Scenes From the Texas Coast, Where Nesting Birds Abound
Eight years after the BP oil spill, the bird-rich islands and shores of Texas's Galveston Bay are a testament to nature's ability to recover鈥攚ith our help.
"This is why we exist," says 爆料公社 Texas Coastal Warden Dennis Jones, gesturing toward an island in Galveston Bay stacked deep with rowdy Brown Pelicans. Prickly pear cactuses and small, scrubby trees offer nesting platforms to the ponderous birds, and they鈥檙e crowding in to every available space. Wildly noisy Laughing Gulls ring the island, while Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, and Snowy Egrets claim the tallest trees.
Around our boat, White Ibises, Reddish Egrets, Tricolored Herons, Roseate Spoonbills, Neotropic Cormorants, and Royal Terns shuttle back and forth. It鈥檚 even more colorful and fantastical than it sounds鈥攁 head-spinning abundance and variety of birds. Look there. Wait, look at that! Oh, oh, over there!
And it鈥檚 just the beginning of a long and busy nesting season on the islands of Galveston Bay. Dennis and Victoria Vazquez, coastal conservation program manager, have brought Executive Director Suzanne Langley and me out on an informal early-season survey as they prepare for months of formal counts and protection work. The birds will nest in waves over the spring and summer. The Brown Pelicans and big wading birds are busy now, but the sleek Black Skimmers, Dennis says, 鈥渁ren鈥檛 even thinking about making babies yet.鈥
You can feel, hear鈥攅ven smell鈥攍ife simmering furiously out here on the edge, where the land is shaped by the sea and both, now, are shaped by humanity's mighty hand.
It鈥檚 risky business, life out here. Erosion and sea level rise gnaw at these nurseries, and sometimes people get too close. And paradise can quickly turn to something else when a storm overwhelms a small island. Or when deadly oil spreads through the warm, productive waters.
Oil from 2010鈥檚 deadly Deepwater Horizon disaster reached , and four years later a shipping accident discharged 168,000 gallons of oil here. I know what oil spills look like on the Gulf Coast; I saw Roseate Spoonbill chicks and baby Royal Terns coated with oil in their Louisiana nurseries in 2010. I saw Laughing Gulls drowning and Brown Pelicans preening frantically, futilely, trying the only way they knew to clean toxic oil from their feathers. And I saw people working hard to save these creatures and rebuild their homes.
That鈥檚 what Dennis meant: To protect these birds and these places, to see them thrive, is why 爆料公社 exists. For decades, 爆料公社 and have protected islands in Galveston Bay and up and down the Texas coast. These birds have been hunted to the brink; they鈥檝e been poisoned nearly to oblivion; the sand underneath them shifts by the hour.
But because people fight for them, they keep coming back. Dennis is old enough to remember something I am not, quite: How few Brown Pelicans once survived in Texas. He reflects on those days. The Brown Pelican鈥檚 recovery is one of American conservation鈥檚 great success stories.
Today, the giant birds come lumbering in to their chosen nest sites with unwieldy branches gripped improbably in their huge, pouched bills. They jostle and flop and waggle, but in the end, it鈥檚 hard to dispute their mastery of their craft.
Two hours later and 18 miles down the bay, Roseate Spoonbills fill the blue sky and the mangrove trees before us. The birds' pinks and scarlets are vivid enough provoke sudden synesthesia鈥攁s though you could taste the hues, or feel them in your gut. Then there鈥檚 the naked green-and-black head, the bright orange tail, and the zany, paddle-shaped bill, and because all that just isn鈥檛 enough, a stringy little puff of rose-red feathers on the breast, like a cravat or a corsage. If this is madness, I don鈥檛 want to be sane.
Great Egrets are nesting here too, their nuptial plumes rippling in the wind, and so are many other species. Forster鈥檚 Terns zip overhead, somehow still able to make a racket while firmly grasping tiny silver fish. In the distance, big flocks of American White Pelicans and American Avocets roost on a sandbar. They鈥檒l be heading north soon to nest in wetlands on the Great Plains, far from this place.
I ask Suzanne what she thinks of the scene.
鈥淗ow can you not be inspired?鈥 she says, her eyes bright.
It鈥檚 evening now, and I鈥檓 alone on Galveston Island, thinking over the day.
Only, not alone. Scissor-tailed Flycatchers, newly returned from Central America, keep watch over the green and gold prairie, calling sharply, attacking any insects within striking range. I鈥檝e always felt a special kinship with the scissor-tails, so it鈥檚 wonderful to see and hear them. They are the emblem of my birth state, Oklahoma, and I feel I was born under their sign.
Sedge Wrens stutter charmingly in the rank shrubs and grasses, always out of sight. A Nelson鈥檚 Sparrow perches up though, and Willets scream with demented zeal over the salt marsh.
Just as the orange sun drops in the west, the full moon rises in the east, so huge, so brilliant, so present that I feel my knees wobble with the awe of it.
There, between the setting sun and the rising moon, a White-tailed Kite hovers high above the marsh, pale, angular, powerful, free. My mind wants to call it a spirit, but it, like me, is a child of this earth, bound to this air, these waters, and all the other life around us.
The sun is gone, and the moon is ascendant. Clapper Rails oink, and whistling-ducks squeal. Ibises, spoonbills, and pelicans鈥攍ikely all fledged from a nursery island tended by 爆料公社 staff and volunteers鈥攈ead to roost through darkening skies.
David Ringer is the chief network officer for 爆料公社. During the 2010 BP oil disaster, he served as 爆料公社鈥檚 front-line PR manager in Louisiana.
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爆料公社 is a nonprofit dedicated to saving birds and the places they need.