Audubon - Mustang Island, Texas: Appreciating wildlife heroes like the late Tony Amos, Alicia Walker, Jace Tunnell of ARK - while remembering that open-borders overpopulation will someday do in Mother Nature (a topic that is Kryptonite to liberal 'environmentalists') --tma

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By Alisa Opar/Photos by Esther Horvath

For decades Tony Amos was as familiar a sight on the beaches of Texas’s Mustang Island as the wildlife he surveyed. Tall with flowing white hair and beard, Amos had surveyed a seven-mile stretch of beach every other day since 1978, recording everything from Piping Plovers and sea turtles to plastic bottles and helicopters. When he wasn’t out counting, he was rescuing injured turtles and birds and tending to them at the Animal Rehabilitation Keep, or ARK, which he founded in the 1980s at the University of Texas Austin’s Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas.

Amos was trained as an oceanographer, but when dead and injured sea turtles and Brown Pelicans began washing ashore in Port Aransas after the 1979 Ixtoc I exploratory oil well blowout, he felt compelled to do something beyond monitoring tides and measuring salinity levels. For four decades he rescued thousands of turtles and birds, and conducted thousands of beach surveys, his meticulous records tracking, among other trends, the resurgence of Brown Pelicans and decline of Red Knots. ...

http://www.audubon.org/magazine/winter-2017/a-life-dedicated-saving-sea-turtles-and