Tales from the Texas Coast

Rockport Birding HQ
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The Texas Gulf Coast between Rockport and the Lamar Peninsula holds more history than most people know and more wildlife than most people believe. Whooping cranes back from extinction. Irish colonists on schooners. Civil War cannon fire on Aransas Bay. The birder who spent 35 years convincing the world this coast was extraordinary. Produced by Rockport Birding HQ — the insider guide to birding, nature, and history on the Texas coast. rockportbirdinghq.com

  1. Aug 30

    San Jose Island, Texas: 130 Years of Private Ownership, From FDR's Cattle Chute to the Bass Family Today

    Eight miles east of Rockport, visible from the waterfront on a clear day, sits a 33,000-acre island you cannot visit. Public access ends at the tide line — and has for nearly 130 years. In 1896, it was home to the Tarpon Club, an elite private fishing colony where Ned Green — son of Hetty Green, the most notorious miser in American history — showed up around 1900 with one of the first motorized powerboats on the Texas coast and paid a local man to travel to Chicago just to learn how to run its engine. In 1936, wildcatter Sid Richardson, who once drilled 80 straight wells without a single dry hole, bought the island and built the only home he ever owned. On May 7, 1937, FDR visited the day before his famous Port Aransas tarpon catch — and found no way into the lodge except a cattle chute. Richardson rolled the President of the United States down it. Two weeks later, FDR invited him to the White House to talk oil; Texas went on to supply roughly 6 of the 7 billion barrels the Allies burned in WWII. Eisenhower relaxed there in 1949. A young Senator Lyndon Johnson visited too. Richardson died on the island in 1959, and it passed to the family that still owns it today — undeveloped, private, visible from town, off-limits at the tide line. 📍 rockportbirdinghq.com/podcast 🎣 rockportfishinghq.com

  2. Aug 27

    Rockport Shipyards at War: From WWI Cargo Ships to WWII Submarine Chasers

    There is a Texas Maritime Museum in Rockport holding flags from two U.S. Navy submarine chasers — built right here, launched into Aransas Bay on July 4, 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor. It wasn't the town's first warship, either. In 1917, two lumbermen from Beeville with no shipbuilding experience landed a federal contract, and Rockport donated 13 acres of waterfront to make it happen. Over 900 workers descended on a town with nowhere to put them — the First National Bank converted its upper floor into worker lodging. The first completed ship was named by Mrs. Woodrow Wilson herself. Five days after the second one launched, the hurricane that killed 300+ people in the area hit the yard directly. Down the coast in Port Aransas, a concrete-hulled ship launched in 1920, rolled "like a barrel," made exactly one voyage to Mexico, and now lies in pieces near the North Jetty. By WWII, a second Rockport shipyard was back at it — 24 submarine chasers in four years. The Texas Maritime Museum's new exhibit, opening September 5, 2026, puts both wars in the same room for the first time. 📍 rockportbirdinghq.com/podcast 🎣 rockportfishinghq.com

  3. Aug 24

    Shallow Water Boats of the Texas Coast: From Karankawa Canoes to Diablo Skiffs

    Aransas Bay averages four to seven feet deep. It always has. Every boat that has ever worked these waters is an answer to the same question: how do you move people and cargo across water too shallow for a real boat? The Karankawa people solved it with flat-bottomed dugout canoes hollowed by hot coals. Jean Lafitte solved it with pirogues — and used those same shallow waters as an escape route when the Navy came hunting, because warships couldn't follow where his shallow-draft boats could go. Farley Boat Works in Port Aransas built cypress and mahogany tarpon skiffs from 1914 to 1973; FDR fished from one in May 1937. When fiberglass took over, the Farleys refused: "If fiberglass boats were meant to be, nature would have provided fiberglass trees." Today, Diablo Boats in Rockport builds all-composite flat-bottom skiffs that dead-drift in six inches of water. And airboats run over 7,300 acres of Texas coastal marsh that no other boat can reach at all. The small boats you see in Port Aransas front yards — painted bright colors, full of flowers — are concrete replicas of the Farley tarpon skiff. Six and a half feet long. 1,800 pounds each. The boat that made this town, cast in concrete, filled with petunias. Same bay. Same problem. Different centuries. Audio produced with AI assistance. 📍 Full show notes + all episodes: rockportbirdinghq.com/podcast 🎣 Fishing the Texas Coast: rockportfishinghq.com

