Natural Features in Texas
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Nature·Harris County
Addicks and Barker Reservoirs
These are reservoirs with no lake in them. Built in the 1940s after the 1935 flood tore through downtown, Addicks and Barker are dry dams — earthen embankments up to a dozen miles long that sit empty most of the time, holding parks, prairie and forest inside the pool, and fill only when a storm demands it.
Nature·Fort Bend County
Alligators of the Brazos Bottom
The oxbow lakes in this bend of the Brazos hold one of the densest concentrations of American alligators in Texas. They are here because the river keeps abandoning its own channel — a meander gets cut off, becomes a still lake, fills with vegetation, and makes close to ideal alligator habitat. The species was listed as endangered in 1967 and recovered well enough to be delisted in 1987, one of the more complete comebacks in American wildlife management.
Nature·Bell County
Balcones Escarpment at Salado
Salado Creek runs off the escarpment here through a set of springs that made this a crossing on the Chisholm Trail and before that on the Camino Real. This is near the northern end of the Balcones zone, where the escarpment is lower and less obvious than it is at San Antonio but still separates the Lampasas Cut Plain to the west from the blackland to the east.
Nature·Bexar County
Balcones Escarpment at San Antonio
The ground rises several hundred feet over the next few miles as the road climbs off the coastal plain onto the Edwards Plateau. Spanish accounts named the feature — los balcones, the balconies — for exactly this stepped profile seen from below. The escarpment is the reason San Antonio exists where it does: the San Antonio Springs and San Pedro Springs rise along the fault line, and the Spanish sited the presidio and the missions on that water in 1718.
Nature·Fayette County
Bluebonnets and the Mowing Calendar
The wildflowers along these shoulders are managed, not accidental. The state highway department has sown seed along its rights of way since the 1930s and now buys tens of thousands of pounds a year, and — the part that actually matters — it holds off mowing until the flowers have set seed. Lady Bird Johnson pushed that practice into policy nationally in the 1960s.
Nature·Galveston County
Bolivar Flats
These mudflats are an accident of engineering. The North Jetty built at the entrance to Galveston Bay around the turn of the twentieth century interrupted the sand moving along the coast, and sediment piled up behind it into a broad, shallow flat that did not exist before.
Nature·Colorado County
Bottomland Hardwood Forest
Bottomland hardwood is a forest defined by flooding. The trees here — overcup oak, water hickory, black willow, bald cypress at the wettest edges — are the species that can stand having their roots underwater for weeks at a time, and the forest sorts itself into bands by how long each spot stays wet.
Nature·Marion County
Caddo Lake
The only large natural lake in Texas, and it was made by a logjam. The Great Raft — a mass of driftwood in the Red River that at times stretched more than 100 miles — dammed the drainage and backed water into this bottomland. The Army Corps blew the raft apart in the 1870s and the lake began to drain, so a dam was built to keep it. The bald cypress standing in open water here carry Spanish moss at close to its western limit, and the lake is a Ramsar wetland of international importance.
Nature·Briscoe County
Caprock Canyons
Where streams have cut back into the Caprock Escarpment they expose bright red Permian mudstone laid down about 280 million years ago, when this was a coastal flat beside a shallow sea that repeatedly evaporated. The red is oxidized iron; the white and gray bands running through it are gypsum, the salt left behind each time the water dried.
Nature·Bastrop County
Cave Swallows Under the Bridges
The small square-tailed swallows nesting under these highway bridges were, until recently, a rarity confined to a few limestone caves and sinkholes in the Texas Hill Country and Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s they discovered that culverts and bridge underpasses imitate a cave mouth well enough, and the population exploded across Texas and beyond — one of the clearest cases anywhere of a bird whose range was transformed by road construction.
Nature·Comal County
Comal Springs
The largest spring system in Texas, discharging an average of about 290 cubic feet per second from the Edwards Aquifer along the Comal Springs fault, and the source of the Comal River — at roughly two and a half miles, one of the shortest rivers in the country. The springs stopped flowing for about five months during the drought of 1956, the only time in recorded history, and the fountain darter was wiped out here and had to be reintroduced from the San Marcos River.
