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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 …
- 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…
- 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 zon…
- 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 …
- 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, a…
- 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…
- 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 un…
- 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 wa…
- 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…
- 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 t…
- 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…
- 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 rang…
- 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 u…
- 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 …
- 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 i…
- 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 un…
- 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 ce…
- 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 …
- 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 flo…
- 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 internat…
- 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 th…
- 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 t…
- 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 th…
- 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…
- 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 Galvesto…
- 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 18…
- 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 shorelin…
- 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 t…
- 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 ha…
- 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 movin…
- 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 Tow…
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 limest…
- 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 allow…
- 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 reboun…
- 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 …
- 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 kne…
- 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 Illi…
- 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 …
- 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 li…
- 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 home…
- 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 carniv…
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Transport·McLennan County
The Brazos at Waco
The Brazos is the longest river entirely within Texas at about 840 miles, and this crossing is why Waco is here. The suspension bridge just upstream opened in 1870 with a single span of 475 feet — the…
- Nature·Austin County
The Brazos Bottom at San Felipe
The Brazos carries more water than any other river wholly inside Texas, and it has spent the last several thousand years swinging back and forth across this floodplain rather than staying put. The res…
- Nature·Lubbock County
The Caprock Escarpment
The flat plain west of here ends in a wall a few hundred feet high running some 200 miles north to south, and the thing holding it up is a layer of caliche — calcium carbonate precipitated out of grou…
- Nature·Harris County
The Cattle Egret's Arrival
The white birds standing among cattle in these fields are cattle egrets, and unlike almost every other bird here they arrived on their own. The species is native to Africa, crossed the Atlantic to Sou…
- Nature·Brewster County
The Chisos Mountains
The only mountain range entirely contained within a U.S. national park, and the southernmost range in the continental United States. The peaks are volcanic — lava flows, ash falls and intrusions from …