  4. Aug 21

    Sawfish, Tarpon, and the Prehistoric Fish That Still Live in Aransas Bay

    There is a 17-foot sawfish painted on the side of a barbershop in downtown Rockport. It commemorates a 2,000-pound fish caught in a shrimp trawl in 1927. The last confirmed sawfish in Texas waters was a 5-foot juvenile pulled from a gill net in Aransas Bay in April 1984. The mural is still there. The fish is not. This episode goes deep on the prehistoric, strange, and vanishing fish of the Texas Gulf Coast — the creatures that shaped this coastline and the ones that disappeared from it within living memory. The sawfish is not a shark — it's a ray with an electromagnetic hunting antenna for a nose and 2,000-pound adults that were common in Texas bays within the last century. The tarpon built an entire town: Port Aransas was called "Tarpon, Texas" until 1910, and President Roosevelt signed a tarpon scale at the Port Aransas jetties in 1937 that still hangs on the Tarpon Inn wall. The alligator gar solved being a fish 100 million years ago and has basically not changed since — and in the 1930s, the State of Texas tried to electrocute every last one. Some are gone. Some are still here. And a few of the strangest ones are living on the oyster reefs and pier pilings of Aransas Bay right now, doing things that shouldn't be possible. Audio produced with AI assistance. 📍 Full show notes + all episodes: rockportbirdinghq.com/podcast 🎣 Fishing the Texas Coast: rockportfishinghq.com

  5. Aug 17

    The Cool Coast Camp — The 1924 KKK Resort on Aransas Bay and the Sawfish Still Painted on Austin Street

    There is a 17-foot sawfish painted on the side of a barbershop on Austin Street in downtown Rockport. Most people who drive past it assume it's local color — a nod to the fishing heritage of Aransas Bay. The name painted above it tells a different story. THE COOL COAST CAMP. Six feet wide. Two thousand pounds. Admission free. In 1924, the Ku Klux Klan operated a family resort near Rockport, Texas — and we know this not from local memory or rumor, but from a surviving printed brochure archived at Duke University's Rubenstein Library. "To All the Klans and Klansmen of Texas Greetings," it begins. It promised "a real family recreation under high-class moral conditions." It promised big-game fishing. It promised that the Fiery Cross would guard you at night. This episode follows the brochure, the mural, and the moment in Texas history when this was the establishment — not the fringe. The 1920s Klan claimed an estimated 150,000 Texas members at its 1922 peak. It held a probable majority in the Texas House. It operated openly, advertised nationally, and then lost 90 percent of its membership within 18 months of that peak. The Cool Coast Camp was launched almost exactly at that hinge point — which is likely why it left almost nothing behind except a painted wall. The same bay that once held sawfish large enough to paint life-size on a building no longer holds them at all. The last confirmed sawfish in Texas waters was 1984, in Aransas Bay. This episode is about both things — what the coast displayed on its walls and what it no longer holds in its water. Audio produced with AI assistance. 📍 Full show notes + all episodes: rockportbirdinghq.com/podcast🎣 Fishing the Texas Coast: rockportfishinghq.com

    The Cool Coast Camp — The 1924 KKK Resort on Aransas Bay and the Sawfish Still Painted on Austin Street

