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- MARK KRAMER: Places like this are living museums.
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They're places where we have collections
of the original historic diversity of life.
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And really, as coastal residents that's what we have,
is an abundance of diversity.
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We don't really have topographical features
like the Grand Canyon here.
We don't have iconic species like the Redwood forest,
but what we have around us right here is a richness of life
that is really hard to duplicate anywhere else.
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So not unusual for me on a morning paddle
to be able to go out and see American alligators,
river otters, brown pelicans,
and bald eagles.
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Increasingly, it's difficult for us to find any place
in Harris County where we can look back
at what the land looked like
before humans so dramatically altered it.
[gentle music]
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[latch clanks]
Welcome to Armand Bayou.
Glad to have you guys on the boat today.
My name's Mark Kramer, I'm the Conservation Director
and Chief Naturalist here at Armand Bayou Nature Center.
Armand Bayou is the most beautifully preserved bayou
left in the Bayou City.
So by definition, bayous are short coastal streams.
Most of us growing up in Houston area
are only familiar with the way bayous have been altered.
They haven't really been exposed to what the historic nature,
what a bayou would've originally looked like.
Once you come here and have a little bit
of background understanding that this bayou
is the way those bayous looked
before they were so dramatically altered,
then it begins to make more sense.
If we could go back in time
and we could visit the Houston area
right at the beginnings of the formation of Houston,
it would be a stark dramatic contrast to what we see today.
Houston, primarily, was composed of the waterways,
but also, those bayous were surrounded
by these forested areas that line the edges of the bayou.
But the great expanse of the area
was actually coastal prairie, grasslands.
Many hundreds of thousands of prairie wetlands,
forested wetlands would've died at the landscape
and worked very much like a sponge.
So when the rain would fall on the landscape,
they would hold the water
and then slowly release it back into the bayou.
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Well, Houston began to grow pretty significantly.
30s, 40s, 50s, business, industry,
many, many hundreds of thousands of people
began to move to the Houston area.
And as they did, many of those ecosystem services
that the prairies and forested wetlands had were removed.
Those wetland sponge effects were replaced
by rooftops, roadways, parking lots.
Those are impermeable surfaces.
So when it rains, those rainwaters hit the
roofs and roads and they're quickly ushered into the bayou.
One of the things that occurred
were more frequent flooding events.
So for a number of decades,
the primary tool that we use to mitigate those flood events
was the process of channelization.
The process of straightening, widening, deepening,
and on occasion, even lining the streambed
of the bayou with concrete.
Bayous were treated exclusively as conduits of water,
as ditches, and that their only real value
was to try to keep water out of our homes
by moving it out as quickly as possible.
So when you look at that,
you don't see a productive,
beautifully diverse ecosystem.
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[light music]
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- SUSAN CHADWICK: I grew up on the bayou.
We used to play on the sandy banks,
but I never actually paddled down it
until I came back in about 2014.
Was probably my first trip all the way down.
And I just thought,
"There's no way I'm gonna
let them kill this river."
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- You know, right here you've got examples
of human attempts to control the bank and erosion.
You can see this sheet pile wall that's tilted over
and you've got these concrete interlocking blocks
that are collapsing and breaking apart.
But what you see quite a bit of is just this random
sort of dumping of chunks of concrete.
You see that all over the place.
- SUSAN: We try to educate people about the danger
and the folly of cutting down the trees
and removing the vegetation
because it just destabilizes the bank
and removes wildlife habitats
and they're just gonna have a lot of problems.
[gentle music]
So all of this used to be forested.
We talk about the riparian forest that used to exist.
This was all --
it was called River Oaks for a reason.
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- Now it's interesting, this little section right here
has been left natural and there're a bunch of cottonwoods
and sycamores and willows that are coming up.
And I don't really see any issues, any erosion problems.
Vegetation absorbs so much more water
and stabilizes the soil so much better
than any engineering solution.
[gentle music]
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- SUZANNE SIMPSON: Houston is the Bayou City.
Bayous are a huge reason as to why Houston was founded
in the first place.
We are not able to separate ourselves from bayous.
We have to stop viewing bayous as our adversary
and start embracing them as our ally.
[upbeat music]
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The main way that Bayou Land Conservancy
protects habitat
is through conservation easements
and conservation easements are a voluntary agreement
that says this land is going to remain natural forever.
And by conserving the flood plains of Houston,
we're making sure that these habitats
that need to be flooded are flooding
and not someone's home.
[gentle music]
The wetland loss of Houston has been described
as death by a thousand cuts
'cause its these little projects that have, over time,
taken away our wetland ecosystems.
Preserving places like this
and restoring places along our bayou systems,
we can turn death by a thousand cuts
into life by a thousand pieces.
[gentle music]
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- KELLI ONDRACEK: Clean water, clean air, wildlife habitat,
erosion control,
urban heat island effect,
preventing flooding.
An ecosystem service is a service that nature provides.
You know, all the benefits that are not given a value,
that people take for granted because, you know,
they're not told about them
but they're benefiting from them.
And when you lose them,
then that's when you notice that they're gone.
The development of Houston is spreading.
And so I think it's important that we focus
on these areas that we can create habitat.
Parks is a really good, easy first start.
We did the restoration at Milby Park,
which we put in over 2,000 trees along the bayou.
We've just decided to create
our riparian restoration initiative
where we're targeting every park that's adjacent
to a bayou to create a riparian buffer.
[gentle upbeat music]
There's unlimited possibilities for restoration
in some of these parks.
And one thing that I've noticed is that some of,
even these smaller areas like Milby Park,
are very concentrated with wildlife,
where you go to some of these larger refuges
and have to, you know, actively look for wildlife.
You go to a city park and it's right there.
[gentle music]
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- There are hundreds of species that live
along the bayou systems.
And one of the most interesting ones, in my opinion,
are the Mexican free-tailed bats.
So probably the most famous bat colony in the Houston area
is the one that lives in Waugh Drive Bridge.
And we have close to 300,000 Mexican free-tailed bats
living in the bridge.
They live in the crevices.
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They provide a whole food web that goes around that colony.
So you have bats that are providing food
for a lot of different species,
such as hawks, owls,
peregrine falcons, snakes, herons,
and then you also have turtles, fish,
things like that, that live in the water
of the bayou down below.
And they're eating bats and bat guano and things like that.
And then you have the bats that leave the bridge every night
and they go out and eat the insects.
They're helping humans by being insect pest control
at night.
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They're also a nature tourism opportunity for people.
So people can come down,
spend the evening watching the bats,
enjoying being down by the bayou,
watching all the different wildlife species interact.
So it's a economic moneymaker for Houston.
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The challenge in urban planning is to consider the needs
of both humans and wildlife.
And the fact that we have to share the space.
- MARK: As a native Houstonian,
I believe that bayous really don't get
the respect they deserve.
But I think our identity is changing
as the decades go on.
We now identify ourselves as being Bayou City.
We now are beginning to improve
and enhance bayous both ecologically and recreationally.
- KELLI: And I just think that there is a need
to create this nature-based infrastructure,
which has not been focused on before.
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- TOM: If you look at what we've got here,
we've got this wild, natural spot
right in the middle of town,
and it's our local waterway
that's our connection to the natural world.
It's worth caring about.
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- SUZANNE: We are just scratching the surface
of what urban and wild land interfaces are able to provide.
And it really is eye-opening to see
what can coexist with us in a cityscape.
- DIANA: And I think in the long run,
we have a choice to make.
Do we work with nature to make things better,
or do we still travel down the same path we've been doing?
We have an opportunity to find a better balance
that benefits both people and wildlife.
[gentle music]