I think Bedi would be pleased to know that his granddaughter and great-granddaughter visited Aransas National Wildlife Refuge today.
Established in 1937, the Refuge played a major role in bringing the Whooping Crane back from extinction. Bedi spent considerable time out here and lobbied for nature-focused management, rather than management with hunters in mind. On the 1938 bird list below, he adds a note to lobby for the road-runner.
In Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, his tells the following story, most likely related to the note above.
A game warden on the Aransas Game Refuge near Austwell, Texas, killed a paisano [road-runner] in my presence in order to protect, he said, nesting quail. I insisted on an autopsy, and we discovered that the bird's crop was packed with the remains of grasshoppers, and with nothing else. There was just then a pest of these insects destroying grass and weeds, which normally produce food for the quail. It was clear, therefore--in this instance, at least--that a friend of the quail, not an enemy, had been shot down.
Unfortunately, we missed the Whooping Cranes who left for Canada a couple of weeks ago. Though we did see beautiful marshes with egrets, herons, black-necked stilts, a 'gator and more wildflowers.
Bedi also mentioned the Big Tree on Goose Island that was, at the time, the largest Virginia Live Oak Tree in Texas (it has since been dethroned by another in Brazoria County).
Bedi notes in Karankaway Country...
A live oak living alone is either blown down or develops into a huge, squatty affair, as the one on Goose Island, said to be the largest live oak in Texas. Scarcely thirty-five feet tall, it has a spread of a hundred and fifty feet, with lower limbs larger than the average trunk of upland live oaks. One can imagine the vast root system in dune sand necessary to support the monster crown in winds which sometimes reach a velocity of one hundred miles an hour. Many of these noble trees have survived the worst the winds of ten centuries can do. Besides spreading their roots far and wide, they sometimes develop another precautionary defense by thrusting the tips of two or more of their limbs into the ground forty or fifty feet away from the trunk—getting down on their hands and knees, so to speak, to resist the tug, twist, and terrific rocking to which they are occasionally subjected.
I found this great comparison of what it looked like in 1938 when Bedi saw it and how it looks now (2021).
