[seagulls squawk]
[piano music]
- NARRATOR: It's an island by many names.
Bird Island by locals.
[waves crashing]
Sundown Island by some.
- This is in the top three of biggest, bestest
of the rookeries in Texas.
- CHESTER: I always liked birds.
It's fun to come out here and see what's going on.
- NARRATOR: But to those who ever met Chester Smith,
who dedicated his life to watching over these birds,
this is Chester Island.
[boat revving]
- This island used to be 100 acres.
Right now it's sitting at 65
and we're losing,
depending on which side of the island,
we lose as much as 30 feet during a year
because of storms,
because of ship wake,
and you can actually see a ship coming now.
[whirring]
[water lapping]
Over the last several years,
Sundown Island continues to erode away,
and that's bad news for these birds,
the birds that use this island every year to nest.
[gentle piano music]
- NARRATOR: Sundown came to be in 1962.
While building the Matagorda ship channel,
all the extra sand and sediment called dredge spoil
was molded into this island.
[birds squawk]
It turned into one of the best rookeries,
or bird nurseries,
along the Texas coast.
- For miles around, miles and miles around,
this is the only game in town.
All those birds that feed and live in that area
come to this one island,
and that's their nursery.
That's their home.
That's where they're making babies
and raising families.
[birds squawking]
- CHESTER: That's a pelican nest with only two eggs.
- NARRATOR: For 25 years Chester Smith worked for
the National Audubon Society as a watcher of sorts.
A caretaker for the birds.
- CHESTER: I have a lot of birds that are beautiful
when they're in their mating colors,
so one of my favorite is the reddish egret.
Reddish egret is on the threatened list.
[gentle music]
- NARRATOR: Chester passed away back in 2011
and left behind a thriving rookery island.
But it's now in need of some attention.
- Yeah, we like to come out and make sure,
kind of keep an eye on the erosion throughout the year.
We don't like to be out here during nesting season
so we keep that to a minimum.
This erosion is pretty substantial.
We're looking at about 15, 20 feet,
a cliff of about 15, 20 feet,
and just above that you've got birds nesting.
Next year this area may not be here anymore
to provide nesting habitat for those birds.
It shouldn't be like that.
[birds squawking]
Sundown Island hosts 18 species of colonial water birds.
That's everything from brown pelicans to laughing gulls.
[water lapping on shoreline]
More importantly, species of conservation concern
like black skimmer, reddish egret.
It's got white ibis.
[chirping]
It's impressive the diversity on this island
and that's why it's important for us to also
create diverse habitat on this island where we can.
[birds cawing]
You can see that in this area there's still some
bare ground spots which end up being great habitat
for terns.
[birds cawing]
Once it starts to get like these sunflowers on the perimeter,
it's too vegetated for those birds to use.
They like bare ground ideally.
That only happens when we get dredge spoil.
[waves crashing]
- NARRATOR: Who helps make sure Sundown
gets that much needed sand?
It's still in the family.
Chester's daughter Peggy and her husband Tim
now keep an eye on Sundown.
- Chester's footprints are pretty big.
It's really special to be able to come out
and walk the same trails that he walked for 25 years.
- CHESTER: There's some beautiful great egret chick.
You can tell they're great egrets
because they have a yellow beak and have green eyeshadow.
- TIM: I tell Peggy that you walk around the corner
and you can just imagine still Chester
coming around and meeting you there
and getting you to work on a project.
[whirring]
- NARRATOR: This latest project, a massive dredge is pumping
tons and tons of sand out to Sundown.
- DAVID STUDER: It's about 16,000 feet all together,
a discharge line from here to Sundown Island.
- NARRATOR: This is a win-win.
The dredge is here to maintain and deepen the ship channel,
while Sundown gets the sand.
[loud whirring]
- DAVID: The cutter's down on the bottom.
We're digging the material.
We're getting about 20,000 gallons a minute.
We pump water and sand mixed together.
[loud splashing]
- ANDREW: This material is looking really, really good.
Even with it being as wet as it is,
you can walk right out and stand on it
which is an indication of just fantastic dredge material.
- NARRATOR: Andrew Smith from the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers has been helping to replenish Sundown's shores
for decades.
- Come on, Chester, let's look at this pipe.
We've been able to use maintenance material
to come out and again start to renourish Sundown Island,
and this particular job is one where we're going to put
more material on Sundown
than we have in the last 10 years at least.
Everything looks great.
It's real easy to imagine here in a month or two
a lot of terns and other ground nesting birds
looking at all this and thinking that it looks really good.
- ANDREW: It's stacking.
We're building quite a bit of island.
The material is very firm,
even all the way to the water line.
I think it looks fantastic.
- NARRATOR: In a way it seems like Chester's still here.
- CHESTER: That is stacking up like I like it.
- Probably the bigger reason why we're standing
out in this part of the bay and on this island
is absolutely because of Chester
and his dedication to the island.
[acoustic guitar music]
There's no doubt that we want to do as much as we can
to preserve and protect this and enhance it.
[acoustic guitar music]
- CHESTER: Look at the plumes on that great egret.
Isn't that beautiful?
Those two there, look at there.
- NARRATOR: As for the birds that rely on Sundown,
it looks like Chester's vision is alive and well.
- TIM: I feel like his spirit is still here in a way.
- CHESTER: See that spoonbill on his nest now?
[honking]
- TIM: It is a special place to us beyond just the birds.
It's all that time that Chester invested
to make this a special place.
- ILIANA: It warms my heart to see this kind of work
because it's very easy to imagine him looking down on us
and thinking, "Y'all are doing great.
You're doing a great job."
It's a beautiful thing.
[acoustic guitar music]
- ANNOUNCER: This project was funded in part
by a grant from the Wildlife Restoration Program.