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Texas Rancher An Unlikely Environmentalist
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123068681
by Wade Goodwyn February 2, 2010

Ranchers in central Texas aren't known for their fondness for government 
regulation or the Endangered Species Act. But one rancher — a former vacuum 
cleaner salesman turned fried chicken tycoon — has become a champion of land 
stewardship and habitat restoration. And it's rubbing off on his fellow 
ranchers.

David Bamberger converted 5,500 acres of some of the most badly damaged and 
overgrazed hill country in Texas into a showpiece of environmental 
restoration. Bamberger has been hailed by the Texas Parks and Wildlife 
Department, and has won the state's top voluntary land stewardship award.

A visit to Bamberger Ranch is like a trip back in time. Instead of cedar 
brush and barren limestone breaking the soil's surface, large hardwood trees 
surround grassy meadows. Wild turkey and deer wander in the open, and bobcats 
lurk in the hollows hunting game.

One recent morning, a dozen hill country property owners took a daylong tour 
of Bamberger's ranch to see what they can learn from him. But why would Texas 
ranchers care about conservation? The answer is a combination of the hill 
country history and generational change.

Sowing The Seeds Early

The first explorers to the central Texas hill country wrote in letters that 
the grass came up to their horses' shoulders, and when the wind blew it 
looked like ocean swells rolling across the countryside. But a century of 
overgrazing by cattle and goats reduced much of the land to a cedar-filled 
brush with much of the topsoil gone with the wind — good for looking at, but 
not much else. When Bamberger bought his ranch in 1969, he was determined to 
show what the land could look like again.

He started out in the 1940s in Ohio selling vacuum cleaners door to door. He 
eventually earned his college degree, but instead of moving into a 
respectable desk job, Bamberger stunned everyone by packing up his wife and 
baby, and moving to Texas, where he proceeded to sell ever more vacuum 
cleaners — 12 hours a day, six days a week. His parents and friends did not 
understand why this smart, likable young man didn't move into a white-collar 
desk job with a little more dignity.

"Everybody was disgusted with me," Bamberger says. "Selling vacuum cleaners 
door to door — anybody could do that."

But Bamberger had discovered that he could make a small fortune door to door 
— and he did. It was straight commission, and Bamberger brought his likable 
Midwestern personality to a state that was exploding in population. After 10 
years, he had banked half a million dollars.

That's when opportunity came knocking. Another vacuum salesman, a man named 
Bill Church, needed a financial backer. He was trying to expand a 
fried-chicken restaurant. So Church and Bamberger became partners, with the 
first chicken shack across the street from the Alamo.

By the late 1960s, Church's Chicken had exploded across Texas, and 
Bamberger's stake made him seriously rich. It allowed him to try to fulfill 
his lifelong dream: habitat restoration, two words that few people had heard 
of in 1969.

Those seeds were sown early in Bamberger's life.

As a young teenager in rural Ohio, Bamberger's mother gave him a book about 
farm life by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield called Pleasant 
Valley. Bromfield lived a few farms down from Bamberger, and the families 
knew each other. After reading the book, Bamberger decided there was no more 
noble cause a man could undertake than restoring the land, while still using 
it to benefit.

Bamberger found 5,500 intensely overgrazed acres west of Austin near Johnson 
City, Texas.

"Realtors were trying to show me places with landing strips and big fancy 
houses, and I says, 'You got me all wrong. I'm not interested in this kind of 
stuff. I want something nobody else wants. I want something that has been so 
beat up, so neglected,' " Bamberger says.

And he has spent 41 years strategically restoring his land.

Changing The Landscape

He cleared much of the juniper ash. He bought barrels of grass seed — 
throwing $5 handfuls of it into the wind from the back of his tractor. He 
carved plateaus into his hillsides to hold the rainfall, letting it filter 
down into the aquifer below. He planted hundred of trees.

It took decades of careful work by both Bamberger and nature, but now 3,000 
people a year visit the ranch to see the results.

Chad Norris, aquatic biologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, 
says the changes wrought by Bamberger are felt almost all the way to Austin. 
"What he does here affects the quality of the water running off the land, and 
in that respect, it affects everyone downstream."

Some of those who come to learn are new landowners who've made their fortune 
in Austin's high-tech industry. The locals call them "Dellionaires" because 
the first wave worked at nearby Dell Inc. These owners buy property not to 
make money off of it, but for recreation; and Bamberger's message of habitat 
restoration resonates strong.

Mark Zuzanek is a software engineer who is attending his fourth workshop 
here. He's already taken the Ranch tour, the Trees and Shrubs Workshop, the 
Native Grasses Workshop, and now he's back for the Water Workshop.

"I come here to learn, in a very short period of time, what it has taken 
these people 40-plus years to learn," Zuzanek says.

The traditional ranchers have been far more skeptical. Bamberger sounds too 
much like an environmentalist to them. But two years of serious drought have 
started to change that.

Jacque Couser has more than 1,000 acres outside New Braunfels, Texas, and 
reaction to a drought has put her best grazing land in jeopardy.

"We had to keep the cattle in one area, and now it's severely overgrazed. You 
can kill the land just like you can kill anything else," Couser says.

Oryx, Bats And Friends

If some Texas millionaires buy hill country property to build 
20,000-square-foot homes, private runways and swimming pools that would make 
a Roman emperor blush, Bamberger is role-modeling a different way to show off.

He's organized dozens of other landowners to plant a beautiful but highly 
endangered tree called the Texas snowbell. He's turned a square mile of his 
property into habitat for the highly endangered scimitar-horned oryx, which 
has disappeared from the African Sahara. Turns out Texas hill country is the 
perfect habitat for a small herd of oryx, and there are so few left that 
Bamberger trades breeding-aged males with zoos around the world to enhance 
the world population's genetic diversity.

Then there is what was considered Bamberger's folly. In 1998, he decided to 
carve out a three-dome cave into one of his hillsides and line the ceiling 
with gunite. The ranch staff rolled their eyes when he told them he wanted 
enough room for a million Mexican free-tailed bats. For years, no bats came. 
But slowly, they began to find Bamberger's cave, and now as many as 400,000 
bats make their summer home there. The cave is called a "Chiroptorium" — a 
term his wife and son came up with that combines Chiroptera, the scientific 
order bats are in, and auditorium.

If you think it's all good and well for a wealthy scion to restore his little 
piece of Texas hill country paradise but that it's beyond the means of the 
average landowner, Bamberger and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department want 
you to stop making excuses.

"You don't need a bulldozer. You need a chainsaw, wheelbarrow, axes, hand 
tools, and a lot of friends coming out from time to time, and a little time," 
Bamberger says. "You can buy used equipment — don't waste your money on new — 
and you can accomplish on your property what I've done here."