Passport to Texas

Billingsley Ranch

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This is Passport to Texas

The Billingsley Ranch in the Trans-Pecos is made up of pristine Chihuahuan dessert grassland. Shortly after buying the ranch in 2008, Stuart Sasser said a wildfire set him back to square one.

And it came up through here and burned about seventy percent of this ranch. We were able then to start completely over with a new set of fences that were antelope friendly type fences.  And build a new type of water system.

In an upcoming segment on the Texas Parks and Wildlife TV series, viewers see the ranch and meet, Sasser: a 2018 Lone Star Land Steward Award recipient. Michael Sullins is a Natural Resource Specialist with Texas Parks and Wildlife.

Stuart’s approach to management out here is not really all from a cattle production perspective. He has a holistic view of the place; he wants to improve it for the native wildlife.

Whitney Gann is a Research Scientist with Borderlands Research Institute. She says the ranch’s prime grassland habitat made it an ideal place to translocate pronghorn.

We’ve completed seven translocations since 2011, the Hughes Sasser ranch served as our release sight for pronghorn in 2016, and the results of these translocations is an upturn in the population, and so we’ve actually doubled our population size since 2012 to today.

A segment featuring innovations on the Billingsley Ranch airs the week of November 4 on the Texas Parks and Wildlife TV show on PBS.

The Wildlife Restoration program supports our series.

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

 Trophy buck taken by Tom Roughton with guide Rene Garza.

It's Buck Fever Season Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is Passport to Texas

As you round a bend during a hike, you spy a buck with large, flawless antlers. Your heart races; your breathing becomes shallow; your nerves tingle. Hunters call this: buck fever. And it’s caused by the sight of perfect antlers.

Nice smooth lines, tall tines coming off the main beams; very symmetrical one side to the other.

John Stein knows a thing or two about perfect antlers; he’s curator at the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum in San Antonio. Antler and taxidermy covered walls draw visitors to the saloon by the thousands.

Overall, in the collection, there’s over 12-hundred trophies that are on the walls –of all difference species.

Some hunters shell out big money to landowners to bag trophy animals on their property; money the landowner funnels into management and conservation. For 25 years, deer experts at the Kerr WMA have studied the genetic and nutritional aspects of antler growth in bucks, and shared the data with landowners; biologist, Gene Fuchs.

The information that we’ve gained from this study shows that through selection – by never allowing a buck that was a spike to ever breed a doe – we produced no spike antler yearling bucks two years in a row. And, the percentage of good quality antler yearling bucks has steadily increased.

Opening day for deer season in the north and south zones is November 3rd.

The Wildlife Restoration program supports our series and funds whitetail research in Texas.

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