About

Cross Timbers Connection is an effort to connect people with the prairies and oak woodlands in North Texas and share the natural history of the region. That effort takes the form of this website, the Post Oak & Prairie Journal (POPJ), and other publications and activities.

It is a project of Michael Smith and Rob Denkhaus, who have co-edited POPJ through its history and who were officers in a more formalized organization several years ago.

Rob, Michael, and several others formed an earlier version of Cross Timbers Connection in 2013 out of a desire to connect people with nature in North Texas. We provided naturalist-led field trips for kids, wrote and distributed Frog Calls (a newsletter centered on young people), and we published the first volume of POPJ. The corporation was dissolved in 2017, but the journal was continued under the editorship of Michael and Rob, and articles were intermittently submitted and published.

Michael Smith has a lifelong interest in the natural world, nurtured by volunteer time in a couple of Texas museums when he was a teenager. As an adult he spent time with and was mentored by naturalists and herpetologists. He had a career as a Psychological Associate and retired in 2020. He has written or co-authored two books on reptiles and amphibians and one on the practice of mindfulness in nature. He writes for Green Source Texas and teaches reptile and amphibian natural history for the Cross Timbers chapter of Texas Master Naturalists. He serves on the board of the Friends of Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve in Arlington.

Rob Denkhaus was raised in the bowels of the Rust Belt, Akron, Ohio, a region that helped birth the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Despite excessive smog and rivers that burned, Rob’s youthful activities led to an education in Wildlife Ecology and Management and, eventually, a 40+ (and counting) year career working to facilitate the human–nature connection in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and for the past 29 years, in Fort Worth, Texas. Rob has spent his career connecting people to their natural roots by helping create our local Texas Master Naturalist chapters, educating students as an adjunct Environmental Science professor at TCU, and guiding dozens of interns and other early career professionals towards impactful careers in natural resource management and environmental education.