Ecologist is faithful steward of bayou southeast of downtown

Mark Kramer steers a pontoon boat on Armand Bayou across reflections of clouds backlit by the first rays of sunrise.

He weaves between partially submerged, gnarled old trees. Striped mullet leap into the air and splash into the bayou all around. Along the banks, black, white and blue wading birds search for crabs.

Kramer has worked for more than two decades as an ecologist at the Armand Bayou Nature Center, 2,500 acres of nature nestled in between the factories and industry of this part of Houston 25 miles southeast of downtown.

This, he says as he tours the bayou on a Tuesday morning, is the closest thing to what Houston looked like before the city's concrete sprawl smothered the prairies, forests and waterways.

"That's the cool thing about this place," Kramer, 56, says, one arm on the rudder. "It's one of the largest urban wildernesses in the country."

Environmental advocates say Kramer has been instrumental in preserving this slice of nature, one of the last bayous of Houston not straightened or lined with concrete. Last month, the Bayou Preservation Association honored him with the Terry Hershey Bayou Stewardship Award.

"He protects and restores one of the last remaining natural bayous as well as the native prairies, forests and watershed tributaries that surround Armand Bayou," said Kathy Lord, executive director of the Bayou Preservation Association.

When the Pasadena native first lowered a canoe into the muddy waters as a child, Houston's booming industry and population sucked up so much groundwater that the land subsided, deepening Armand Bayou and killing off more than 90 percent of the coastal marshland.

After years of experimentation and replanting, Kramer has slowly seen the bayou recover, bringing back animals and plants to an ecosystem that was in danger of being lost forever.

"It's come a long ways," he says.

30 years living at park

Kramer wears a dark grey Armand Bayou t-shirt with light grey shorts and black flip-flops. Mosquitoes swarm the park, their numbers and zeal boosted by the recent floods, but Kramer chooses to endure that discomfort instead of wearing long sleeves and suffering in the heat.

His dark brown hair is pulled back into a long ponytail and he wears a salt-and-pepper moustache and beard.

His voice is deep and his speech slow and deliberate. He knows the names of most, if not all, of the birds and plants in the park.

Aside from some traveling in his 20s, Kramer has never left the area. He grew up a few miles from the park, went to high school in Pasadena and got a degree in biology from San Jacinto College, the extent of his higher education, he says.

He has lived in the park itself for 30 years. He first worked at Armand Bayou Nature Center briefly out of college tending to trails before joining Harris County's parks department, then doing some construction work and finally rejoining the park staff.

He says his mother and son live in Pasadena.

In high school, Kramer would paddle up and down the bayou with a friend, exploring tributaries - "adventuring," as he calls it. He says amid all of Houston's industry and development and the polluted Pasadena air, the bayou represented freedom.

But as the ecosystem recovered, his connection deepened.

"As every year goes by, you don't know if you've changed or she's changed or your eyes have changed, but she gets more and more beautiful," Kramer said.

The nature center itself is an important piece of nature, where salt and freshwater mix, says Deborah January-Bevers, president and CEO of Houston Wilderness, a nonprofit organization that studies and helps coordinate conservation projects in the Houston region.

It provides a habitat for fish in the seafood industry.

"They've been able to keep it very similar to its original ecosystem state," she said. "I think all that is pretty amazing. It sort of gives hope that you can have industry and nature exist together."

There are few places like it around Houston, she said.

Kramer parks on a dirt road and points to a quivering clump of trees full of white wading birds called egrets cawing and jostling one another.

The island rookery is where the birds rear their young. Some bend their long necks as parent birds place food they've foraged from the bayou into their yellow beaks.

In 2011, during the drought, the trees died, so Kramer helped construct a wooden structure in between the trunks that the birds could use instead. It's been a success, he says.

There are few places in the nature center that Kramer hasn't touched since he rejoined the staff in 1995.

Alligators' return

His biggest achievement was replanting coastal marsh plants in the bayou that were drowned out by the earth's subsidence and the deep water that came with it.

Kramer engineered a system where clumps of California bullrush roots, held together by chicken wire and weighted down, were thrown off the side of the boat so they could sink down into the water and take hold.

He calls it a "bullrush bomb." Kramer went through many of them in the 2000s, replanting about 26 acres.

Much of his job now involves coordinating hundreds of volunteers that help keep the park together. He also shepherds students and visitors on tours of the park.

The gleaming, yellow eye of an alligator peeks out from under the bayou's surface, its body obscured by the murky water, as Kramer slows the pontoon boat for a photo opportunity.

When he was exploring the bayou as a teenager, he never saw alligators. They were all but wiped out.

But in recent decades, they began to cruise Armand Bayou once again. Kramer says it may not have been possible without preservation efforts.

For Kramer, the most rewarding part of his job is watching a species return to the bayou. It gives him what he calls a "potent" feeling. Over the years, he's been fortunate to witness it happen multiple times, with alligators, but also with peregrine falcons, brown pelicans and bald eagles.

Today, Kramer says, the biggest threats to the bayou are invasive species, like water hyacinth that line the bayou's banks.

Then there is the development around the park, which January-Bevers said the park needs to watch "very diligently" if it's to keep its status as a natural oasis.