Padre Island National Seashore - Texas (November 2021)
Padre Island, off the coast of Texas, is the longest barrier island in the world. It stretches 113 miles, north and south, from Corpus Christi in the north (the upper end of the island is a district in the mainland city of Corpus Christi) to the community of South Padre Island, near the mainland city of Port Isabel, in the south. It is bordered on the east by the Gulf of Mexico and on the west by the Laguna Madre. It is the second largest island by land area in the contiguous U.S., after Long Island in New York.
A barrier island is an island formed by wave and tidal action parallel to a mainland coast and consists of flat and/or lumpy areas of sand. Other barrier islands I've personally visited in the U.S. are Galveston Island in Texas, Sanibel Island and Miami Beach in Florida and Jones Beach Island off Long Island in New York.
Padre Island was split into two islands, that have become known as South Padre Island and North Padre Island, in 1957 by the Port Mansfield Channel, a privately built channel, 30 miles north of the south end of the island. The channel was destroyed later that year and then built again by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1962 to its present state. The channel permits tidal exchange with the Laguna Madre, the inland water area, and provides ocean access to the fishing port of Port Mansfield. The man-made Packery Channel, which separates North Padre Island from Mustang Island to the north, is just one of several channels that replaced the natural and much larger Corpus Christi Pass that silted up and was closed by the 1940s.
South Padre Island, which I visited in September 2019, is becoming quite commercial and a beach destination. North Padre Island, which we visited over Thanksgiving weekend in November 2021, is mostly preserved in its natural state as part of Padre Island National Seashore ("PINS"). PINS extends for 70 miles and has 65.5 miles of gulf beach. There are paved roads from the entrance down to Malaquite Campground and Visitor Center, into Bird Island Basin, and to North Beach. Below Malaquite Visitor Center it is possible to drive on the beach for about five miles without four-wheel drive. Beyond that, you can continue by vehicle, but four-while drive is strongly recommended. More than 380 species of bird have been seen on PINS and it is also an important nesting ground for the critically endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle.
We visited on a cold, rainy Thanksgiving Day, early in the morning. We encountered a Texas white-tailed deer just inside PINS and continued past Malaquite Visitor Center down to the seashore and drove along it. We drove back, drove into Bird Island Basin, then drove north to Port Aransas on Mustang Island. Then we drove back to PINS and drove all five miles of the beach down to the five mile marker and back.
We saw Texas white-tailed deer; royal terns; a sandwich tern; Forster's terns; Caspian terns; black-bellied plovers; brown pelicans; double-crested cormorants; great blue herons; laughing gulls; ring-billed gulls; willets; long-billed curlews; red knots; ruddy turnstones; sanderlings; a California gull; a great egret; American white pelicans; and a crested caracara.
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