The Book of Texas Bays

3. Wetlands of the Upper Texas Coast

17 I prefer to experience the wetlands of the Texas coast in my kayak. That way I can glide quietly along the marsh edge, almost touching the Spartina grass as it rises from the lifegiving mud of the bay bottom, passing the wading birds as they probe the mud with their varied beaks, searching for food. I share the marsh with the fish and the birds and the crabs and the snails and I am enlightened and uplifted by the experience. For me, to be in the marsh in my kayak is the highest experience on the upper Texas coast. Yet all wetlands are not marshes. On the upper coast we have gradations of wetlands, from those inundated by tides to those flooded by stormwater and riverine flow year-round to those that are wet only during certain times of the year. Each of these kinds of wetlands is important to various life forms and to coastal ecology, and no area is more blessed with wetlands than is the upper Texas coast. Yet at the start of the twenty-first century, we are in danger of losing a substantial portion of these wetlands. One morning in February, 2003, I found myself driving along a road on the upper Texas coast with Doug Jehl, the environmental writer for the New York Times, and John Jacob, a Texas coastal wetland expert. At one point as we drove along, John and I both yelled out simultaneously, “There’s one.” Jehl laughed as we explained that we had just spotted what he had come down to see, a wetland 3 McFADDIN NWR Extensive areas of marshland connect the Sabine Lake system with the Galveston Bay system. Much of this land has been purchased by the federal and state government and is preserved as a network of national wildlife refuges and state wildlife management areas. ANAHUAC NWR SEA RIM SP TEXAS POINT NWR Wetlands of the Upper Texas Coast MOODY NWR J.D. MURPHREE WMA Chapter 3 : Wetlands of the Upper Texas Coast 18 The Book of Texas Bays that was no longer protected after the Supreme Court decision in the case of Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County vs. United States Army Corps of Engineers —known as the swancc (“swank”) decision.1 Jehl had called my office a few days earlier and said he wanted to come down and view firsthand how the swancc decision had altered wetland protection on the coast. I told him he was coming to the right place, that wetland protection on the Texas coast had been vastly altered by that Supreme Count decision. Now John and I had found exactly the type of wetland affected by swancc. We were looking into the Bayport project on Galveston Bay, a project in which the acreage of jurisdictional wetlands had shrunk from well over a hundred acres before the swancc decision to less than twenty acres after swancc. This situation was mirrored in several locations up and down the coast. The upper Texas coast is blessed with hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands of various types, forms, and shapes. We have the low salt marsh that is inundated daily by the tide, where waving Spartina alterniflora marshgrass grows along the edges of bays. On the upper coast, the high marsh is dominated by Spartina patens (saltmeadow cordgrass), grading into vegetation types more compatible with fresh water, such as Panicum hemitomum (maiden cane) and Juncus effusus (salt-stem rush). In some areas, we also have forested wetlands called swamps, and we have bottomlands that may or may not be wetlands, depending The kayak is my vessel of choice for recreation on the Texas coast. There is no need to be an expert. Open-cockpit kayaks are stable and allow entry into shallow marshes and grass flats that may be difficult to wade. Try it. 19 upon how long the water stays in the area, among other things. And we have wetlands that are contained within the prairies—saturated water meadows mixed in with other types of prairie vegetation.2 These are the so-called potholes or isolated wetlands that were affected by the swancc decision. Figure 2 shows the acreage of marshes adjoining the seven main bays on the Texas coast. A stunning 280,000 acres of marshes surround the Sabine Lake complex . Heading south, marsh acreage around the bays decreases. Corpus Christi Bay has much less...