Nature·Harris County
Coyotes in the Bayou Greenways
The bayou corridors running through Houston are continuous strips of cover from the countryside into the middle of the city, and coyotes and bobcats use them as roads. Coyotes have expanded their range across almost all of North America over the last century — largely because wolves were removed and coyotes are far more adaptable — and they now live inside essentially every major American city.
Nature·Waller County
Crawfish Chimneys
The little mud towers standing in these wet fields are built by burrowing crawfish, which dig down to the water table and stack the excavated pellets around the entrance. They spend most of the year underground and are the reason crawfish appear in a pasture with no visible water in it. The burrows matter beyond the animal: they carry air and water down into heavy prairie clay, and the crawfish themselves are a staple food for herons, ibises and raccoons across the coastal prairie.
Nature·Harris County
Dwarf Palmetto in the Bayou Bottoms
The fan-shaped palms growing in the understory here are dwarf palmetto, and they are genuinely palms — one of only a handful of palm species native to the United States, and among the most cold-hardy in the world. They grow with almost no visible trunk, holding their stem underground, which is how a tropical-looking plant survives hard freezes this far north. A bottomland forest of oak and cypress with a palmetto floor is a distinctly Gulf Coast combination, and it runs from here into Louisiana.
Nature·Comal County
Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone
For roughly 30 miles along this stretch, the highway runs across the band where the Edwards limestone reaches the surface and creeks vanish into it. Streams draining off the plateau lose their water into sinkholes, fractures and caves here rather than running on to the coast, and that water reappears at Comal and San Marcos springs and in the wells that supply about two million people.
Nature·Culberson County
El Capitan and the Capitan Reef
This limestone cliff is a fossil reef. About 260 million years ago a horseshoe-shaped reef built by sponges and algae — not corals — grew around the rim of a deep marine basin here, then was buried under thousands of feet of sediment when the basin dried out. Uplift and erosion have since exposed a section of it, and the Capitan Reef is now the best-preserved fossil reef complex of its age anywhere in the world. The same buried reef holds much of the oil of the Permian Basin.
Nature·Fayette County
Feral Hogs
The rooted-up ground along these bottoms is the work of feral hogs, descended from Spanish domestic pigs turned loose centuries ago and from Eurasian wild boar released for hunting in the twentieth century. Texas holds more of them than any other state, in the low millions, and they are close to unstoppable: they breed at a year old, produce two litters a year, eat essentially anything, and are smart enough to learn traps.
Nature·Blanco County
Flash Flood Alley
The low-water crossing signs along this road are not decoration. Central Texas, in a crescent following the Balcones Escarpment from west of San Antonio through Austin and up toward Waco, produces more flash floods per square mile than anywhere else in North America. Three things combine to do it. Warm, wet air off the Gulf is forced upward as it meets the rising edge of the Edwards Plateau, which wrings out extraordinary rainfall rates.
Nature·Val Verde County
Goodenough Spring
Before 1968 this was the third largest spring in Texas, pushing roughly 140 cubic feet per second into the Rio Grande. Then Amistad Dam closed and the reservoir rose over it, and the spring mouth now sits about 165 feet underwater — it still flows, it simply has a lake on top of it. It was also the only known home of the Amistad gambusia, a small fish that lived nowhere else and was declared extinct in 1987.
Nature·Kendall County
Guadalupe River Cypress
The bald cypress lining this river are not incidental to it — they are what holds it together. The trees root directly in the streambed, tolerate months underwater, and their trunks and knees slow floodwater and trap gravel, which is why the Guadalupe keeps clear runs and deep green pools instead of scouring to bare rock. Some of the largest are estimated at well over 500 years old, and they survive because cypress was hard to reach with a wagon in a steep valley.
