Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Wildlife Restoration Program

Cut off from the Lower Laguna Madre, the Bahia Grande, a unit of the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, changed from productive tidal wetland to nuisance dust bowl. The tide started to turn for this basin with the new millennium.

It was not until 2000 when the Fish and Wildlife Service acquired the land surrounding the Bahia Grande Basin that you could start doing something—because the Fish and Wildlife Service was very supportive of restoring the area.

John Wallace is the refuge manager. Eight years later, the process of restoring Bahia Grande continues.

Restoring ten thousand acres takes quite awhile. We have had to go through an environmental assessment—public hearings—to just make sure what we were planning to do in restoring it was not going to cause some kind of impact.

Wallace says the project is at the stage of installing the main channel that will fully restore the area. He estimates the work to start in early 2009. When fully restored, humans and wildlife will benefit.

Besides just reducing the blowing dust, it’s going to increase the number of marine organisms in the area: anything from larval finfish, to shrimp, to blue crabs that are already in the area. And when we have it fully restored it’s going to do nothing more than become a nice estuarine area to benefit wildlife.

Find more information at passportotexas.org.

That’s our show… with support from the Wildlife Restoration Program… providing funding for wetland conservation through the Private Lands Enhancement Program.

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

 Wetlands Month--Bahia Grande, 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (13)

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Wildlife Restoration Program

For the past seventy years, Bahia Grande, a unit of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, has been no more than a six thousand acre dust bowl. Before then, it had been a productive tidal wetland.

A tidal wetland is normally a coastal wetland that is influenced by the daily tide cycle that would basically push or pull water into that system on a daily basis.

John Wallace is the refuge manager. The construction of the Brownsville Ship Channel in the 1930s effectively cut off Bahia Grande from the Lower Laguna Madre.

The spoil from that ship channel was piled on the north side, and it blocked off those natural channels that allowed water to flow into the Bahia Grande.

Without water, the basin dried up, and eventually became a nuisance to local residents and businesses whenever prevailing winds came from the southeast.

Normally on a coastal area with prevailing winds, you would get winds ten to twenty miles an hour every day. And these winds would pick up that real fine clay dust, and blow it to the north and northwest. And the local communities north of there were suffering from this blowing dust. It was impacting people that had breathing problems. The local schools, their air-conditioning systems, it was getting into the classrooms. So, it was a major concern for the local communities.

Solving the problem…that’s tomorrow.

That’s our show… with support from the Wildlife Restoration Program… providing funding for wetland conservation through the Private Lands Enhancement Program.

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

 Wetlands Month--Bahia Grande, 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (19)

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

Susan Gonzales’ family knew nothing about the outdoors…

We’ve always wanted to go camping, but we didn’t know where to start.

So, she brought her husband and children to Steeplechase Park in Kyle last month for a Texas Outdoor Family Workshop.

Now we feel more comfortable to be outdoors. We know what to do—the things that we’re going to need, what to bring, and cook, and stuff like that (laughs).

The Kyle Parks and Recreation staff, and students from Texas State University in San Marcos, mentored the families. Susan’s daughter Marisol tells us what she learned.

Mmmm… How to use a compass, and how to set up a tent, and fish and all that.

Susan Gonzales says her family will use their newfound outdoor skills at Texas State Parks.

I got a really great guide—the Texas State Park Guide—so we’re going to look through it, and sit down and see what we like and what we want to go see. So, do you think that you’re going to talk other friends and family into joining you? Oh, definitely yes. It’s a great experience that I’m having today, so I’m going to definitely tell them about it.

That’s our show for today, with support from Toyota, reminding you to do whatever it takes to get your kids outside. For tips and ideas, go to lifesbetteroutside.org.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti

 Texas Outdoor Families--The Gonzales Family: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (19)

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

Women can gain a lot from outdoors experiences.

I think women are strong and they’re smart. And I think we’re stronger and smarter than sometimes we give ourselves credit for being.

Krista Allen is a participant turned instructor of the Becoming an Outdoors Woman workshops.

And I think the outdoor experience help women realize their strengths because the skills we learn help you grow as a person and those skills have application in their everyday lives.

Allen believes that women finding passion outdoors will encourage them to share it with others. Your most effective doing things that your passionate it about and when you find an outdoor activity that you love and you’re passionate about, you’re going to pass that on to other people. Showing the outdoors to people, I think, is one of the coolest things that you can do.

Once women discover an outdoor activity they’re passionate about they’ll find new value in state parks.

If you’re a mountain biker or if you’re a cyclist you have a huge appreciation for the out of doors and the value of having those sort of spaces and preserving those sort of spaces.

To find out more information about Becoming an Outdoors Woman Workshops, visit passporttotexas.org.

That’s our show… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

 Women in the Outdoors: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (20)

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

The mystery of the tarpon is a story you’ll see this month on the Texas Parks and Wildlife television series– writer/producer Ron Kabele.

The funny thing about a lot of young anglers is, there’s so few tarpon left in the gulf of Mexico that a lot of them don’t even know what a tarpon looks like. But, it’s a big silver fish; when I say big, I mean ninety to two hundred and fifty pounds.

The producer who did the story went out a number of times—they never saw a tarpon. They’re really hard to catch now because there aren’t that many left. One of the biologists said, in the course of the story, that they didn’t want to happen to the tarpon to what happened to say the Attwater’s prairie chicken, where the population gets just so low that bringing the species back would be virtually impossible. And that’s what they’re trying to circumvent with this research.

The series airs on PBS stations statewide.

That’s our show for today… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

 TP&W TV May Feature: Mystery of the Tarpon: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (25)