Things to Do in Anahuac This Fall Even Without Gatorfest

The second weekend of September usually belongs to Fort Anahuac Park. This year it doesn't. Texas Gatorfest, held annually in Anahuac since 1989, will not take place in 2026 after organizers announced they are cancelling the event, previously scheduled for Sept. 11–13, to conduct a review and restructuring of the festival's operations.

If you've lived here more than a season or two, that hits differently than a headline about a festival somewhere else. It's the weekend the airboats fire up on the Trinity, the weekend the roundup scale gets set on the bank, the weekend a town of a little over 2,000 hosts a crowd many times its size. And it's the one weekend that most consistently gets Anahuac into the regional press.

Here's the thing worth saying out loud, though. The migration calendar that made Anahuac a destination long before there was a festival is still running on schedule. If you plan the fall around the birds instead of the alligators this year, you actually get more of the season, not less.

The Weekend That's Not on the Calendar

Gatorfest is not a small thing to lose. The festival, held at Fort Anahuac Park on the Trinity River in what organizers bill as the Alligator Capital of Texas where alligators outnumber people nearly 3 to 1, draws crowds for carnival rides, live music, airboat rides, arts and crafts, and more than 20 food and drink booths featuring alligator dishes, and it is powered by more than 500 volunteers and pumps over half a million dollars into the local economy each year.

Organizers framed the pause as a reset rather than a goodbye. They said pausing the event is in the best interest of the festival, its partners, and the broader community, and that the priority remains transparency, accountability, and ensuring the long-term success and integrity of Texas Gatorfest, with a commitment to addressing current concerns and working toward a stronger future for the festival. Sponsorship materials on the festival's own site already point to Sept. 11–13, 2026, so read the cancellation as a skipped year rather than a closed door.

That still leaves a hole in mid-September. It also leaves everything else.

What Actually Runs the Fall Calendar Here

Anahuac sits at a bend in the Central Flyway where coastal marsh, prairie, and the Trinity's mouth pinch migrating birds into a narrow lane over Galveston Bay. That geography doesn't take a year off. The dates below are the ones locals plan around when Gatorfest isn't setting the rhythm:

• Aug. 15 – Nov. 30: Smith Point Hawk Watch, daily, at Candy Cain Abshier WMA
• September – early October: Peak Broad-winged Hawk kettles at Smith Point
• October: Songbird species count surges through the refuge
• November – February: Waterfowl season, snow geese arriving around Thanksgiving
• Year-round, sunrise to sunset: Refuge trails and the Shoveler Pond auto loop

Every one of those dates is anchored to a specific piece of ground within thirty minutes of downtown Anahuac. None of them require a festival to be running.

Smith Point, From August 15 Onward

If you've driven FM 562 out to Smith Point in September, you already know the raptor traffic can be hard to believe. If you haven't, this is the year to start. Candy Abshier Wildlife Management Area is famous for the daily hawk watches conducted from early August to November, sponsored by the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, the Houston Ornithology Group and Hawk Watch International.

The setup is straightforward and free. The Hawk Watch is held daily at the Candy Abshier Wildlife Management Area where GCBO has a 30-foot observation tower, is staffed from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, and visitors are invited to come out any day during the season. Bob Baez, an avian technician and the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory's official hawk counter, is on-site counting six days a week, stays in a trailer near the watchpoint for the season, and readily takes help from volunteers because it can be tough counting birds on busier days.

The scale is what surprises people the first time. Smith Point on the eastern shore of Galveston Bay is a natural concentration point for southwardly moving raptors in fall migration, and at the peak of fall migration it's not unusual to see thousands of Broad-winged Hawks, the most numerous species that migrates through, on a single day. One Wildlife Management Area in Texas that does not allow hunting means the tower sits inside a genuinely quiet 207 acres. Bring water, bring a hat, and if you have kids old enough to sit still for twenty minutes, bring them too.

