In a typical school year East Foundation wildlife and conservation educator Masi Mejia will carry her message of land stewardship to 13,000 students in an area that includes Cotulla, Encinal Laredo, Zapata, Hebbronville, Bruni, Freer, Premont, and Falfurrias.
Teaching lessons that are aligned with the state curriculum in partnership with the Texas Wildlife Association’s “Learning Across New Dimensions in Science,” Mejia teaches students from pre-K to 12th grade.
A love of horses and a Texas Youth Hunt at the King Ranch when she was 13 instilled in the Encinal native a love of the outdoors and the solace it offers.
Mejia earned an undergraduate degree in environmental conservation and a Masters in wildlife science at Texas Tech.
She credits her late mother, Leticia Nieto Mejia, a kindergarten teacher, with making education a priority for Mejia and her two siblings.
“She was the pivot upon which our lives turned, a noble, super sweet woman,” said Mejia, who has cared for her younger brother Edward since the loss of their mother in 2016.
Mejia will make as many as six presentations a day in six sessions of 50 students each. She said fourth and fifth graders are the most receptive students. “They still have a love and wonder for science, and they have just started forming their ideas about future careers,” she noted.
“I share my own experiences — studying scat to identify wildlife, flying over ranches in a helicopter, electroshocking to study fish in the Llano River, and how good it is to enjoy a life outdoors,” she continued.
Students who travel to the East Foundation’s 150,000-acre San Antonio Viejo Ranch 38 miles south of Hebbronville experience the diverse ecosystem of a working cattle ranch and a research preserve that implements conservation, wildlife management, and land stewardship.
Sessions begin with an explanation about ranch rules and the history of the ranch, which spans an area the size of Chicago.
“They learn that the land around them was the legendary Llanos Mesteños, where the last of the wild Spanish mustangs and free-ranging longhorns once roamed. They learn about wildlife in a lesson called Skins and Skulls. They identify pollinator plants for Monarch butterflies. There’s a session called ‘Run for Your Life’ about predators and prey. And they keep a field journal to document what is around them,” Mejia said, adding, “They might run into graduate students doing research on quail or deer. Many have never been on a ranch, and they get to experience the wildness of the place and its inhabitants — deer, wild turkeys, tortoises, horned lizards, butterflies, dung beetles, scorpions, and spiders. It’s an adventure. They will also visit the horse barns and do a guided walkabout through the corrals with a cowboy.
“By the time they get back on the bus to go home, they have had a unique learning experience that was also fun. Most importantly they take with them a lesson about the importance of water, wildlife, and land conservation,” Mejia concluded.
According to the Foundation’s website, “The ranchlands held by the East Foundation were acquired by the East Family across a period of almost 100 years. Tom T. East Sr. registered his diamond-bar brand in 1912, and then began acquiring ranchland. After the 1915 marriage of Tom East and Alice Kleberg, the new couple moved to the San Antonio Viejo, where they ranched and raised a family. Through the years, the East family ranched mainly on lands across the Wild Horse Desert, a region known also as the South Texas Sand Sheet, the Coastal Sand Plains, and the legendary Llanos Mesteños, where the last of the wild Spanish mustangs and free-ranging longhorns remained up through the first of the 20th Century.
The East Foundation was formed after the passing of Robert C. East on June 18, 2007. The charitable activities of the foundation are operated as an integrated program of research, education, and outreach in pursuit of the mission to support wildlife conservation and other public benefits of ranching and private land stewardship.
The mission statement on the East Foundation’s website is stated thus: “We promote the advancement of land stewardship through ranching, science, and education.”
According to the website, that mission is aimed to
- Educate the general public on wildlife conservation and the relationship of wildlife with livestock and ranching;
- Use scientific research to understand and improve the productivity of native rangelands for both wildlife conservation and livestock production; and
- Manage our ranchlands as a working laboratory that includes cattle ranching as an integral part of the overall operations of the foundation
The East Foundation’s 215,000 acres of native rangeland are in six separate ranches in parts of Jim Hogg, Starr, Willacy, and Kenedy counties. The headquarters ranch is the historic San Antonio Viejo, situated across southern Jim Hogg and northern Starr counties.
