Natural Features in Travis County
Texas·6 places
Nature
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.
Nature
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
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.
Nature
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
The Colorado Enters Austin
The river arrives here having just left the Hill Country, and the change is abrupt: a few miles upstream it runs in a limestone canyon, and here it is on the coastal plain in a wide, flat valley. That break is the Balcones fault zone, and the city grew along it.
Nature
Where Slaughter Creek Sinks
US 290 crosses Slaughter Creek here, and for most of the year there is nothing under the bridge. That is not drought. It is the creek doing its job. A short way upstream Slaughter Creek runs onto the outcrop of the Edwards limestone, and from that line downstream its bed is perforated with sinkholes, solution cavities and open fractures that take the flow underground.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