Nature·Galveston County
High Island and the Trans-Gulf Crossing
This low rise is a salt dome — the only high ground for miles, pushed up by the same buried Jurassic salt that traps oil along this coast — and the few acres of oak woodland growing on it are internationally famous among birders. Songbirds migrating north in spring fly the Gulf of Mexico nonstop, some 600 miles over open water, and when a north wind meets them at the coast they come down exhausted in the first trees they can reach.
Nature·Blanco County
Hill Country Whitetail
The Edwards Plateau carries more white-tailed deer than any comparable area in North America. Texas holds roughly five million whitetail altogether, and the densest concentration of them is here in the Hill Country. State survey units in the counties west of this road have run close to 265 deer per thousand acres, which works out at about one deer for every four acres.
Nature·Travis County
Hornsby Bend Bird Observatory
Hornsby Bend Bird Observatory is a hidden gem for bird enthusiasts in southeast Austin, Texas. This 1,200-acre site, part of the Austin Water Utility's Center for Environmental Research, is home to the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant. Despite its industrial purpose, the area is renowned for its biodiversity, attracting birders from near and far. The observatory offers a unique blend of habitats, including ponds, wooded areas, agricultural fields, and 3.
Nature·Harris County
Houston's Bayou System
Houston is drained by roughly 2,500 miles of bayous, creeks and channels, and the defining fact about them is how little they fall — Buffalo Bayou drops on the order of a foot per mile on its way to the ship channel, so the water moves slowly and the tide is felt well inland. That flatness is why the bayous meander so extravagantly across a city built on them, and why heavy rain has nowhere to go quickly.
Nature·Harris County
Houston's Monk Parakeets
The loud green parrots around here are monk parakeets, native to subtropical South America and living wild in Houston because of the pet trade — birds escaped or released in the 1960s and 70s found the climate close enough to home. They are the only parrot that builds a stick nest rather than using a cavity, and they build enormous communal ones, which is why the colonies end up on stadium light towers and electrical substations. Utilities remove the nests regularly; the birds rebuild.
Nature·El Paso County
Hueco Tanks
Three low hills of syenite — magma that cooled underground about 34 million years ago and was later exposed — hold natural rock basins that trap rainwater in the desert. Those basins, the huecos, made this a reliable water source in country with almost none, and people have stopped here for at least 10,000 years. The site holds several thousand pictographs, including the largest concentration of painted masks in North America, left mainly by the Jornada Mogollon between roughly 450 and 1400 CE.
Nature·Galveston County
Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtles
The rarest sea turtle in the world nests almost entirely on a single stretch of Mexican coast, and in 1985 the count of nesting females fell to a few hundred. Part of the recovery ran through Galveston: a federal laboratory here has raised Kemp's ridley hatchlings through their most vulnerable first year for decades, and turtles now nest on Texas beaches again in numbers that were unimaginable in the 1980s.
History·Kinney County
Las Moras Springs
One of the largest springs in Texas rises here at the edge of the Edwards Plateau and forms Las Moras Creek. The flow is what put a fort here — the U.S. Army established Fort Clark at the spring in 1852, and it stayed in service through 1946, including as the base for the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. The spring pool is still used for swimming and the discharge has dropped substantially as regional pumping has increased.
Nature·Austin County
Mill Creek and the Sand Hills
The low sandy rises here are old river deposits, not hills in any structural sense — the streams draining this stretch have cut down through layers of sand and clay laid along successive Gulf shorelines, leaving the more resistant sand standing as gentle ridges. Where the sand is deepest the vegetation changes noticeably: post oak and bluejack oak on the rises, with a dense understory of yaupon, and hardwood bottom along the creeks.
Nature·Colorado County
Native Pecans
The pecan is the state tree of Texas and it is native to exactly this ground — river bottoms with deep, well-drained silt that floods occasionally and drains fast. Wild groves along the Colorado and the Brazos fed people here long before anyone planted an orchard, and the trees are long-lived enough that some standing now were mature before the first Anglo colonists arrived.
