The National Marine and Fisheries Service (NMFS) has authority for enforcing the Endangered Species Act (ESA) regarding marine animals, include sea turtles and marine mammals. If you see a violation, immediately contact the 24-hour NMFS Enforcement Hotline at (800) 853-1964. You may also call the U.S. Coast Guard Hotline at (800) SAVE-FISH.
Texas has its own list of endangered and threatened species in the state. Contact Texas Parks and Wildlife at 1-800-792-GAME (4263).
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has jurisdiction over the remaining endangered species, those protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and those protected by the various federal-level game laws. You can assume that virtually any bird seen at San Luis Pass is protected, or is regulated through state and federal game laws. Contact the USFWS at the following address:
Office of Law Enforcement
P.O. Box 329
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA 87103
Phone(505)248-7889 Fax:(505)248-7899
The Texas General Land Office controls ownership of lands protected for the citizens through the Texas Open Beach Act. The US Army Corps of Engineers (along with the EPA) is responsible for regulating wetlands.
Finally, contact the City of Galveston and let them know about your disgust with their disinterest. Galveston is about to have a city election, and there will be a new mayor. For the time being, though, you can contact Mayor Thomas directly.
Texas boys and girls joyride their way across our beaches, leaving flattened wildlife and rutted beaches and dunes in their wake. Texas anglers, too sluggish to actually walk to the shore to fish, steer their pick’em trucks to the water’s edge where they can offload their beer and bait. Drive-by birders clamp their scopes to side windows and chase the birds from the comfort of air conditioning. All ignore who gets hurt.
Here’s who.
Black skimmers nest, when able, on the beach at San Luis Pass. They carve out a small depression in the sand where they lay their eggs. They nest colonially, so they are hard to miss. Black skimmer breeding colony
Of course the eggs are difficult to see in the nest itself. These birds nest in exposed areas, and therefore their eggs are patterned much like the sand and shell around them. Black skimmer eggs, San Luis Pass
The young skimmers are most vulnerable as hatchlings (i.e., after hatching but before they can fly). Young skimmers are easy prey for raccoons, coyotes, feral cats, and ORVs. Skimmers will hide their young in the shade of any adjacent vegetation to keep them cool and safe. Black skimmer chicks, San Luis Pass
Skimmers are rarely alone in the nesting colonies. They are often joined by gull-billed terns, an uncommon breeder along the upper Texas coast. Gull-billed tern at nest, San Luis Pass
Shorebirds such as the snowy plover, Wilson’s plover, and willet will nest nearby. Snowy plover has only recent begun to recover from a population crash most likely due to increased beach traffic. Snowy plover
A few of the birds that nest here are unique to the region. The Texas horned lark is but one of numerous subspecies, but with its generous yellow wash about the face and head it may be the most attractive. Horned larks, too, nest here at San Luis Pass flats. Texas horned lark
Some, like the piping plover, are threatened. Other wildlife species, such as Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, are endangered. Yet all depend on San Luis Pass for some portion of their lives. Piping Plover, Galveston
Many of the San Luis Pass species gather, at times, in immense aggregations. For example, after nesting many of the gulls and terns bring their young to San Luis Pass flats for the remainder of the season. In this way they only have to make short flights between their young and the waters where they feed. Some gather here after nesting far away. For example, the black tern is an inland tern that breeds throughout the Great Plains east through the Great Lakes. In late summer and early fall they stage at San Luis Pass flats, gaining weight and energy stores before making their migratory flight to the coast of northern South America. These staging flocks at San Luis Pass can be dazzling, with as many as 25,000 birds congregated on the sand flats and floating over the waters of San Luis Pass on a single day. Black tern, San Luis Pass flats
These are but a few of the species that are being decimated by the failure of the local, state, and federal governments to protect them. The laws are in place; the enforcement is absent. Galveston would rather prosecute one local birder who took it on himself to control the feral cat population than to police the area for which Galveston has jurisdiction, authority, and responsibility. Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest American conservation president, said that “surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs…our people should see to it that they [America’s treasured landscapes] are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever with their majestic beauty unmarred.” San Luis Pass Flats is one of Galveston’s treasured landscapes, and complacency and ignorance are insuring its demise. San Luis Pass is marred. San Luis Pass is disintegrating.
There is nothing new in this saga. I first became involved in trying to protect this area in the 1980s, when the property had been sold to the Dugan family by the Resolution Trust Corporation. The original developer had defaulted during the S&L collapse (remember that fiasco?), and the Dugans had acquired the property at a bargain basement price. They immediately tried to limit vehicular traffic in the region, and the locals squealed. The city capitulated.
