Pronghorn Comeback and Screwworm's Return: Inside West Texas Wildlife Fight

The newest episode of the Building Texas Show, hosted by Justin McKenzie and published September 14, 2026, travels to Alpine to sit down with Lalo Gonzalez, chair of the Department of Natural Sciences at Sul Ross State University and a leader at the Borderlands Research Institute (BRI). The conversation zeroes in on one of the state's most urgent conservation stories: the near-collapse and hard-won rebound of the West Texas pronghorn population, and the return of New World screwworm to Texas soil after decades of eradication. It is a timely dispatch from a fragile, rapidly changing landscape.

Listeners get a working tour of BRI's research portfolio and the pressures reshaping the Trans-Pecos. Topic threads covered in the episode include:

• The 2010-2011 Texas Parks and Wildlife translocation program that moved roughly 1,000 pronghorn from the Panhandle to the Marfa and Marathon grasslands.
• The return of New World screwworm and what sterile-fly eradication accomplished from the 1960s down to Panama.
• The first-ever pneumonia outbreaks in Texas desert bighorn sheep, plus work on scaled quail, black bears, mule deer, sandhill cranes, soil health and hydrology.

Gonzalez explains why pronghorn were uniquely vulnerable to fencing and brush encroachment, noting they behave nothing like whitetail deer. "They don't jump fences. They physically can't. They just seem to not like doing it. So any fence is a barrier, pretty much. It's a wall that they don't cross," he tells McKenzie. He credits landowners like Nile Maxwell for opening gates, pulling historic fencing, and lowering bottom wires to knee height (about 18 inches) so pronghorn can slip underneath without disrupting livestock operations, calling private stewards "the best conservationists" in a state that is 95% privately owned.

The episode also digs into New World screwworm, a flesh-eating fly larva that the U.S. pushed south to Panama in the 1960s using sterile-fly technology. Gonzalez notes recent positive cases in Texas livestock and confirmed wildlife cases in northern Mexico that cross the border freely, even as cattle imports have been paused. He connects the dots to other emerging threats: pneumonia now wiping out pockets of desert bighorn sheep (Texas had been the last holdout state), drought comparable to Death Valley in some years, and the steady loss of working landscapes from El Paso to Del Rio. BRI's graduate program, he adds, boasts a 95% job-placement rate at graduation, with millions of acres of West Texas serving as the classroom.

About The Building Texas Show

The Building Texas Show, hosted by Justin McKenzie, tells the stories of the founders, community leaders and projects shaping Texas, from economic development and small business to conservation and education. New episodes publish weekly on YouTube and all major podcast platforms, with highlights on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn at @thebuildingtexasshow. Watch, listen and subscribe at www.buildingtexasshow.com and https://www.youtube.com/@thebuildingtexasshow.