Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Wildlife Restoration Program

Some say you can smell a resaca long before you see it. The peculiar perfume of decaying vegetation often fills the airspace of these marshy wetlands that snake along the border, defining the floodplain of the Rio Grande.

When we filled the resaca with water, then we had a lot of plant life that started to rot away a little bit. So right then, there were some stronger smells. Most of those have dissipated into the atmosphere.

Katherine Miller is a natural resource specialist at Resaca de la Palma State Park—the newest park in the system—north of Brownsville.

What we have here is a resaca that curves through the park. And the way that was originally created was that when the Rio Grande would flood, it would get these oxbow lakes. And this resaca has been dry since the seventies. And Texas Parks and Wildlife acquired the land and we started putting water in it this summer.

The addition of water has attracted wildlife. The park encompasses 17-hundred acres of intact Tamaulipan thorn scrub.

And we also have other habitat. We have hackberry. We have anacua ebony type of woodlands. And we have some revegetated grassland as well. So we have a variety of different habitats the birds and the other wildlife can use.

Resaca de la Palma State Park, part of the World Birding Center, has its grand opening December 6. Tomorrow, we learn about the wildlife at the park.

That’s our show… with support from the Wildlife Restoration Program… providing funding for wetland conservation through the Private Lands Enhancement Program. For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

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