Native plants in the Rio Grande Valley are nothing if not tenacious.
Each one seems to have some type of thorn or sticker or tough skin designed to make it as difficult as possible to eat, or enabling it to fend off insects or to keep from being colonized by parasites.
But even our resilient and drought-resistant flora can use a helping hand.
A program at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge is attempting to do just that. The goal? Accelerating the complete restoration of native Tamaulipan thornscrub from 25 to 30 years to maybe half that time.
“Those tree protectors we call them – tree tubes or tree protectors — they do two major things to help the plant survive,” said Kim Wahl, a plant biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who is leading the restoration effort.
“Without them on, rodents and rabbits will chew them down until just little nubs,” Wahl said last week.
“They also protect against natural elements like sunlight, and the dew will condense inside the tube and run down the tube,” she added. “The humidity inside those tubes is higher, and the temperature is a little bit lower.”
The tubes also cut off some of the eternal Valley winds, and the plants end up with a better growth environment.
Re-establishing native habitat from what is now Rio GrandeValley farmland is both time and labor intensive. It was only 100 years ago, prior to the agricultural revolution that arrived with electricity, pumps and irrigation, when practically the entire Valley was covered in dense thornscrub.
Wahl said about 275 acres were replanted between October and March this year to restore Tamaulipan thornscrub in Cameron and Hidalgo counties. Most of that acreage was planted without the protection of the 3-foot tree tubes.
Among the species planted at Laguna Atascosa were snake eyes or devil queen, Texas torchwood, crucita or Christmas bush, trixis or American threefold, lantana, Berlandier croton and Manzanita, or Barbados cherry, Wahl said.
For her part, Wahl is less interested in overall restoration recovery time than she is in how animal and plant species adapt to the new habitat. She says wildlife can use the plots almost immediately after planting.
“I don’t know if we have a good idea of just how much time it will take” to completely restore the thornscrub habitat, Wahl said.
“But from the time we plant, it becomes useful right away for small mammals, rodents, pollinators like bees and butterflies that first year, and then to be useful for birds, it needs to start seed production or the trees get large enough for nesting,” she said.
“From there, you are beginning to be more beneficial for larger mammals and ultimately we’re looking at making these areas suitable habitat for ocelots,” Wahl said.
At any one time, there are about 15 of the endangered Texas subspecies of ocelot on the Laguna Atascosa refuge, and about 80 in South Texas. Restoration of habitat is considered a key component to saving the wildcats, which, unlike their bobcat cousins, can be quite particular when it comes to preferred habitat.
By RICK KELLEY | Staff Writer
