Passport to Texas

Writer Pam LeBlanc happily waiting for teal.

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This is Passport to Texas

Fall hunting season kicks off on September first with dove. Teal is next with a sixteen-day season that runs from September 14th through the 29th.

Last year writer Pam LeBlanc took advantage of an invitation to go teal hunting with former TPW Executive Director, Andy Sansom. She wrote about it for the current issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

In the article, Pam admits that she is not a hunter, and never imagined she’d find herself slogging through a wetland, wearing rubber waders and shooting at teal. But she did and writes vividly about the experience.

A funny bit is about a “sticky-footed” frog that spent the night in her waders which she’d left on the porch of the Bucksnag Hunting Club in Garwood, where the hunting party stayed. She discovered the little fellow when they were in the truck, headed to into the field.

She writes: [The frog] shot out of my pants and onto the windshield, then ricocheted across the interior of the truck like a tiny, spring-loaded pogo stick, jolting me awake. That would wake me up, too.

Find Pam LeBlanc’s article about her teal hunt in the August-September issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

You’ll also find a recipe by Chef Jesse Morris for Smoked Teal in Miso Garlic Butter Sauce.

Our series receives support in part from RAM Trucks: built to serve.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife… I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Bikepacking is the new bike touring.

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This is Passport to Texas

When you combine backpacking and cycling you get bike-packing. And that’s the focus of an article by Brandon Weaver for the April issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine.

Touring the countryside on a bicycle isn’t new. Cyclists haul their gear and supplies using racks and saddlebags.

However, bike-packing is the next evolution of bicycle travel. Brandon says it differs from traditional bike touring by eliminating the need for racks.

The packs, he said, are specifically sewn and engineered to fit in and around a bicycle’s frame and distributes the weight equally across the bicycle. That makes it lighter, faster, and more efficient than saddlebags.

To test this, Brandon joined brothers Jerod and Seth Foster on a 223-mile bike-packing adventure. They traveled from Mother Neff State Park to Possum Kingdom State Park. Along the way, camped at Meridian State Park, Dinosaur Valley State Park, and spent their final night at the future site of Palo Pinto Mountains State Park. And the new pack system made the trip a breeze.

They traveled as many gravel county roads between the parks as they could find. Brandon wrote: We are taking the roads less traveled, which is the essence of bike-packing. Read all about this bike-packing adventure in the April issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

We receive support in part from RAM Trucks. Built to serve.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Accessible trail at a state park.

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This is Passport to Texas

Whether it’s ADA-accessible pit toilets in Enchanted Rock State Natural Area’s backcountry… or accommodations for disabled hunters in the public hunting program—access is important wherever and whenever possible.

The March issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine addresses accessibility in an article by writer Kathryn Hunter.

Hunter writes: The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is currently developing a five-year accessibility transition plan that Sandra Heath, TPWD’s first ADA coordinator, calls “ADA and beyond.”

The agency strives to provide access and inclusion for users of all abilities, while also recognizing that public lands are equally tasked with the protection and good stewardship of wildlife and cultural and historical resources.

In fact, nearly any capital project underway has an accessibility component to it.

Research has shown that when you make something accessible for one group of people it often improves accessibility for everyone.

Read Kathryn Hunter’s article on accessibility in the March issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

Our show receives support in part from RAM Trucks: Built to Serve.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Pensacal wind farm and avian radar.

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This is Passport to Texas

Texas is the number-one wind energy state; but what’s the effect of wind farms on bats and birds? Writer Russel Roe addresses this matter in an article for the March issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

The stakes are high when it comes to wind and wildlife, especially as you consider that Texas has the largest population of bats in the world and the nation’s highest diversity of bird species.

Although clean, renewable wind energy offers benefits to the environment, you’ll learn in Roe’s article that it does so at the cost to wildlife. Hundreds of thousands of birds and bats die annually, their fates sealed when they fly into the turning blades of gargantuan turbines.

Bats are hardest hit—no pun intended. With more than twice the number of fatalities than birds.

Roe writes that wind companies and conservation groups agree that responsible siting of wind turbines away from areas with high wildlife activity is a key first step to reducing the problem. TPWD is working on its own set of wind energy guidelines and hopes to release them sometime in 2019.

Meanwhile, read Russel Roe’s article about Wind and Wildlife in the March issue of Texas parks and Wildlife Magazine. You’ll also learn about research on ultrasonic acoustic deterrents that reduced bat fatalities by 46 percent.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Texas Horned Lizard

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This is Passport to Texas

With a flat, spiky body, the Horned Lizard has captivated the generations of Texans.

Everyone you meet, if you just mention horny toad, or horned lizard, they say” “Oh, I used to see those all the time when I was a kid; I would pick them up and put them into my pocket. But now I never see them. What happened to them”?

That’s a question editor Louie Bond addresses in an article for the December issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine. To get answers, she travelled to the San Antonio Zoo to meet with director of conservation, Andy Gluesenkamp.

And he is raising horned lizards in hope of having babies in a few months, and putting them back into their historic habitats.

Which includes arid and semiarid habitats in open areas with sparse plant cover. This habitat’s been fragmented by development. But it still exists.

We’re actually tying into a whole other program at the agency, which comes from the mapping department. And we have this incredible interactive vegetative map of the whole state, broken into pretty small parcels of land. The biologists can look at the map and judge the habitat by a variety of criteria. So, they actually can rate each piece of land and make sure that it actually does have all the things that are needed there.

The horned lizard article by Louie Bond is as fascinating as the animal itself. Read this in-depth feature in the December issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine. On newsstands now.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.