Texas City Prairie Preserve

Texas City Prairie Preserve
Location	Moses Lake, Texas, United States
Nearest city	Texas City
Coordinates	29°27′N 94°57′W / 29.450°N 94.950°W / 29.450; -94.950Coordinates: 29°27′N 94°57′W / 29.450°N 94.950°W / 29.450; -94.950
Governing body	Nature Conservancy

The Texas City Prairie Preserve is a 2,300-acre (9.3 km²) nature preserve located on the shores of Moses Lake and Galveston Bay in Texas City, Texas in the United States, near Houston. The preserve was created in 1995 by the Nature Conservancy thanks to a $2.2 million donation of land by ExxonMobil.^[1][2] The primary goal in creating the preserve was to save the endangered Attwater's Prairie Chicken species, though the preserve supports a wide variety of wildlife.^[1]

The terrain of the preserve includes prairie and wetland habitats, enabled in large part by restoration efforts in recent decades.^[1] The preserve includes 40 acres (0.16 km²) of public access areas including camp sites. The remainder of the preserve is available for tours including boardwalk access through the marshes.^[3]

The preserve is part of the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, a network of preserves and trails along the Texas coast featuring habitats for birds and other wildlife.

Controversy

1999 the Nature Conservancy commissioned an oil and gas operator to set up a new gas well inside the preserve. The location was "the closest to where the prairie chickens normally hung out, or normally boomed."

In 2010 a paper was presented at a Society of Petroleum Engineers conference stating that the original well "died in March 2003, and was unable to flow due to excessive water pollution." As new well was drilled in the same area in late 2007, the new well was for oil and the original was for nature gas.

There are no more Attwater's Prairie Chicken on the land as of 2012.

Notes

References

Bibliography

• Klein, Naomi (2014). This Changes Everything. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster ISBN 978-1-4516-9738-4

External links

• Gulf Coast Bird Observatory: Texas City Prairie Preserve
• Nature Conservancy: Texas City Prairie Preserve

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