Conservationists won’t let area’s original ecosystem die out

With structures from the Pasadena petrochemical complex looming in the distance, Tim Pylate stands in a field at Armand Bayou Nature Center and imagines a different moment in history.

“If you could wave a magic wand and go back in time, this is what Texas would have looked like,” Pylate said, waving an arm across a field of tan prairie grasses punctuated with bright pops of yellow flowering baptisia. “But again, there’s less than 1 percent of that historical range left, less than 1 percent.”

Pylate is talking about the Houston area’s original ecosystem, Gulf Coast native prairie, which once ran from Brownsville, Texas, to Lafayette, La., but now is considered an endangered ecosystem — just 100 acres remain in Louisiana and another 65,000 acres in Texas. It’s been lost to residential and commercial growth, ever bigger highways, overgrazing and invasive species.

The prairie isn’t important just for historical or cultural reasons. Ecologically, it’s important, too. Plants that naturally populate Gulf Coast native prairie have roots that can grow to 20 feet underground, turning the land into a giant sponge to prevent flooding during heavy rains, and at other times serve as a huge carbon bank that cleans the air.

Not long ago, Pylate and his team with conservationists from two dozen other conservation groups such as the Coastal Prairie Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy Texas, Ducks Unlimited and the University of Houston Coastal Center organized under the umbrella of the Texas Coastal Prairie Initiative. Together, they vowed to educate the public, raise money, share resources and find a way to restore native prairie, in plots large and small, throughout the area.

It was big news in parks and conservancy circles, but ordinary folks likely heard little about it. Since existing prairie acreage was at suburban sites such as the Coastal Prairie Conservancy or Armand Bayou, most wouldn’t recognize prairie even if they saw it.

So the coalition decided to bring prairie to the city, in small patches at schools and colleges and in every signature park in Houston. There’s even a bit in the Texas Medical Center. Fifteen acres of undiscovered native prairie were spotted at Willow Waterhole, a fairly new park just outside Loop 610 on the city’s southwest side, and 25 acres atop the Memorial Park Land Bridge will get its first real seeding this fall.

Now, Pylate and Armand Bayou are in the middle of a capital campaign, having raised $17 million of the $20 million needed to buy another 1,000 acres from Exxon Mobil, where they’ll launch a new plan to create more prairie land. An urban wilderness, the nature center has what may be the most pristine, meticulously curated native prairie in Texas. Its 2,500 acres includes 900 acres of Texas tallgrass coastal prairie.

“We were about making this ancient ecosystem visible to urbanites, and showing resiliency and how you can manage land differently,” said Jaime González, Houston Healthy Cities director at the Nature Conservancy Texas and vice president and co-founder of the Coastal Prairie Partnership. “We also want to reconnect the things people love with the ecosystem from which they came. Because we had a prairie, we have a rodeo and barbecue and take pictures of bluebonnets. Because we had a prairie, we have cowboy music. It’s about reconnecting Houstonians to their heritage.”

Prairie origins

Back in the early 1800s — before brothers Augustus and John Allen founded Houston and even before Stephen F. Austin arrived with Texas’s original settlers, the Old Three Hundred — the Texas Gulf Coast was pristine frontier inhabited by tribes of Attakapa, Akokisa and Karankawa native Americans.

From Brownsville into Louisiana, stretching inland from the Gulf Coast to the piney woods of East Texas, were 9 million acres of coastal prairie. The land had grasses that reached 6 feet tall, and at different times of the year burst with color from sweet golden rod, red milkweed and a variety of wildflowers.

Bison roamed in herds the size of Harris County, with the front of the herd consuming sweet green tops of plants and the back of the herd munching on woody stems. As the alpha mammal of their day, bison were the architects of the prairie, consuming plants, then fertilizing the land and redistributing seeds that would feed them in a new season.

With them were a host of species, from birds that either lived here year round to those who migrated through here annually. Some, like the eastern meadowlarks and loggerhead shrikes, were “prairie obligate,” meaning that they had to live on the prairie. As NASA grew and other businesses sprang up, residential neighborhoods followed, and the habitat nearly vanished. Animals, birds and insects moved on, or, like the Attwater prairie chicken, their numbers dwindled.

