WARREN, Texas — I headed to the Big Thicket National Preserve on a mission: to find a bug-eating plant.
I envisioned a vast, mist-shrouded swamp surrounded by jaw-gnashing plants with blood trickling down their stems.
 PAMELA LEBLANC/Cox Newspapers Towering cypress trees thrive in the swamps of the Turkey Creek Unit of Big Thicket National Preserve. The preserve covers about 100,000 acres of swamp, forests, bogs and plains. For a larger, high resolution image, click HERE |
My vision was a little off. We saw a lot of swampland — but the trickling blood was caused mainly by the multitude of mosquitoes that feasted on every exposed morsel of human flesh (mine!) they could find. And the plants? More on that later.
The Big Thicket is a fascinating, bio-diverse place, worthy of exploration. But come prepared, with serious bug repellent.
Big Thicket, just north of Beaumont, covers about 100,000 acres in nine land parcels and six water corridors. (The preserve just added 6,000 acres in April.) It's not all connected, and some stretches are just narrow sleeves following the Neches River and Pine Island Bayou.
My running buddy Marcy Stellfox and I decided we'd focus on the Turkey Creek area, where the insect-munching plants are known to live.
The park is home to four of the five types of carnivorous plants that live in North America — sundews, pitcher plants, bladderworts and butterworts. Only the Venus fly trap, the star of "Little Shop of Horrors," doesn't call this sliver of the state home.
We stopped by the visitors' center to pick up maps and obtain a free backpacking permit.
We learned a lot about the area before we plunged in.
Native Americans once hunted here, but didn't often venture deep inside the thicket. In the 1800s, American settlers arrived, creating farms around its perimeter. During the Civil War, people burrowed deeper into the woods to avoid conscription.
The railroad arrived in 1876, and along with it lumbering. That, coupled with an oil strike around 1900, doomed this land. The Big Thicket that once covered 3.5 million acres has shrunk to less than 300,000 acres. A third of that is protected within the preserve, which was established in 1974.
The area has been called an American ark because of its incredible diversity of habitat and life — more than a thousand species of flowering plants and 85 species of trees, as well as snakes, mammals and birds. Swamps, forests, plains, deserts and bogs all can be found here.
Oil and gas development is still allowed, but only about 1 percent of the preserve's land is affected. New technologies allow companies to drill outside its boundaries to access deposits beneath the protected lands. That lessens the impact.
Still, in 2003, the National Parks Conservation Association designated the preserve one of America's Ten Most Endangered National Parks. In 2007, the American Rivers Association named the Neches River one of America's Most Endangered Rivers.
Fragmentation is the biggest issue now facing the preserve, says Leslie E. Dubey, resource education specialist at the preserve. Because the parcels are not contiguous, the plant and animal populations can't always interbreed. "That isolates species," Dubey says.
Land-use patterns are changing, too. Timber companies have put about 2 million acres in the area on the market since 2002. Some of the land has returned to timber production, but some has changed to ranching or development. "If you have timber company land, that's a better buffer than having parking lots and malls up to your boundaries," Dubey says.
With a little knowledge of the place tucked in our memories, Marcy and I drove a few miles down the road to the Kirby Nature Trail Loops. We swung on our backpacks and headed out onto the trail.
We should have dipped ourselves in DEET before our little excursion. Instead, we sprayed ourselves with some eco-friendly eucalyptus oil that was supposed to ward off biting bugs. We thought it smelled great. Apparently, so did the mosquitoes.
Perhaps all the twitching and contorting induced by the insects is what caused our next delay.
We got lost. On a nature trail.
Really, and I take full blame for this, we only got turned around for 30 minutes or so. But we needed to find a place to pitch our tent and get away from the bugs (by now we had dubbed the place The Big Skeeter Thicket) that were turning our hides into a landscape of red, itchy welts.
Visions of Bigfoot and the Creature from the Black Lagoon danced in my head as we finally trudged down the correct pine needle-covered trail. The paths were well maintained, with boardwalks over particularly swampy areas. I loved peering into the muckier parts, imagining that the cypress knees were tiny, caped people.
We hiked an hour and a half through a bramble patch before the undergrowth cleared enough that we could make camp — in a ghostly, partly toasted section that had been the site of a prescribed burn a year or so ago.
We enjoyed our meals of dehydrated pasta and zipped ourselves snug into our tent for a glorious hour or two of reading. Heaven!
Aside from some barking dogs (werewolves?) during the night, we awoke refreshed and, for the moment, not itchy. We hiked back to our car, then drove around to the north end of the Turkey Creek Unit, in search of the carnivorous plants.
Lucky for us, pitcher plants bloom in April and May, and a short walk down the Pitcher Plant Trail put us in the midst of a sea of them. They have slender, funnel-shaped, lime-green stalks about a foot and a half long, with red-veined throats and dainty little lids on top.
They're dotted with nectar glands that attract bugs. Once an insect climbs into the plant's funnel, long, downward-pointing hairs keep them from escaping. The trapped bugs eventually fall into a little puddle of digestive enzymes (like those in our bellies) at the base of the funnel. There, they slowly disintegrate until all that's left is a tough exoskeleton and wings. The rest gets absorbed into the plant.
We didn't see any of the plants in the process of eating bugs while we were there.
They looked pretty well-fed, though.
And a funny thing. The mosquitoes weren't as thick in this area. I think the plants ate them all.
Pamela LeBlanc writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: pleblanc(at)statesman.com.
