USDA researchers in South Texas built a battery-powered sprayer, hid it at a fence crossing where wild nilgai antelope squeeze through the wire, and loaded the tank with billions of microscopic parasitic worms suspended in water. When an antelope walked through the gap, an ultrasonic sensor detected its movement, an onboard computer started the pump, and the machine sprayed the animal’s belly and legs with living roundworms that kill ticks.The target was the southern cattle fever tick. The tick carries bovine babesiosis, a blood disease that could devastate the American cattle industry if it spreads beyond the quarantine zone along the Rio Grande. Cattle can be gathered and dipped. Nilgai cannot. A nilgai antelope stands five feet at the shoulder, weighs up to 600 pounds, jumps fences, and does not cooperate with livestock handling in any form. The USDA had been shooting them from helicopters at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, killing hundreds, and the tick kept spreading because the surviving nilgai kept carrying it across ranch boundaries.John Goolsby, a USDA research entomologist at the Cattle Fever Tick Research Laboratory in Edinburg, Texas, proposed a different approach. It is no surprise that the cattle fever tick gets on nilgai, he said, because they both come from India, the tick and the nilgai. Nilgai were imported as zoo animals in the 1920s and later released in South Texas. The tick was already in the region. The two species from the same subcontinent found each other on the same ground 10,000 miles from where they evolved together.The weapon Goolsby chose was Steinernema riobrave, a microscopic roundworm native to the Rio Grande Valley. It is an entomopathogenic nematode, meaning it parasitizes and kills insects and ticks. It enters the tick through a body opening, releases bacteria that liquefy the tick’s internal organs, feeds on the resulting material, reproduces inside the carcass, and sends its offspring into the soil to find more hosts. Goolsby’s team had already demonstrated in the lab that the nematode kills cattle fever ticks. The problem was getting the nematode onto a nilgai.The sprayer solved it. Goolsby and colleagues at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, including Diana Cantu, Alejandro Vasquez, and Alexis Racelis, built the device from off-the-shelf components. The tank held the nematode solution. An aerator ran continuously to keep the worms alive and oxygenated in the Texas heat. Tests showed the nematodes stayed viable in the aerated tank for more than two weeks. The ultrasonic sensor triggered the spray when an animal passed. The system ran on batteries and required no human presence.They demonstrated the sprayer publicly on November 20, 2017, at Russell Ranch near Rio Hondo. In the summer of 2019, they deployed sprayers across six private ranches in Cameron County totaling 40,000 acres. Researchers used satellite-collared nilgai and game cameras to compare tick counts in treated and untreated areas. The results showed a significant treatment effect.Later work placed motion-triggered sprayers at water troughs and monitored them with 16 cameras from 2020 through 2022. The nilgai kept visiting the equipped troughs. They did not avoid the spray. An animal walking through a mist of water on a hot South Texas day has no reason to object, and the microscopic worms landing on its hide are invisible, odorless, and already native to the dirt under its feet. The nilgai does not know it has been treated. It walks through the fence crossing or drinks from the trough, picks up a few billion roundworms, and carries them into the brush where the ticks are waiting.The technique remains experimental. Goolsby and his team recommended further testing before incorporating the system into the wider Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program. We have been able to prove that we can spray nilgai, and we know that the nematodes kill the tick, Goolsby said in 2019. But what we do not know is, when the whole thing comes together, can we reduce ticks enough to make a difference at scale.Source: Goolsby, Cantu, Vasquez, and Racelis (2019), Subtropical Agriculture and Environments / Goolsby and Shapiro-Ilan (2020), Biocontrol Science and Technology / USDA ARS / MyRGV / Texas Farm Bureau / Las Huellas Association.
I mentioned moose ticks before here and how they are devastating moose populations. I was pleased to see something that might help.
Dear Stephen Bodio,
I have just finished *Tiger Country: A Novel of the Wild Southwest*, and what stayed with me was the way you turn the idea of rewilding into a very real human conflict. By imagining the return of predators such as grizzlies and jaguars to the mountains of southern New Mexico, you move the question out of theory and into the lives of ranchers, naturalists, activists, politicians, journalists, and the people who actually inhabit the landscape.
I particularly appreciated the tension between the wild and the human world. The mysterious animals appearing in the mountains, the reports of carcasses and cattle killings, and the growing attention surrounding the “Bosque Bigfoot” create an atmosphere that is suspenseful and sometimes unsettling, while the novel never reduces the debate to a simple argument between opposing sides. Your long experience with the land, wildlife, and culture of rural New Mexico gives that world an unusual sense of authenticity.
My name is Peter Constantine. I am a literary translator, and for many years my work has taken me across German, Russian, French, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, and Slovene, always with the same underlying problem: how to carry a writer’s voice and meaning from one language into another without reducing it in the process.
I am writing because I would like to explore the possibility of translating *Tiger Country* into German. Before reaching out, I looked into the book’s publication and translation history and found the English-language edition published by Behind the Ranges Press in October 2018, but I could not find evidence of a German-language edition. German retailers currently list the English edition, which made me wonder whether German rights might still be available.
A novel like yours presents a particularly interesting translation challenge because the landscape and wildlife are not simply background; they are part of the novel’s identity. The language of ranching, hunting, conservation, ecology, and rewilding has to remain precise, while the suspense, humor, lyrical passages, and competing viewpoints need to feel equally natural in German.
I also found that your work as a naturalist and writer has long been closely connected with the landscape and wildlife of the American West, and that *Tiger Country* grew out of that sustained engagement with the region. That depth of knowledge is one of the qualities that makes the novel particularly distinctive.
For me, translation is not simply the production of another edition. At its best, it gives a book a second life. It allows a story rooted in one landscape and culture to enter another literary world and gives new readers the opportunity to encounter its characters, ideas, and questions from a different perspective.
If the possibility of a German edition interests you, I would be very glad to send you some information about my previous translations and discuss what might be possible.
Thank you for bringing together wildlife, landscape, human conflict, and literary suspense in such an unusual way. I would be pleased to hear from you.
Warmly,
Peter Constantine
Literary Translator