At one time you could find red wolves here, though they’re now considered extinct in the wild in the U.S. The American alligator was once on the verge of extinction, but has made a slow, steady comeback after being protected by the Texas Endangered Species Act in 1973.

“There are lots of folks who have recognized the importance of having these prairie grasses as an important part of our ecosystem. When you don’t take care of this land you lose the things that are important to us,” Pylate said. “You lose the alligators, the bison, the prairie chickens and bobwhite quail. You lose the red wolf. You lose all of those, and it’s our ecological heritage that you’ve lost.”

Armand Bayou has done much to restore the habitat of alligators, and they’re now an important part of the nature center’s ecology. In fact, when various species are nesting, alligators provide protection for many birds, who build their nests directly above an alligator nest.

In a pond near the front of the nature center, one mama alligator protects her eggs on the ground while a yellow-crowned night heron sits on her own eggs in a nest in the tree limbs above. She knows that any predator — such as a raccoon or a snake — that wants her eggs, first has to get past the ferocious alligator.

After NASA sprang up in Clear Lake, residential neighborhoods followed and wildlife lost its habitat and as underground aquifers emptied, the ground crushed in on itself — a geological process called “subsidence.” The nearby bayou — then called Middle Bayou and now known as Armand Bayou — spread out and washed out the existing riparian forest, killing trees and marsh grasses and driving out the wildlife that depended on them

Through the years, Armand Bayou staff and hundreds of volunteers have physically removed invasive species such as daisy grass and Chinese tallow and replanted acres of prairie, collecting big and little blue-stem grass seeds, growing new plants and then placing them in the ground by hand.

They also brought back marsh grasses — which spread more easily — and created a home for the blue crabs, shrimp and speckled trout that spend the first summer of their lives in the brackish marshes or estuaries in the nature center, where headwaters meet the sea.

‘Nature’s kidneys’

The Coastal Prairie Conservancy began as the Katy Prairie Conservancy some 30 years ago, with volunteers concerned about the loss of wetlands on Houston’s west side. Today they own 13,500 acres and oversee another 30,000, with hopes of acquiring more.

“We need to get people on the land if we’re going to get them to care about it. It’s an incredible wildlife habitat, helps air quality and wetlands are nature’s kidneys reducing flood risk,” said Mary Ann Piacentini, the CPC’s president and CEO.

The park-like part of the conservancy on the city’s west side has prairie grasses and wetlands, trails and a nursery where volunteers produce plants from seeds, just as they do at Armand Bayou. Bird watchers flock here, and sometimes west-siders come to have lunch or relax.

Photos by Marie D. De Jesús/Staff photographer

Petrochemical facilities loom over baptisia flowers growing in the prairie at the Armand Bayou Nature Center in Pasadena.

A bullfrog jumps in the water at the Armand Bayou Nature Center, where more wildlife has been seen.

“People have to have places to live, but there just needs to be a balance. Who wants to live in a place that doesn’t have anything green?” Piacentini asked. “We want to be Memorial Park West, only bigger and more natural.”

At Memorial Park, it’s no coincidence that the new land bridge will someday be covered in the grasses and flowers found here 200 years ago.

Park officials were still reeling from the 2011 drought that caused the loss of millions of trees when they began the process of creating a master plan for the park’s future.

Sarah Newbery, the director of parks and greenspace at the Kinder Foundation who assisted the Memorial Park staff, said their mandate was to look at the land and learn from it. Despite the park’s current canopy that provides generous shade, scientists evaluated the soil and found that there used to be more grasses and fewer trees.

The new plan became a park that would have a mix of forest, savanna and prairie, she said. The park’s new prairie won’t be evident for a while, but when it is, it will be in a prime location and able to evolve season to season — as it would have historically.

Already, more wildlife is through the park, just as Pylate and his team at Armand Bayou notice in Clear Lake.

“There are indicator species, like the alligator, osprey and the least bittern. They tell you about the health of the bayou,” Pylate said. “One day I came through and they were just landing here on their way to Mexico. I saw 650 wood storks here in one day. Their population has declined exponentially over the years, so to see 650 of them together shows what we’re doing here is working.” diane.cowen@chron.com