GALVESTON — Conservationists will be going door to door this winter battling to obliterate Chinese tallow and Brazilian pepper trees.
They hope the campaign will deliver a knockout punch to invasive trees hit hard by Hurricane Ike.
“Ike has given us this window of opportunity where we can take back the island,” Jim Stevenson, director of the Galveston Ornithological Society, said.
Volunteers from the Ornithological Society, the Galveston Chapter of the Houston Audubon Society, the Galveston Island Nature Tourism Council and Scenic Galveston will unite for the campaign.
In December, they will be knocking on doors along Ostermeyer Road, east of Galveston Island State Park, an area roughly between 8 Mile Road and Camino Real. They will ask landowners for permission to give lethal herbicide doses to the more than 350 tallow trees in the area.
“We have this window right now where if we can kill off enough of them, tallows won’t be a problem on the island for quite some time,” Stevenson said.
The volunteers also will mount a seek-and-destroy mission for Brazilian pepper trees found in the same area. Both the tallow and Brazilian pepper trees are invasive bullies, crowding out native plants and associated animals in the coastal prairie habitat.
Brazilian pepper trees are shrubs, while the Chinese tallow is a small to medium-sized tree. Tallow trees are known for their heart-shaped leaves that turn red in the fall.
Both species produce seeds that are dispersed by birds that eat their berries. Both trees have proved to be tough contenders against conservationists.
But then Hurricane Ike inundated the island area more than a year ago with salt water, killing large numbers of trees, including the invasive ones.
“Basically, what has happened on the island is that about 95 percent of the tallow trees were killed in Ike,” Stevenson said.
The Ostermeyer Road area is at a slightly higher elevation, in the middle of the island, and may not have been overrun by salt water to the extent the East End was flooded, Stevenson said. Tallow and Brazilian pepper trees survived in the area.
Volunteers also will seek out surviving invasive trees on the Bolivar Peninsula, since migrating birds carry seeds from there to the island. The overall goal is a blitzkrieg campaign.
“I feel like with the right manpower, we can do this thing and we can stop them,” Stevenson said.