Later I became involved in San Luis Pass when the Dugans decided to sell to yet another development company,Centex. The new buyer wanted to restrict vehicular traffic on the beach, and I wanted to get the cars and trucks away from the birds and other wildlife. While some traffic has been eliminated near Point San Luis, the vehicles simply moved to the end of the island and the flats. Then Centex bailed (beginning to see a pattern?), and the property ended up being owned by Macfarlan Capital Partners and their management arm, Terramesa Resort Development. Traffic damage, San Luis Pass
These conservation battles have been fought for decades here. In the 1970s we fought against the George Mitchell development of Eckert’s Bayou, now called Pirates Cove. We argued (without success) that the dynamic nature of this landscape, and its vulnerability to storm surge, made it unsuitable for large-scale housing development. Until Hurricane Ike the building boom on the west end continued, each developer and buyer hoping, against hope, that a storm would not occur on their watch. All balanced on the bubble, praying that they could make their fortunes before time to go (and leave their messes for us to clean up). On 13 September, 2008, the bubble burst.
In the late 1800s heron and egret rookeries in the southeast were decimated by plume hunters. Women of fashion demanded ornate hats decorated with the plumes plucked from birds slaughtered for that reason alone. Roosevelt created the federal wildlife reserve system (wildlife refuges) by an executive order and a simple “I so declare it.” By the end of his presidency Roosevelt had protected acreage equal to about half of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.
What is rarely mentioned in this otherwise rosy story is the opposition that Roosevelt, Pinchot, and others met every step of the way. The exploiters of nature will always fight against those who want nature preserved. Plumers fought restrictions against slaughtering herons and egrets. Market hunters chaffed at the initiation of the nation’s first game laws. Developers today oppose deeper set backs along Galveston’s beaches.
Gifford Pinchot, in The Fight For Conservation, popularized the notion of conservation. Pinchot argued that “conservation means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.” Galveston has failed to heed Roosevelt and Pinchot’s inspired words. Our heritage is being sacrificed to greed, ignorance, and insouciance. Either dramatic steps are taken at this moment to stem this rising tide of destruction, or, in the end, our children and grandchildren will inherit a wasteland. San Luis Pass rainstorm
Many of the photos posted above (the skimmers and gull-billed tern, for example) were taken by Bob Behrstock of Naturewide Images Bob is a fantastic nature photographer, a wide-ranging naturalist, and one of my dearest and most loyal friends. Thanks for the photos, Bob (and the birds thank you as well).
East Beach, Galveston Island, Texas Galveston Island is halted at its southern tip (southwestern tip, to be exact) by San Luis Pass. The pass isolates the island from the peninsula of Follet’s Island (and High Island is a not an island either; it is a salt dome that is only an island during hurricanes). At the northeastern end of the island a similar set of circumstances occurs. There, Bolivar Roads (not a road, but a pass) separates the island from the Bolivar Peninsula. Galveston is the sand in this peninsular sandwich.
Extensive sand flats border these passes at each end of the island as well – East Beach to the north, San Luis Pass to the south. San Luis is by far the larger of the two, only because the North and South jetties have isolated East Beach from its sand source. That sand now collects at Bolivar Flats, making it the other major sand flat on the upper Texas coast.
Nothing appreciates a sand flat more than birds (and tiger beetles). Birds loaf, feed, mate, preen, nest, congregate, and rest on these flats. These Galveston sand flats are frequented by hundreds of thousands of birds each year. Some stay year round, some only for a day or so. Some winter, some breed, some fatten before they make their way along their migration routes. Some, like the black tern, coalesce in the tens of thousands. A few, like the lesser black-backed gull, only collect in ones and twos.
Black skimmerLeast terns and black skimmers nest on the open sand. Snowy and Wilson’s plovers prefer the deeper sand behind the beach. Willets and horned larks like the vegetation that borders the open sand, and eastern meadowlarks stay in the coastal grasslands, the climax vegetation of this ecotype. Seaside sparrows (and seaside dragonlets) stick to the smooth cordgrass. No trees here; the coastal sand flat is far too dynamic to be attractive to a plant that takes decades to mature.
Birds are not the only wildlife to find sand flats attractive. Ridley’s sea-turtles, a critically endangered species, have begun to return to our sand flats to bury their clutch. Bobcats, raccoons, and coyotes saunter through hoping to ambush unsuspecting pray. Sand flats are a cafeteria for predators so inclined.
Humans are also a predator here, motived by impulses others than consumption. Humans prey on sand flat wildlife through ignorance, through insouciance. They drive their SUVs over baby Wilson’s plovers, tiny cotton swabs perched on matchstick legs. They spin their wheels through black skimmer eggs, and squash least tern chicks between their treads. Hey, it’s just good-natured fun! Hell, it’s Texas! It’s my God-given (or at least Lone Star-given) right!
Actually, no. There is no “unalienable” right to kill. You can hunt. You can fish. Both are regulated, and there are laws that determine when, where, and how many you can “take.” But the public, ignorant as it is, has no right to slaughter the sand flats because it is too insensate to care. I grew up on these beaches. I have fished, hunted, photographed, birded, bugged, and surfed them for my entire lifetime. I know how idiotic Texans can be on a beach, but killing is not idiotic. It is illegal. It is evil.
