Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge


	Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge
	Rt. 2 Box 202A Alamo, TX 78516 E-mail: Phone Number: 956-784-7500
	Visit the Refuge's Web Site: http://southwest.fws.gov/refuges/texas/santana.html

Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge
Step into a rare tropical world at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. Spanish moss drips from trees. Noisy chachalacas welcome the morning dawn. A malachite butterfly flits from the shadows. The wildlife clientele is truly international here along the most southern stretch of the Rio Grande.

Thanks to the foresight of those who succeeded in protecting the refuge in 1943, we can experience a natural world that has vanished from 95 percent of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Santa Ana NWR gleams like an inviting island in a sea of cleared and altered lands.

The designation of Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in 1979 set the wheels in motion for connecting the natural pieces left along the last 275 miles of the Rio Grande's journey.

Getting There . . .
Take Highway 83 to Alamo, turn south onto FM 907 for 7.5 miles. At Highway 281 (Old Military Highway) turn left and continue for about one quarter of a mile. The refuge is on the south side of the highway.

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You're entering the 2,088-acre home of nearly 400 bird species, half of all butterfly species found in North America, and such rarities as the indigo snake and endangered ocelot.

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Dreams and schemes gone awry forged the foundation for the present day refuge. Once traded for a fiddle and a new suit, this former Mexican land grant harbors as many stories as wildlife. The same land narrowly escaped a plan to form the keystone in a river development project on the scale of the Hudson River Valley.

In 1943, concerned about the loss of habitat, the federal government purchased the land grant for the protection of migratory birds.

Within the refuge, a 100-year-old hand-hewn ebony fence surrounds tombs and unmarked graves. Visitors today will sometimes find grave sites adorned with flowers from family members who come to the refuge to pay their respects to ancestors of 150 years past.

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Interpretation
Photography
Wildlife Observation
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Santa Ana NWR is located near the junction of four distinct climate zones (temperate, desert, coastal, and subtropical)which has led to unusually high biological diversity for such a small area. This diversity requires habitat management to ensure the diversity continues. Habitat management at Santa Ana NWR consists largely of water level manipulations, control of pest species, and removal of invasive plants.

Pest control efforts included removal of beaver, feral hogs and nutia as needed and spraying exotic grasses with herbacides. Tamarisk, Chinese tallow, and castor bean plants are among the plant species that the refuge staff are trying to control.

Controlled burning is another management tool that the refuge is using to reduce fire threats due to high forest fuels. The refuge has developed a plan to reduce the fuel in areas near Refuge boundaries where an ever increasing number of houses are being built.

Water manipulation in riparian forest areas are used to replicate historic patterns of flooding by the Rio Grande and the associated flood plain innundation and subsequent draw-down. Managed wetland areas receive water from the Rio Grande River, a canal adminsitered by the local irrigation district, and another irrigation canal whose leakage supplies a borrow ditch with water. Water is pumped from these water supplies as needed.