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The can-do mentality that made them successful businessmen, in fact, may be making them rotten ranchers. "All the time I hear they want to restore to the native habitat with buffalo and bluebonnets," says Neil Wilkins, a wildlife biologist at A&M. "They call and say, 'I've already cleared the brush, now what?'" Of course, they have destroyed the very habitat that attracted wildlife. "These people are used to running corporations, and, by gosh, they want to see some changes fast," says Wilkins. "They make sure some dirt gets pushed around, and more often than not it results in something bad."

Fragmentation of the land is a big concern. Midsize ranches of 500 acres are disappearing, chopped up into 50- and 100-acre ranchettes. The hill country is fragmenting at an "alarming rate," says Wilkins. Newer owners tend to be hobbyists who experiment with the land, one growing Bermuda grass, another hay (worthless for wildlife), another dabbling in pecans and peaches. Almost all have high fences to corral some of the exotic animals that previously roamed free. "It has huge, potentially devastating implications for the wildlife," says Wilkins. Charles Gillaland, research economist at A&M's Real Estate Research Center, chuckles dourly about a rancher who sawed up his land into 25-acre blocks, all with deer blinds for hunters; yet they were so close together that the hunters would have ended up shooting one another.

Some big-ranch owners are trying have it both ways, carving up their land into smaller homesteads while maintaining a common ground for deer and wildlife to flourish. The Schreiner family, owners of the famous Y.O. Ranch that once spanned 600,000 acres (YOUR HOME ON THE RANGE, say the ads), is selling off 43-acre to 80-acre lots but is keeping 40,000 acres open to wildlife for hunting and photo safaris. Fatjo, seeing his friends search without luck for land, plans to start selling two-acre homesites on his ranch for $275,000 to $400,000 apiece this summer; there will be no fences--even on the perimeter--so wildlife can come and go.

Indeed, windshield ranchers sometimes turn out to be better stewards of the land than they are given credit for. Don Carlton, a retired engineering executive from Austin, bought 870 acres near Comfort for his grandchildren to enjoy. He admits that his 3,800-sq.-ft. "bunkhouse" is more like a mansion and that his family treats the two longhorns as pets. "I'm not interested in being a rancher," he says. "Being a real rancher is real work. My objective is to have fun." He does, however, take a songbird census, record deer counts and make sure there is erosion cover and prescribed burns. "Folks like us are taking care of the land," he says.

The influx of new ranchers seems unlikely to slow anytime soon. Most (97%) of Texas, unlike many Western states, is in private hands, and stiff estate taxes are blamed for the continuing breakup of big family ranches. The souring economy may be helping out too; as the stock market slumps, land values here are still a good investment. Then there's the state's eternal Wild West appeal. "We want a part of Texas," says Dana Kirk, a personal-injury lawyer in Houston who now owns a 486-acre ranch outside Kerrville, complete with his own herd of antelope, zebras and elk. "It's almost irresistible."