My brethren, my fellow Texans, are once again on a rampage. They are spilling onto these sand flats, carving their SUVs through birds, beaches, and babies. They do not care who or what gets hurt. They have their misperceived, Palinesque “rights.”
If you care about these sand flats, if you care about these birds and other wildlife, if you care about a landscape that defines who we are as Galvestonians, then you should care enough to take the actions necessary to stop these fools. Here is what I would do (and am doing). Call, write, or visit the City of Galveston, Texas Parks and Wildlife, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service and demand that they enforce the law (think West Virginia and coal mines). Write your newspapers and bring this to the public’s attention. Mention this issue at your local birding club meeting. But most importantly, get pissed. Get mad. Get involved.
Karla Klay alerted me to this article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. This is one in a series that the paper has been publishing on the loss of coastal wetlands in Louisiana. For a gist of the story, here is the opening paragraph:
Even under best-case scenarios for building massive engineering projects to restore Louisiana’s dying coastline, the Mississippi River can’t possibly feed enough sediment into the marshes to prevent ongoing catastraphic catastrophic land loss, two Louisiana State University geologists conclude in a scientific paper being published today.
The result: The state will lose another 4,054 to 5,212 square miles of coastline by 2100 — an area roughly the size of Connecticut.
Ike offered Galveston a peak into the future, I believe. Our sand-starved island (victimized by a variety of engineering projects both local and inland) is simply not prepared for the additional blow of sea level rise. With the passage last week of legislation in the House to finally move the U.S. off of dead center, perhaps at last we can begin to develop the strategy necessary to moderate the impacts of global warming. I find it hard to imagine anyone opposing such a tiny first step (the battle in the Senate will be tough), but, as usual, Texas finds a way to put its best foot forward. Rep John Culberson of Texas, a Republican, said the bill “is the equivalent to a light switch tax – if this bill becomes law, Americans will pay higher taxes every time we turn on our lights.”
Today, 27 members of Congress urged Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to instruct U.S. Customs and Border Protection to comply with all laws if she proceeds with the final approximately 40 miles of border wall construction still slated for environmentally sensitive areas in California and Texas.
The REAL ID Act of 2005 gave the Secretary of Homeland Security — an unelected official – the authority to waive any law in order to fast-track construction of infrastructure along our shared international border with Mexico. Bush administration Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff used this unprecedented authority five times, waiving more than three dozen cultural protection, religious freedom, public safety, and environmental laws.
“Ignoring laws to build walls has caused needless harm to families, communities, and wildlife,” said Michael Degnan, Sierra Club’s public lands representative. “We are heartened to hear members of Congress call on the administration to reinstate the rule of law to the borderlands, a simple act that would go a long way toward restoring responsibility to our border policy.”
In today’s letter, the 27 Representatives recognized the impacts of waiving laws at the federal, state and local levels, writing: “We believe damage that has occurred to community relationships and public lands is attributable, at least in part, to the haste with which construction has proceeded, the lack of compliance with laws and regulations, and the lack of consultation with property owners and land managers.”
In asking that the Secretary comply with all laws if additional border wall construction takes place, the members of Congress note that more “careful consideration now could save mitigation dollars later, as well as avoiding the type of impacts that will be difficult to mitigate at any cost.”
A diverse group of organizations have applauded Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) and his colleagues for taking a stand and urging action on this critical issue.
“I’ve seen nothing that even comes close to justify waiving laws in order to fast track border wall construction,” said Congressman Bob Filner. “It concerns me that this has taken place in the past and I urge Secretary Napolitano to prevent further damage to our border communities, natural resources, and fragile wildlife habitat.”
“We should not sacrifice bedrock democratic principles like ‘consent of the governed’ and ‘representative democracy’ at the altar of the border wall,” said Reverend John Fanestil of the United Methodist Church. “Kudos to legislators working to restore due process and the rule of law on the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr., founder and president of Border Ambassadors and executive director of the Rio Grande International Study Center, Laredo Community College, said: “For those of us who live here on the border, we feel like our part of the United States is not recognized as equal to the rest of the country. When over three dozen Congressional acts were waived, we lost the legal protections that the rest of the United States enjoys. Some call our borderlands the ‘deconstitutionalized zone.'”
“The controversy over walls and waivers is far from over, despite hundreds of damaging miles of walls already built in disregard of laws meant to safeguard our lands and resources,” said Matt Clark, southwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “This is the time for President Obama and Secretary Napolitano to make a clear departure from the mistakes of the last administration and comply with the important laws enacted to prevent or minimize negative impacts to our wildlife and environment.”
![](https://www.fermatainc.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Traffic-damage-at-SLP-web.jpg" "Traffic damage at SLP web")
