The Big Thicket to be the Bigger Thicket?

Tuesday, 01 April 2008

The Big Thicket was once a vast dense forest of over 1,000,000 acres. It truly was a big thicket. Early settlers described it as perhaps the most impenetrable forest they had ever encountered.

Through development and parcelization, the vast Big Thicket actually became a smaller thicket and in its present official form, the Big Thicket National Preserve, managed by the National Park Service under the Department of the Interior, its size is roughly 100,000 acres. The original Big Thicket is now sometimes referred to as the Primitive Big Thicket, and is broken up by a number of small towns and private land.

The area has a rich history of so-called "wildman" or bigfoot sightings, often referred to as "Mossyback" in the area.

The good news: legislation was recently drafted by the National Park Service, at the request of U.S. Congressman Kevin Brady (R), 8th District of Texas, to increase the size of the Big Thicket National Preserve by another 100,000 acres. The land would be acquired from willing sellers.

The TBRC will keep a constant eye on the status of this important legislation. While 200,000 acres is not 1,000,000 acres, the expansion of the Big Thicket National Preserve by another 100,000 acres would no doubt be a great step toward the conservation and restoration of this place that's been called the biological crossroads of North America. Let's keep our fingers crossed that this special place called the Big Thicket can soon be the Bigger Thicket.

Source: The Big Thicket Reporter (Big Thicket Association).