Perspectives

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McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge has just finished a brand new visitor center and office building when Ike hit.  It was so new that they hadn’t even finished installing all of the interpretive exhibits.  The above image is what the facility looks like now.  What is even more amazing, is that this was primarily water damage. You can’t see it from here, but the roof is entirely intact, including the solar panels.  Across the road is the Gulf of Mexico and during Ike, the storm surge simply swept through this brand new building.  To give you an idea of scale, it is 14 feet to the base of the second floor.  

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The town of Sabine Pass was located on the really bad side of the storm and took a really hard hit.  This was especially devastating as this area had only just been able to recover from Hurricane Rita in 2006.  I don’t have any data to back this up, but after visiting Sabine Pass twice now, I don’t believe there are more than a handful of buildings in the area that are still structurally sound.  

Just outside Sabine Pass is a small patch of woods, Sabine Woods, owned by the Texas Ornithological Society (TOS) and protected as an important migration stop for songbirds as they reach the Texas coast after crossing the Gulf of Mexico during spring migration.  Like the preserves at High Island, this small patch of woods is often the first trees the birds can land in to feed before continuing north.  The second panorama above is taken in Sabine Woods.  Here the damage was different from that at High Island.  There was very little debris: a couple hoses, a couple big anchor lines, some small trash.  A few large trees were down, but mostly the big trees did fine.  During my first visit, Ron Weeks (president of TOS) and I had 7 or 8 species of warblers feeding in the few remaining green oak trees.  What was so impressive though was the power of water.  I know I say it a lot, but it blew me away.  Small shrubs, grass, and other undergrowth was devastated.  The few small ponds were now filled with saltwater and required pumping.  However, overall, the woods weren’t too badly damaged and should once again be a haven for birds this spring.