Saltwater Country
Saltwater Country: Bringing Wild Buffalo Back to the Beach
Bringing the journey home to completion, to the place of original conception where the prairie meets the sea, there needs to be a reintroduction of wild buffalo, pronghorn antelope, and maybe even critically endangered red wolves back to the few Texas reserves of long-grass coastal prairie left. Excellent, sizeable places to begin are Padre Island National Seashore, Aransas National Wildlife Refuge/Matagorda Island Complex, Anahuac/McFaddin National Wildlife Refuges, and Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. Restoring and rewilding these and other areas can offer Green Collar jobs, education opportunities, renewed health, and deeper ecological belonging for people of all colors, cultures and communities. Houston and the other coastal cities and towns can lead here.
“The last naturally occurring population utilised the coastal prairie marshes of south- west Louisiana and south-east Texas (Carley 1975; Shaw 1975).”
The last red wolves in the wild were all taken from coastal Texas in the 1970s, placed into a captive breeding program, with some eventually released into North Carolina. There is still plenty of room for them on the Upper Texas Gulf Coast, but not a single one lives in the coastal prairie anymore.
