AP News, November 4th, 2007
This bump on the flat Texas coast, one of the nation's premier bird-watching meccas where thousands of people from around the world are lured each year, took a direct hit from the tiny but intense Hurricane Humberto.
But it doesn't seem to have bothered the migratory birds who use it as a rest stop.
"Mother Nature's been doing this for eons," said Winnie Burkett, manager of the Houston Audubon Society's four bird sanctuaries at High Island, trying to shrug off the frustration of the extensive damage wrought by the hurricane.
"I don't think the birds care the way we care. It changes the habitat that's available, but as long as there's habitat available, that's what matters," she said.
Humberto was supposed to be only a tropical storm with heavy rain when it swept ashore Sept. 13. Instead, it unexpectedly grew to a hurricane with 85 mph winds, then scored a direct hit on High Island, which is not an island and is high only in a relative sense.
Humberto ripped through the Boy Scout Woods sanctuary, a four-acre tract at the northeast edge of the tiny town of about 500 residents. The storm uprooted century-old trees that then toppled on and broke smaller trees, altering the neighborhood's appearance.
Humberto wasn't the first big storm to roar through the surrounding salt marshes that first were farmed some 170 years ago. Just a couple years ago, Hurricane Rita skirted the area and left the sanctuary with some tree damage.
But the damage was nothing like this.
"You couldn't get in here right after the storm," Burkett said, describing how she had to crawl through the tangled mess of trees and brush to get a glimpse inside the sanctuary.
Volunteers planted new trees, but it will take time for them to grow and restore the canopy that Humberto eliminated in many of the sanctuary areas, Burkett said.
Only 32 feet over sea level some 60 miles southeast of Houston, it's nonetheless the highest spot on the Gulf of Mexico coastline between Mobile Bay, Ala., 400 miles to the east, and the Rio Grande, 300 miles to the southwest. Its elevation makes High Island the first piece of Texas visible for birds migrating north each spring from Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula — a 600-mile nonstop flight that takes an average 18 hours.
"And when they get off the gulf, they need a drink, a bath to wash off the salt spray, something to eat and a place to rest," Burkett said. "Just like us. It's like a convenience store, a gas station."
That attracts bird-watchers — from 48 states and 15 countries over the past year, according to surveys by the sanctuary folks — who crowd narrow boardwalks and wood observation decks to get a glimpse of species that then head east or north as far as Canada.
"We're very well known in Europe," Burkett said. "A lot of the English birders know more about Galveston County than some of the people in the county offices."
"It's such a famous place," said Tammy Bulow, convention and tours manager for the Colorado-based American Birding Association. "That's like a birder's nirvana."
The sanctuaries at High Island typically draw the majority of species known as neotropical migrants that spend summers nesting in the forests of eastern North America. On a typical spring day here during the height of the migration in April and May, bird watchers in a single day can see more species than they could find in several thousand acres of eastern North American woods.
"I'm thinking the birds will maybe be more dispersed from the High Island area because they're going to need trees," said Bulow, who estimated she's been to the sanctuaries 15 or 20 times. "Obviously, there's nothing you can do about that other than know that in Texas trees grow quickly and that new growth will be coming."
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On the Net:
Houston Audubon Society, High Island http://www.houstonaudubon.org/index.cfm/MenuItemID/366.htm
