Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

Arrested development: along the remote South Texas Coast, you'll see no condos, few roads, and more wildlife than in any other region of the state.

Article Excerpt
A COUPLE OF PELICANS CIRCLE IN THE AIR OVER Baffin Bay as the roar of a Chevy 454 engine fills the morning. Bart Ballard, a research scientist at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, at Texas A&M-Kingsville, hands me a pair of noise-reducing earmuffs as I step aboard his airboat. Wrapped in a fleece sweater, a jacket, and a waterproof shell against the December chill, I am taking a tours led by Ballard and his boss, institute director Fred Bryant, of the coastline that surrounds Baffin Bay, the antler-shaped inlet off the Laguna Madre whose network of estuaries and mudflats reach deep into Kleberg mad Kenedy counties in South Texas. It's an area that Bryant calls "the last great habitat" in the state. [paragraph] Even with the sun beginning to rise over the water, the greatness of this region isn't immediately apparent. The Laguna Madre is flanked by an enormous coastal plain offering fewer topographical highlights than the Panhandle. What is stunning what you don't see. While fragmentation and urbanization rapidly envelop so many other parts of Texas, the south coast remains nearly untouched, an ecosystem home to more biological diversity than the Everglades. Baffin Bay is Ore heart of what has become the largest swath of undeveloped coastline in the contiguous United States. >From the new subdivisions north of Port Isabel to the southern outskirts of Corpus...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!