Katy Park Fly-Over

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It’s become a Tuesday night ritual for the dogs and I – bringing their boy to the park for soccer practice, then walking the perimeter. I watch the sky, they sniff the ground. We are the guardians of earth and air.
These places don’t belong to us, though. The sky is ruled by the birds, migrant and permanent residents of oak and elm.  The earth is ruled by soccer cleats and lawnmowers, little rodents and squirrels. Other dogs try to lay liquid claim to it, like mine, but they all know the temporary nature of such claims.
A wide swath of grass is cut to open up to the rainwater treatment, a riparian oasis. Red winged blackbirds sit singly at tops of small trees, making their pip-pip-pip scree call. A pair of Carolina Wrens fly up and down,  in and out of the long grass at the water’s edge looking for food. Mockingbirds fight each other for territory in the trees, screeching at each other in downward dives with outstretched feet.
It’s the black bellied whistling ducks that reign supreme these days, though. Flashes of white undersides of wings mark small flocks of three or four flying overhead, making their distinctive whistle calls that have earned them their name. Seven of them line up along a roof of a nearby house, scooting over by inches to make even spaces between them.
The best part of the fly-overs at the park, though, are the short and frenetic flights of the scissortails.  There is a handful of them that have terrible arguments over perching spots in the elm trees closest to the soccer practice.  It is easier to hear them than it is to see them, but sometimes a few of them fly out in fierce rages and circle right back around, long forked tails snaking against the sky.

I was so proud of my little son last weekend when he pointed at one of these perched on a wire above a stoplight and correctly identified it.  Even this night at the park, a man stopped me to ask me what kind of bird that was, and thought it was very interesting.  I explained that they were just starting to come around here.  They’ll be here until the fall, as you can see from this occurence range map here:

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Last night, we rode our bikes out to the secret place of ducky delight.  When I pointed out that my favorite bird was there, my older son said, “that pink flamingo thing?”, and the little one corrected him and said, “No, it’s a spoonbill!”  Even though he still thinks he sees hummingbirds everywhere and is not quite sure what a white winged dove is, he’s getting good at the birding thing.  He wants to find “legendary” birds, so now we have to look up what birds are the most rare and where they live.

For now, the dogs and I will watch to see what flies over Katy Park this soccer season, and invest more time at the CRNT.

Spring Creek Nature Center Goings-On

wildlife list There are so many reasons to love the Spring Creek Nature Center.  Inside the center, displays dazzle young children with live and preserved specimens, coloring areas, quizzes, fun worksheets and nature journals.

Outside, there is the forest, which is practically enchanted; filled with lichens, mosses, big trees and little trees.  Mud sucked at our shoes at some parts of the trail, while monarch butterflies fed at flowers at other parts.  Birds trill and flit from branch to branch.  Could have spent hours identifying species but only had a few minutes in between geocaching, hanging out with friends, having a picnic lunch, and learning in the center.  Belted kingfisher was the new species of the day (#75 for the year).  Eastern bluebird flitted from a feeder as we walked up.  A ladder-backed woodpecker showed us his hidey-hole.  lichen prehistoric treeThe best part of the day we could have spent hours on, but had other commitments – Merriwether, a research chemist who spends his weekends exploring Houston’s edible plants, was teaching a (free!) class today on foraging edibles.  We were able to stay for about an hour but could have listened all day.  There were just too many things pulling at us – our friends who were going to meet us at the playground, the other friends we have promised to drop a kid off after, a child’s hunger for his sandwich, and a soccer game in the afternoon that all needed to be fit in there somewhere.

This was my third visit here this year, and still so much more I feel I want to see.  Every second Saturday, there is a bird walk from 7:30-9.  There will be another foraging class in the fall.  And, there are always more caches to find and more birds to see.

Prairie Parkway

South of the Indian Grass Prairie preserve section of the Katy Prairie Conservancy land, a steady stream of Northern Harriers fly northward, forty eight in total counted by birders within about an hour.  Like the jets that were named after them, these birds now seem symbolic of war – the current war between development and conservation raging west of town over a proposed section of road called 36A, or the “Prairie Parkway” – a proposed four lane highway to run from Freeport to Hempstead at 290, cutting through land protected by the KPC that preserves habitats for local flora and fauna.

map of 36A

This is not a new war; it’s just one battle of the same kind that has been played out since man first took to corralling nature, certainly burning more intensely since cities starting sprawling ever further over the land.  It’s not even that recent of a war.  The Prairie Parkway has been on the thoroughfare plan for Waller County since 1985, and TxDot approached the commissioners in 2007 about piggy-backing the Trans-Texas Corridor along the same path.  The Sierra Club was  investigating the proposed parkway sites as early as April 2010.  However, just two weeks ago,  the turnout at the Texas Master Naturalist Coastal Prairie Chapter’s January meeting was much larger than usual, due to concerned environmentally-minded citizens coming to get some questions answered.