Nature·Travis County
Oak Wilt in the Live Oaks
The live oaks that give Oak Hill its name grow in dense groves, and in Central Texas a grove is usually one connected organism. Escarpment live oaks send out roots that graft onto their neighbours' roots, so water, sugars and disease all move freely between trees that look separate above ground. That is why oak wilt has been so destructive here.
Nature·Travis County
Onion Creek
Onion Creek drops over a set of hard limestone ledges here on its way to the Colorado, and the rock is the tell: this is Austin Chalk and the harder beds beneath it, the first limestone the highway has met since leaving the Hill Country side of the state. The creek drains off the Edwards Plateau and crosses the Balcones fault zone a few miles upstream, which is why a stream on the coastal plain is running over stone at all.
Nature·Kleberg County
Padre Island
At about 113 miles, this is the longest undeveloped barrier island in the world. It is a young landform — built by waves and longshore currents over the last few thousand years — and it is still moving, migrating landward as sea level rises and being cut through and resealed by storms. The shallow lagoon behind it, the Laguna Madre, is one of only about six hypersaline lagoons on earth, saltier than the Gulf because it is barely flushed and evaporates hard.
Nature·Randall County
Palo Duro Canyon
The second largest canyon in the United States opens with no warning in ground that looks flat to the horizon — about 120 miles long, up to 20 miles wide, and around 800 feet deep. The Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River cut it, and the walls run through roughly 250 million years of rock: bright red Permian mudstone at the base, then Triassic sandstone, then the caliche caprock at the rim.
Transport·Val Verde County
Pecos River High Bridge
The bridge crosses about 273 feet above the water, which makes it the highest highway bridge in Texas. The Pecos has cut a slot canyon into the limestone here on its last few miles before joining the Rio Grande, and the depth is the reason the crossing mattered — the Southern Pacific built a viaduct just downstream in 1892 that was the highest bridge in North America at the time.
Nature·Waller County
Rice Fields and the Geese That Followed
Rice growing on the coastal prairie accidentally replaced the wetland it displaced. Flooded fields and waste grain turned out to suit wintering waterfowl well enough that snow geese and white-fronted geese shifted their wintering grounds inland onto the rice belt through the twentieth century, arriving in numbers the natural prairie had probably never supported.
Nature·Brewster County
Santa Elena Canyon
The Rio Grande enters a limestone wall here and comes out the other side 8 miles later having cut a slot up to 1,500 feet deep and in places barely 30 feet wide. The rock is the same Cretaceous limestone that forms the Edwards Plateau, lifted here into the Mesa de Anguila block along a fault; the river was already running its course when the block began to rise, and it cut down as fast as the land came up rather than being diverted around it. The far wall is Mexico.
Nature·Harris County
Sheldon Lake
This lake was dug for a war. It was built in 1942 to supply water to the Houston Ship Channel plants making synthetic rubber and steel, and when the industrial need passed it was handed over and allowed to go wild. It is now a state park with a substantial alligator population, and the old rice-field levees inside it are being reworked back into coastal prairie and wetland — a piece of 1940s war infrastructure quietly turning into habitat.
Nature·Pecos County
Sierra Madera Astrobleme
The isolated hills south of Fort Stockton are the scar of an impact less than 100 million years ago. What stands here is not the crater — that eroded away long ago — but the central uplift, the rebound peak that rose in the seconds after the strike, where rock from thousands of feet down was driven upward and left standing about 800 feet above the flat. Shatter cones and shocked quartz confirm the origin, and the original crater is estimated at around 8 miles across.
Nature·Colorado County
Spanish Moss at Its Western Edge
The gray strands hanging from these bottomland oaks are Spanish moss, which is neither Spanish nor a moss — it is a bromeliad, a relative of the pineapple, and it takes no water or nutrients from the tree it hangs on. It has no roots at all and absorbs everything it needs from rain and humid air, which is precisely why it stops around here: a few counties west the air is simply too dry to keep it alive.
