SWA’s landscape “intervention” for the Smith Oaks Sanctuary in High Island, TX, transforms a remote, post-industrial site into a more accessible birder’s paradise.
Central to the design is the introduction of Canopy Walk, a 213-meter-long, 5.4-meter-high boardwalk that elevates then threads visitors up into and through a canopy refuge long-known to the birding community as an important stopover for migratory birds.
Here remnants of the oil industry add industrial character to the Island’s distinct ecology and geology: a salt-dome that rises enough from the surface of an otherwise flat saltwater marshland to lift the flora and fauna into a layer of fresh water, protected from tides and storm surge.
While salt domes are common to Southeast Texas, this particular salt dome elevates the ground 9.7 meters above the surrounding coastline, supporting the growth of trees and rendering it a beacon for birds migrating up the Central and Mississippi Migratory corridors.
In the Canopy Walk project, landscape architects at SWA sought to tread lightly on the land, leveraging existing abandoned infrastructure, and distinguishing the remote Smith Oaks Sanctuary, which is one of four sanctuaries in and around High Island.
SWA’s design of the Canopy Walk boardwalk is supported by weathered steel pipes that speak to the site’s historic oil and gas infrastructure while also blending into the rich woodland habitat and iconic live oaks. It serves as a new backbone to experience the area, and makes the site more accessible to all nature enthusiasts.
The structure’s opening coincides with a surge in birding’s popularity, and a strong commitment from the Audubon Society to make the past-time, which is often characterized by slogging through muddy and mosquito-filled marshes, more approachable to the uninitiated or less mobile.
The Canopy Walk was designed to be robust enough to weather the harsh environment full of dense vegetation yet light enough on the land to retain its ecology, which includes a resident alligator population lurking within the island rookery waters.
The Canopy Walk also shelters visitors who can experience the birds as they take a break from their long migratory paths to nest and breed in High Island.
An elegant but inoperable concrete and brick pump house, leftover from an age of oil extraction in the 1930s, was designed by collaborating architects at SCHAUM/SHIEH to serve as a visitors’ pavilion. The cast-concrete ceiling and historic brick façade has been cleaned and exposed to reveal the history of the small-scale public infrastructure of this community, repurposed to this new center for visiting birders.