The biggest question on everyone’s minds regarding 36A seems to be, why? Why does it have to go through one of the sections protected by the KPC, therefore most likely interfering with the protection of species such as the Northern Harriers that were roosting in this area, or the native plants such as blooming Spider Lily, Blue-eyed grass, Spiderwort, Indian paintbrush, Lyre-leaf sage, and many other flowers that grow in this area?  The environmentalists are concerned that building this highway through the area will lead to the direct destruction of hundreds of acres of prairie and agricultural land as well as important prairie pothole and riparian wetlands.  The developers insist that this road will provide an important transportation shortcut from the Port of Houston to outlying areas, reducing the Fort Hood route from Port Arthur from 460 to 246 miles alone.  It would provide an important evacuation route for those along the coastline to make their way north, and help Waller County rise up in quality of life and tax base.

The environmental groups ask why the route cannot instead direct traffic over the new Section E of the Grand Parkway (99), or along 362, and the planners insist that there is a need to provide a new route, and not displace those who already use those previously existing routes.  Also, it would slow down the traffic moving northward from Brazoria County to have to shift over to these other roads, and just extending 36 from Waller County upwards would keep this traffic flow efficient.  Some in opposition to this route suspect that the real motive is to develop infrastructure to later build houses and strip malls along this route to support the tax base.

The engineers charged with planning this route also stress that the route would be built using Low-Impact Development (LID) techniques, such as creating a large number of smaller, cascading wet ponds to better slow down rain water and create a more natural green space, paving the roads with porous asphalt to slow rain water’s progress, as well as filter out its pollutants, and planting native fauna along the thoroughfare.  They could plan to  divert animal traffic by thick hedges and tunnels that run under the roadway for animals like deer to cross.  Utilizing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process – the seven-step process that’s required to build a public highway like 36A – the coalition wants to include environmental advocacy groups early on, so they have taken the interests of the Sierra Club and Katy Prairie Conservancy into account at a much earlier stage than what is typical.

The funding for this project is not yet complete.  The Prairie Parkway Advocacy Group is advocating for the project and trying to get people organized to press for funding.  They maintain that they are recognizing not just current needs, but future needs as well, placing their sights ten years or more into the future.  By 2050, the Greater West Houston area (Harris-Ft Bend-Waller Counties) is projected to have over one million new residents, and transportation in and out of these areas will be imperative for quality of life.

The question is how to maintain the balance between the needs of the people and the needs of nature.  If there is a formula for this, we might have forgotten it.  Last week, birding reports from the suggested route counted a thousand snow geese and over three hundred cranes.  Ducks, hawks, bald eagles, caracara, long-billed curlews and short eared owls all call this area home.   Biologists suggested that 50,000 acres were needed to maintain habitat for the native wildlife, so the 19,000 acres obtained by KPC is less than half of this recommendation.  How much will be lost to these transportation needs is not known right now.

I haven’t seen a source yet that indicates when the next open forum conversation will happen about this proposed route, or what are the next steps that will be taken.  I will be watching, though, and will let readers know if there is an opportunity to share our opinions on the matter.  Meanwhile, I propose we continue to develop those opinions, whether or not we have opportunity to share them.  I, for one, don’t want to lose this vital wildlife resource we have practically in our own backyard.

Coming Soon

I have neglected this poor blog, and if you are a regular reader, bless your heart and I am sorry.  I was consumed with wedding planning, as I tried to put together a wedding in less than three months with a very bare-bones budget.  It’s over, and it was a success, and now I can focus on other things.

We haven’t been doing much exploration of the great outdoors and the wilderness, because we were focusing on home and family.  There were two adventures we had in the past couple of months: going to Corpus for a weekend to see my brother, and driving out to La Grange to buy some mead for the wedding.  We went geocaching along the way in La Grange and I made a new friend:

dog geocachingThis year, I am hopeful we will have more adventures, and that I can share with you some of the fun and interesting things we do.

Of course our plans for the New Year’s include getting in better shape, like most people.  We really need to work on that.  We need to get in good shape to be better parents for the kids we have here, and for those we might want to have together.  These are some of our other plans:

1) Discover Houston – from a kid’s point of view.  We made a list of the places that make Houston unique, and set dates to take the kids to the ones we haven’t already taken them too.

2) Hiking:  I have also set some dates and made some plans for that.  I want us to get backpacking equipment rather than car camping equipment, so we can do long distance hiking.  I would LIKE to do the Lone Star Trail this year and make some preparations to do pieces of the AT in following years.  We don’t have specific plans for more that a weekend hike on the Lone Star Trail, though

3) Geocaching: there are two people I would really like to catch up to and pass, because I am competitive like that.  They are about 300-500 caches ahead of me.  I usually find around 500 caches a year, but we have really slowed down on geocaching this year.  I want to get back up there, so I have also set aside dates to work on caching series.  I am also working on solving the puzzle caches in my area and would like to find those, and widen out the distance to our nearest unfound cache to about three miles from our house.  There are still ten pages of caches that are within three miles of us right now!

4) Explore Glacier National Park: this is the vacation I am planning for us this year.  I also think we could take the opportunity to drive through Utah and try to get that Potters Pond cache that we were unable to get the last time we were out there.  More grandfather caches!  More western adventures!

5) Run a 5K with my oldest son – as part of my road to recovery, and something that he and I can do together.

6) Re-invest in my faith – get involved with the youth group again (now that I have that marriage certificate), and also spend some quiet time with God every day, and teach my sons to do the same.

I also want to investigate wineries, invest more in my friendships, replace my bike and go riding more often, and set up a regular revolving housework schedule that we can all stick to.  What are your plans for the new year?