loss of privacy. Our detractors may be right, but we accept those risks as part of doing what we think is the right thing to do. It may seem strange, but the more we do to restore native habitat to Denney Ranch 2, the less we feel that we should keep it all to ourselves. It must be shared. This attitude involves more than birding trails. In fact, it has a lot to do with a little boy’s yearning for clear skies and trees and grass and water. Tom and I have come to believe that doing our part to maintain those things for future generations is meaningful work. After all, we are simply the stewards, not the owners, of Denney Ranch 2. That’s what we all are—stewards.