Each fall the coastal Texas ecosystem on Mitchell Island rolls out the welcome mat for the whooping crane. The endangered bird is one of the island’s favorite seasonal guests. In fact, you could say the 33-acre island and the cranes were meant for each other.
Before 1992 the island didn’t exist and the cranes’ winter habitat was being eroded by the lapping waves of Mesquite Bay. That’s when Devon took a potential obstacle that threatened to shut down an important gas well project and turned it into an opportunity to benefit cranes in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge near Corpus Christi, Texas.
To obtain access to a gas well operation in Mesquite Bay, the company was required to dredge a canal. That posed a problem. Engineers had to determine where to dispose of 130,000 cubic yards of bay-bottom sand and soil, a prospect that would require barges, trucks and millions of dollars.
That is the place where innovation intersected with necessity to form a solution that satisfied regulators, benefited the environment and saved money. Instead of barging the dredged material to a disposal site more than 13 miles away, Devon used it to build an island for the cranes. At the end of the project, the birds had a new island along the central Texas coast. Its amenities included protected levees to ward off erosion, a natural habitat complete with the undulating landscape cranes like best and a robust ecosystem teeming with life.
The island’s three phases of construction cost the company more than $2 million, but the savings were more than double that amount. The project was planned, constructed and closely monitored by state and federal environmental agencies. It was such a success, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers followed Devon’s lead and built two of its own islands several miles away.
The Mesquite Bay project is part of an ongoing effort to preserve the world’s only remaining wild flock of whooping cranes, which migrates between northwest Canada and south Texas each year.