A newly installed solar-powered water well north of Rockport, Texas will provide stable freshwater for endangered whooping cranes as well as other birds and animals.
A newly installed solar-powered water well north of Rockport, Texas will provide stable freshwater for endangered whooping cranes as well as other birds and animals.
Rockport, has been hammered and battered by Mother Nature over the centuries, and still it spreads its gnarly limbs over the coastal prairie.
Most days, a steady stream of visitors stop at the small parking lot at the Big Tree. They don t stay long. It only takes a few minutes to walk around the tree s massive 90-foot canopy and pay your respects to the oldest living thing in Texas.
No one knows for sure the age of the 45-foot-tall
live oak (
Quercus virginiana). Estimates put the 35-foot circumference of the trunk at beginning between 500 and 3,000 years ago, with the best guess to be around 2,000 years. That would put 1969 s state champion coastal live oak at more than 500 years old when Cabeza de Vaca visited in 1528.
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PALACIOS It’s an overcast windy day as Ellis Chapman walks down a long pier facing Tres Palacios Bay. With his waders in hand, he wears a hat that says, “The Oyster Farm Company.”
This is a therapeutic escape for Chapman who makes the walk nearly five days a week, Monday through Friday. The pier looks out onto the small bay, which is an extension to the much larger Matagorda Bay located in the northern Texas Coastal Bend.
At the end of his walk, about 100 feet in both directions, are two growing systems used for oysters farming, or oyster aquaculture. From this vantage point, the systems appear to be nothing special and could easily be mistaken for trash or abandoned fishing material. However, a closer look into the shallow waters reveals cages of nearly perfect, fully grown Coastal Bend oysters.