Nature·Harris County
Spring Creek Cypress
The big trees standing in the water along this creek are bald cypress, and they are doing structural work. Cypress root directly in the streambed, tolerate months of flooding, and their trunks and knees slow floodwater and trap sand, which is part of why Spring Creek still runs over clean sandbars instead of scouring to bare clay. It is deciduous despite being a conifer — the needles turn rust orange and drop every winter, which is where the bald in the name comes from.
Nature·Colorado County
The Armadillo's March North
The nine-banded armadillo is not an old Texan. It crossed the Rio Grande in the 1800s and has been expanding north and east ever since — through Texas, across the South, and now into Nebraska and Illinois — one of the fastest range expansions of any American mammal. What limits it is cold: it cannot hibernate, stores very little fat, and lives on insects it digs out of soft ground, so hard freezes stop it.
Nature·Lee County
The Austin Chalk
The white rock in the roadcuts around here is chalk — the compacted remains of microscopic algae that settled on the floor of a shallow sea about 85 million years ago, the same kind of deposit as the cliffs at Dover. It is soft enough to cut with a hand saw, which is why so many 19th-century Central Texas buildings are made of it, and it is naturally fractured, which is why the Giddings field pulled hundreds of millions of barrels out of it starting in the 1970s.
Nature·Travis County
The Balcones Fault Zone
This is the seam where Texas changes. A belt of faults, active roughly 15 to 20 million years ago, dropped the Gulf Coastal Plain down against the Edwards Plateau, and almost everything follows the line: the hills start on one side and the blackland begins on the other, the springs emerge along it, and the road pattern, the soil, the rainfall and the vegetation all shift within a few miles.
Nature·Bastrop County
The Bastrop Fire and the Pines Coming Back
In September 2011, at the end of the worst single-year drought in Texas history and with a tropical storm's winds behind it, fire burned about 34,000 acres of this pine forest and more than 1,600 homes — the most destructive wildfire the state has recorded. Loblolly pine does not resprout from its roots the way many oaks do, so a stand that burns that hot comes back only from seed, and the seed source burned with it.
Nature·Hardin County
The Big Thicket
Four North American biological zones overlap here — southeastern swamp, eastern hardwood forest, central plains and southwestern desert — which is why a stand of cypress, an arid sandhill and a carnivorous-plant bog can sit within a mile of each other. Four of the five carnivorous plant types found in North America grow in the Thicket. It was named a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1981, and it survived as wild country largely because the ground was too wet, too tangled and too poor to farm.
Nature·Bell County
The Blackland Prairie
The soil here is a deep, dark clay that swells when wet and cracks open when dry, sometimes to a depth of several feet — a vertisol, weathered out of the soft Cretaceous marl and chalk underneath. It grew a tallgrass prairie of little bluestem and Indiangrass that ran in a belt from San Antonio to the Red River, and because the soil was extraordinarily fertile, essentially all of it was plowed.
Nature·Blanco County
The Blanco River at Blanco
The Blanco River rises in Kendall County and runs about eighty-seven miles east to the San Marcos River, and this crossing is near the top of it. Most of the time it is a modest, clear stream over limestone ledges, held just downstream in the long pool at Blanco State Park behind a set of small dams that a Civilian Conservation Corps company built in 1933 and 1934 and that are still in use.
Nature·Fayette County
The Bluff at Monument Hill
The ground drops away sharply here where the Colorado has undercut a bluff a couple of hundred feet above the river — a rare piece of relief in country that is otherwise long, low rises. The exposure is sandstone and clay of the Eocene, laid down some 40 million years ago when the shoreline of the Gulf stood far inland of where it is now, and the whole belt of similar rock runs northeast across the state parallel to the coast.
Nature·Comal County
The Bracken Bat Column
Bracken Cave, in a hillside in southern Comal County, holds the largest concentration of mammals anywhere on earth. Up to twenty million Mexican free-tailed bats use it as a maternity roost through the summer, almost all of them females and their single pups. On a July evening the emergence begins around dusk and continues for hours.