The Refuge, By Its New Name

If your GPS still says Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, it's out of date. The refuge was renamed by secretarial order from Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge to Jocelyn Nungaray National Wildlife Refuge on March 10, 2025, in honor of Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl from Houston who cared deeply for nature and tragically lost her life. On July 24, 2025, Trump signed the Jocelyn Nungaray National Wildlife Refuge Act, which officially codified the new name into law. Same 34,000-plus acres, same entrance road off FM 563, same alligators sunning on the same berms.

The fall reward for going out there is that the visitor mix thins out while the bird numbers climb. One can expect to see dozens of bird species any month, and the numbers of bird species reliably surge in October and April as seasonal migrants ebb and flow with the tides. In November, the arrival of waterfowl in all shapes and sizes are reliable, but the return of snow geese is what many from Houston drive the hour-plus journey to see every Thanksgiving or winter break, and it is quite the spectacle and cacophony to witness firsthand a field painted white with thousands of geese.

You don't need to be a birder to make the loop worthwhile. Visitors can double back for the drive down to the auto loop where you won't necessarily need to exit the comfort of your car to see all you came to see. The Shoveler Pond auto tour, the Willows Trail, and the Skillern Tract seven miles east all sit inside the same hour. The refuge holds designations as a Globally Important Bird Area, a Monarch Waystation, and a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network Site of International Importance, which is a lot of institutional weight for a place most locals just call "the refuge."

Fort Anahuac Park Without the Festival

Fort Anahuac Park doesn't disappear because the festival does. The bluff over the Trinity is still there, the picnic pavilions are still there, and the boat ramp is still one of the more usable public access points on the north end of the bay. It's just going to be quieter in September than it has been in any year since 1989.

That quiet is worth using. A Saturday morning walk along the shoreline path is a different experience without the carnival footprint on the grass. If you have out-of-town family visiting during what would have been Gatorfest weekend, the park still tells the story of why Anahuac exists in the first place, from the historic marker on the fort site to the alligators you'll almost certainly see somewhere along the bank. The park sits at 1704 S Main St, and Chambers County keeps public information about it on the county parks page.

Where the Fall Table Still Fills Up

The pause on Gatorfest also means a lot of first-time visitors won't be discovering Anahuac's small restaurant bench this September. That's an argument for locals to keep the seats warm. Nopalitos on Cummings Street is the reliable Tex-Mex anchor, open 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. most days of the week, and the sort of place where the pace picks up when a birding group rolls in from the refuge. The Beginning Mexican Grill is the other name that shows up on most short lists.

Tony's BBQ, Ms. Marie's Great Home Cooking, and the Crawfish Hideaway round out the working roster on the local Yelp and Tripadvisor pages, and the small-town scale means you'll usually recognize half the room. None of these need a festival weekend to justify a Friday night. It's more that a festival weekend used to nudge people out of the routine of always eating at the same one.

Planning Around a Quieter September

The honest read on 2026 is that Anahuac's fall gets rearranged, not diminished. September loses its center of gravity. August 15 through late November gets a little more of your attention, because that's when the migration corridor is doing what it always does. Fort Anahuac Park stays open, the refuge keeps its sunrise-to-sunset hours, and the Smith Point tower is still going to be staffed by a counter who genuinely wants company.

For long-time residents, that's a season worth planning around. For newer neighbors who moved here for the schools or the acreage and haven't spent much time at the refuge or the WMA yet, this is the fall to fix that. The stories you'll tell about living in Anahuac aren't going to come from the years the festival ran smoothly. They're going to come from the mornings you drove out to the tower before work, or the November afternoon you stood on the auto loop and heard the geese before you saw them.

When you're ready to talk about what living here looks like on the housing side too, whether that's a home in town near the park or an acreage parcel closer to the refuge, The Holly Jackson Team is a phone call away. Ask us for a free home valuation, or just ask where the hawk kettles were biggest last week. We keep track of both.