To appreciate why birders consider an obscure wildlife refuge on the Texas border to be the premier birding destination in America, you must walk its trails in solitude, either at dusk or at dawn, as the birds emerge from the forest looking for food.
Earlier this year, in March, I was alone on a path, deep in thought, when a plain chachalaca appeared suddenly in the moss-covered tree beside me. I froze as he dropped down into the scrub and the gray morning light revealed his handsome cascade of brown plumage. After a few tentative steps, I joined him in a slow procession, as he plucked insects from the soil and I considered the feast just 10 feet away.
Tiffany Kersten, an environmental activist who settled here in South Texas after working as a biologist in the refuge, lives for these surprise moments. “You go out and you never know what you’re going to see,” she told me as we watched ducks play in a lake. “Here in South Texas, every day you have the possibility that you’ll go out birding and you’ll see a bird that has never been seen in the United States before, that belongs in Mexico and got lost.”
In an unusual concession to the environment, Congress earlier in March exempted the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, a 2,088-acre patch of extraordinary biodiversity on the Rio Grande river, from the new sections of border wall it funded in the spending bill passed last week.
But it’s a slim victory for conservation because Congress also allocated $1.6 billion to build 33 miles of new barriers around the refuge in the Rio Grande Valley. These wall sections — a compromise to assuage President Donald Trump, who wants a wall across the entire border — are expected to disrupt several other protected parcels of land home to rare animals, plants, and birds, including the National Butterfly Center, a state park, and several other tracts in the federal wildlife refuge system.
The wall won’t just fragment the dwindling wildlife habitat on the border — they’ll also create around 6,500 acres of “no man’s land,” cutting off human 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