What I’ve Learned About Port Aransas

 Hurricane Harvey Came Calling Here
Port Aransas, on Mustang Island, has a commercial road, a state highway, in the middle of the island that is lined with strip malls and restaurants and big beach shops with eye-catching decorations like a giant shark, a lighthouse, and two large wooden statues of sea captain. East of that road, toward the gulf, there are many, many little enclaves of beach houses and near-beach houses, condo buildings, and a few hotels and resorts. West of the main road, there’s a lot of wetlands and right across from where we are, there is an airport. But there’s also a whole lot of empty spaces.

You enter this store through the belly of the beast

We're gonna need a bigger boat!

Lighting the way to t-shirts and boogie boards    

So I was interested in finding something out about the history of the town and the island, and I discovered that it was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017—not that long ago—and that most of the old town that had survived Hurricane Celia in 1970 had been battered by Harvey’s winds and a six-foot storm surge that swept the island. So most of what we’ve seen here is fairly new, built after Harvey’s devastation. I think that explains the wide bike and walking paths along the major roads, for one thing. There’s a big park at the north end of the island, too; that seems to be where the fishing village once was.

And there’s construction still going on in many places on the island, not to mention a lot of empty lots for sale. Considering Hurricane Harvey hit only a little over seven years ago, it’s kind of amazing how much has been built back already.

Kemps Ridley Sea Turtles
Port Aransas and the barrier islands here are home to one of the most endangered ocean species, the Kemps Ridley sea turtles. They are also the smallest of the turtles that live in the ocean, but they only turn up on the beaches in the summer when they come to lay their eggs; we are unlikely to see them in December or January. On the other hand, birds are plentiful in the winter here, and besides the common species, there are some very interesting ones.

Roseate Spoonbills and Other Avian Species
We were driving up into town the other day when we saw a whole flock of pink birds. Are they flamingos? we wondered. But no, a quick check of Google told us what we had seen were roseate spoonbills, the city bird of Port Aransas. It’s a wading bird and is related to the ibises we saw in New Orleans. Turns out they are pink for the same reason flamingos are pink—they eat a lot of shrimp.

A flock of roseate spoonbills flying over the airport

On our way from Houston to Port Aransas, we passed through the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the mainland. Turns out, that is one of the best places to see endangered whooping cranes. I may need to go back there to see if we can spot any; we are supposed to head up that way to get some new tires for the van sometime in January anyway. I love the huge flocks of sandhill cranes that winter up on Brookville Lake in Indiana, hollering and swooping at dusk, but whooping cranes—man, that would be something to see. Like the sandhill cranes in Indiana, they migrate south from Canada in the winter (and if you believe Tom Robbins and Only Cowgirls Get the Blues, make a stop in North Dakota on the way). But the best time to see them here in Texas is December through March so I think I have a chance.  They are the tallest birds in North America—some are over 5 feet high. That is a lot of bird. I hope we have a chance to see a few of them in person. It would be quite a story to tell the Indiana cranes.

Port Aransas is on Mustang Island, due east of Corpus Christi; the
Aransas National Wildlife Refuge is on the mainland, north of the islands

Meanwhile, we visited the Leonabelle Turnbull Bird Sanctuary in the wetlands west of the town of Port Aransas, and though there were no cranes, there were lots of huge American white pelicans, as well as herons, egrets, ibises, ducks, and other water birds. A huge flock of the pelicans was hanging out on the shore opposite the viewing tower, and I remembered I had first seen them atop a dam in Oklahoma, and I was convinced they were whooping cranes. Nope, I was disabused of that notion by the lady at the park office, so it made me laugh to hear half the people on the tower saying the big birds were whooping cranes. I know better now, though  I still hope to see an actual whooping crane in one of the wildlife refuges around here sometime this month.

Big American white pelicans at the bird sanctuary

One more local bird observation: around here, the seagulls stay on the beach and don't cause much trouble, but man, the grackles will drive you crazy. They are a corvid--a crow-like black bird--and they hang out wherever they want, bold as brass. They do eat the nasty ants, so I appreciate that, but they are everywhere, looking in the windows and relieving themselves on the picnic tables, perching on the van and the camper, and otherwise being kind of pests. They have an interesting assortment of sounds, but all of them are also kind of annoying--they can sound like a penny whistle, a creaking door, or an unearthly screech. And they are as fearless as crows or ravens around humans. One is staring at me right now. I think he knows I'm writing about him. Agghhh.