San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas coast near Brazoria is a very peaceful place. Birds fill the humid air with a chorus of songs. Overhead, hawks ride the breeze coming off the nearby Gulf waters. On the banks of the refuge’s ponds, alligators ignore the intrusion of human visitors.
Stephen F. Austin brought his colony of immigrants to the area around the mouth of the Brazos River in the 1820s. The virgin plains were thick with timber, marshes, and grassland and became known as “Austin’s Woods.” At one time, the tangled jungle covered 1,000 square miles of floodplain along the Brazos, San Bernard, and Colorado rivers.
You don’t have to drive far along the highways of the coastal plains to realize that less than 25% of the forest remains, replaced by farmers’ fields, malls, factories, and homes. At 34,000 acres, San Bernard is a thimble-sized portion of an ecosystem that once stretched 50 miles inland from the beaches.
Because of the loss of habitat along the coast, migratory birds and other wildlife tend to congregate in the last remnants of the bottomland forests and wetlands. It’s not uncommon to see 40,000 snow geese feeding at San Bernard during the winter. More than 300 kinds of birds have been spotted in the refuge along with bobcats, American alligators, and bald eagles.
“Halloween to Christmas is the best time to visit,” says Shane Kasson, refuge manager. Birds that spend the winter begin arriving in late September. “We’ll have good populations of birds that are just passing through early spring,” he says.
Open to the public daily from sunrise to sunset, San Bernard is the kind of place that you can spend an hour or hours. White caliche roads cut through the tall grass and thickets to environments that would otherwise be inaccessible to most visitors. The three-mile Moccasin Pond auto tour is like driving through an animal park with large numbers of ducks feeding in the brackish water among the reedy grass. A wildlife-viewing platform at one end of the pond is the perfect spot to let the animals come to you.
The park’s three hiking trails offer an assortment of access to wildlife-viewing areas. The Bobcat Woods Trail has a handicapped-accessible boardwalk that goes to a scenic overlook on Cocklebur Slough. Scissor-tail Trail goes about a mile into a mesquite thicket.
For hikers, the best place to see a variety of wildlife is the 1.5-mile Cowtrap Trail that follows an old road on a levee into the salt marshes. Kasson isn’t sure how the pond got its name. “It was probably when some rancher lost some cattle stuck in the mud back there. It gets really mucky around there,” he says. It is also a great place for crabs, mussels, and other wildlife-dining options.
Canoeists and kayakers can follow a water trail along Cedar Lake Creek. Kasson recommends going downstream from the refuge’s boat ramp toward the Intercoastal Waterway. Much of the wetlands are accessible only by boat.
“What is unique about San Bernard,” Kasson says, “is our variety of birds and habitat.” The land gently rises from the sandy beaches into the salt and freshwater marshes. The tall-grass prairie is occasionally interrupted by stands of trees draped in Spanish moss. The refuge is what the coastal plains used to look like.
San Bernard NWR is administered by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and named for the 120-mile-long San Bernard River that runs from New Ulm in Austin County to the Gulf of Mexico. The refuge is about an hour southwest of Houston and about 10 miles from Brazoria and Lake Jackson. There is an interpretive center, restrooms, and drinking water at the headquarters but no admission fee. For information, call 979/964-3639 or go to www.fws.gov/southwest/texas.html.
While you’re in the area, check out Dido’s Restaurant on the river upstream from the preserve. The owners are former shrimpers who are known for their preparation of seafood and steaks. There is even a paddle wheel boat that gives cruises from the restaurant’s dock to see the wildlife on the river. For hours and reservations, call 979/964-3167.
849th in a series. Day Trips, Vol. 2, a book of “Day Trips” 101-200, is available for $8.95, plus $3.05 for shipping, handling, and tax. Mail to: Day Trips, PO Box 33284, South Austin, TX 78704.
This article appears in October 5 • 2007.