  6. Aug 14

    Space Rockets in Rockport: The Texas Coast That Almost Launched America

    In 1946, the U.S. government looked at a barrier island off the Texas Gulf Coast and almost made it the national launch site. Cape Canaveral got it instead — by a matter of degrees of latitude. Thirty-six years later, the first privately funded rocket in American history lifted off from that same island. Conestoga 1. September 9, 1982. Matagorda Island, Texas. The man who owned the land — who also ran a fishing resort on the Copano Bay causeway — died that morning and never saw it. This episode traces the hidden aerospace history of a fifty-mile stretch of Gulf Coast shoreline: the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi that trained Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, and Pete Conrad. The Cold War radar station four miles from Lamar that went to high alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Percheron rocket that exploded on the pad in 1981 before Deke Slayton — Mercury 7, grounded for sixteen years — came to Texas and got it right. The launch pad on Matagorda Island is still there. Starship is on the pad at Boca Chica, 200 miles south. The thread is unbroken. 📍 Full show notes, maps & photos: https://rockportbirdinghq.com/podcast Explore the places, history, maps, and birding locations featured in this episode. 🐦 Rockport Birding HQ https://rockportbirdinghq.com 🎣 Rockport Fishing HQ https://rockportfishinghq.com ⭐ Subscribe for more stories from the Texas Coast. New episodes released regularly.

  7. Aug 10

    The Vanishing Tides of Aransas Bay: Where Did the Shrimp Boats Go?

    In the 1980s, hundreds of shrimp boats left Fulton Harbor before sunrise every morning. Today, fewer than 350 licensed shrimping vessels work the entire Texas Gulf Coast — down from over 3,000. This episode traces what happened. The golden era of Rockport-Fulton's working waterfront. The arrival of Vietnamese refugee fishing families after the fall of Saigon and what happened when two fishing cultures collided on the same water. The global seafood market that made wild-catch shrimping economically impossible for everyone. And the ecological cost nobody put on the ledger — the tarpon, the sawfish, the fish kills, the ducks that used to darken the sky. This is not a story about who was right. It's a story about what a bay looks like when the boats stop coming back.  Full show notes, maps & photos: ⁠https://rockportbirdinghq.com/podcast⁠ Explore the places, history, maps, and birding locations featured in this episode.  Rockport Birding HQ https://rockportbirdinghq.com  Rockport Fishing HQ https://rockportfishinghq.com  Subscribe for more stories from the Texas Coast. New episodes released regularly.

  8. Aug 7

    Rockport Hummingbird Legacy: Connie Hagar and the Flyway She Put on the Map

    Every September, tens of thousands of hummingbirds funnel down the Texas coast through Rockport. Feeders drain overnight. Birders arrive from every state. The HummerBird Celebration — 38th annual, September 17–20, 2026 — fills the motels and the parks. None of it would have happened without one woman. Connie Hagar moved to Rockport in 1935, took over a small tourist motel on Little Bay, and started walking nine miles of Texas coastline every day. She was self-taught, frequently doubted by professional ornithologists, and consistently right. She added more than 20 species to the Texas state bird list. She documented the Eskimo Curlew — a bird most experts believed extinct — three times in 1952. And she was the first to systematically record the concentrated fall hummingbird migration through Rockport, identifying nine species in the Aransas Bay area. This episode follows her life, the nine hummingbird species she documented, and the moment Roger Tory Peterson — the most famous naturalist in America — came to Rockport specifically to consult her. The HummerBird Celebration she unknowingly made possible turns 38 this September. She died in 1973 and never saw it.  Full show notes, maps & photos: ⁠https://rockportbirdinghq.com/podcast⁠ Explore the places, history, maps, and birding locations featured in this episode.  Rockport Birding HQ https://rockportbirdinghq.com  Rockport Fishing HQ https://rockportfishinghq.com  Subscribe for more stories from the Texas Coast. New episodes released regularly.

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About

The Texas Gulf Coast between Rockport and the Lamar Peninsula holds more history than most people know and more wildlife than most people believe. Whooping cranes back from extinction. Irish colonists on schooners. Civil War cannon fire on Aransas Bay. The birder who spent 35 years convincing the world this coast was extraordinary. Produced by Rockport Birding HQ — the insider guide to birding, nature, and history on the Texas coast. rockportbirdinghq.com

Information

  • Creator
    Rockport Birding HQ
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Rockport Birding HQ
  • Show Website
    Tales from the Texas Coast