Both have had ample opportunity to watch the forest shift. Gordon is president of the American Birding Association and has been coming here since the 1980s Kersten worked at Santa Ana from 2012 to 2013 before leaving for the McAllen Nature Center. I’m walking through spiny trunks with Tiffany Kersten and Jeffrey Gordon, two people with an abiding affection for the refuge. Under boughs of honey mesquite and velvet leaf, long-snouted butterflies tumble around sprigs of white flowers. On the southern edge of the levee, the trees close in, olive and gold canopies whispering in the hot wind, sunlight baking the dusty ground. It’s late morning in August, and the temperature has already hit 100 degrees. The paved trail into the refuge leads past a cheerful visitor center, across a small bridge and up and over the broad, grassy berm of the levee. Hundreds march in August against a border wall in the Rio Grande Valley. I went along as well, to observe the wilderness in the shadow of the wall. On August 13, about 680 people from across the country marched through Santa Ana to plead for its defense. The revelation prompted an immediate outcry from local activists and politicians. Construction will cut visitors off from most of the park and fracture an already tiny block of habitat. In July, the Observer broke the news that the Department of Homeland Security is moving in secret to construct a 2.8-mile segment of border wall through the refuge. “If we lose these last little fragments like Santa Ana, that’s it. “So much of the Rio Grande Valley’s wilderness has been lost,” says Scott Nicol of the Sierra Club Borderlands Team. In 2016, an estimated 150,000 people visited the reserve. But for birders and ecologists from all over the world, it’s a treasure. The park is not well-known, even within Texas. Charismatic rarities like ocelots, jaguarundi and indigo snakes move through the brush. At least 400 species of birds have been sighted inside, and 450 kinds of plants grow here, pollinated by half of North America’s butterfly species. Ninety-five percent of the region’s habitat is gone Santa Ana remains. It’s a wild place at the intersection of desert, floodplain, scrub forest and jungle, where alluvial clay settles into sandy soils and where species at the edge of their ranges come together. The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge is a 3.3-square-mile tract of protected forest, wedged between the winding Rio Grande and the booming development of Alamo and McAllen. Field Notes from Santa Ana A visit to the crown jewel of the national wildlife refuge system, now under threat from Trump’s wall, reveals a harsh landscape teeming with life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |