uman access to nature and trapping wildlife the next time the Rio Grande floods.
“Pretty much all of the same species in the Santa Ana refuge will be affected in these other tracts of land where the wall will go,” said Kersten.
On Thursday, the administration announced it will waive 28 federal laws to begin construction on 17 miles of new wall segments in the region as soon as February. So what do we know about the wall and how bad it will be for the environment? Let’s break it down.
The spending bill saved a prized national wildlife refuge
When you trace the 2,000-mile border from west to east (as this Story Map project by Krista Schlyer did), you find shrinking pockets of remarkable biological abundance. At the far west is the Tijuana Estuary, a key salt marsh habitat for some 400 species of migrating birds. At the far east, birds and butterflies stop through the Rio Grande Valley, which is also a permanent home for mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, including the endangered ocelot, that depend on the specific subtropical ecosystem to survive.
As Norma Fowler, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and co-authors write in the April issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Environment, much of the remaining natural habitat in the border region of Texas happens to be on federal lands, which means that the Department of Homeland Security can commandeer it in the name of national security if it chooses. And thanks to the Real ID Act of 2005, DHS also has the power the power to waive most environmental reviews when it wants to build border walls.
Over the years, as DHS has built 654 miles of barriers and wall on the border, it has sliced and diced land set aside for shrinking populations of wildlife.
In the Rio Grande Valley, the 70 miles of existing wall go through the Nature Conservancy’s Southmost Preserve, several state Wildlife Management Areas, sections of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuges, and Audubon’s Sabal Palm Sanctuary, Audubon magazine has reported. And natural areas continue to be at risk of border walls being built across them.
So it’s no surprise that when DHS signaled in 2017 it was eyeing the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, Texas, for 3 miles of new wall, environmental groups went on defense. Over the past several months, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Wildlife Corridor lobbied and held protests over the significant harm this wall would bring to the wildlife and overall ecology in the refuge.
The Fish and Wildlife Service calls Santa Ana the “crown jewel” of its 560 refuges in the US.
What a visit to the refuge revealed about how sensitive wildlife is to construction
In March, my colleague Christophe Haubursin and I went down to see for ourselves. Our arrival coincided with the very end of winter, which meant we got to see many birds on the move. Santa Ana is located at an east-west and north-south confluence of two major migratory routes of birds flying from as far north as Canada to as far south as Central America. It’s also the northernmost point for birds whose range extends all the way into South America, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson told me.
The abundant berries, insects, and wetlands in the refuge attract around 400 regular bird residents. And more than 500 of the 1,000 bird species known to inhabit the United States have been sighted there. “Its unique geography means birders who go there get the best of all worlds,” Steve Holmer, vice president of policy at the American Bird Conservancy, told me. “It’s a special, special place.”
And it’s not just the birds that make it special — rare plants and reptiles like the endangered indigo snake can find safe harbor in the refuge too. (The Rio Grande Valley region is native habitat for the endangered ocelot cat, and there are about 50 left in the entire US. Most are in the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge; the last official sighting of one in the Santa Ana refuge was in 1992.)
Though most birds could theoretically fly over a wall, the big concern is that the wall wo