Passport to Texas

Great Texas Birding Classic begins April 15 and runs through May 15.

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This is Passport to Texas

If you didn’t enter a team in the Great Texas Birding Classic by the April 1st deadline because you think you and your friends aren’t good enough birders. Fuhgeddaboudit.

Next year, enter The Big Sit.

The Big Sit is a wonderful category if you only have one or two good birders, and everyone else just has an interest in nature.

Shelly Plante is nature tourism manager for TPW and organizes the classic. Only one person on a Big Sit team needs to ID a bird for it to go on the team’s checklist.

It’s super easy, it’s easily accessible to everyone. And you go and bird in a 17-foot diameter circle for as much as you want in a day. I’ve seen people do it at their local park; I’ve seen people do it in their backyards, which is a lot of fun. So, there are so many different ways that you can do a Big Sit, and it’s just a lot of fun. We like to call it the tailgate party for birding, because people usually have a great food spread, and just a lot of camaraderie throughout the day. So that’s a lot of fun.

Food…friends…feathers? That just screams good times. Find out what this year’s teams spotted across the state between April 15 and May 15 at birdingclassic.org or eBirds.org, where teams upload their checklists.

Every team fills out a checklist and they upload it into eBird, which is an online bird checklist system through Cornell Lab of Ornithology that we use. So, teams are contributing to citizen science on an international level when they do the birding classic. Once they’ve submitted their checklist, they share that checklist with birding classic staff, and that’s how we know what was seen or heard.

Registrations fees fund habitat projects in the state.

We receive support from RAM Trucks. Built to Serve.

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

Paddlefish

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This is Passport to Texas

Alongside Big Cypress Bayou seems an unusual place to perform a surgical procedure. That doesn’t stop Mike Montagne with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from carrying out surgery on a paddlefish—a species that’s more than 300-million years old.

They are one of the most ancient fishes and species that we have on the planet. They don’t look like any other fish, and they are super cool.

Montagne  inserts an acoustic transmitter into the abdomen of a fish that’s been anesthetized before stitching it up and releasing it back into the water. Receivers along the bank track the fish. Overharvesting and manmade changes to habitat, caused the species to disappear from east Texas waters. Restocking, with an emphasis on recreating natural flows, helped the fish and habitat to rebound.

 [Laura-Ashley Overdyke] The Paddlefish were the perfect poster child to explain and test out our theory that more natural flows would help the forest as well as all these fish and other animals.

[Tim Bister] We’ve been reintroducing paddlefish since about 2014; we started out with about 50 fish that we radio-tagged and pout inside the Big Cypress and Caddo Lake, and we followed those around for about a year. One of the things we really wanted to find out is if the fish would stay in the system…

That was Laura-Ashley Overdyke with the Caddo lake Institute and Biologist Tim Bister.

Find out if the fish stayed in the system, or went over the dam, when you watch the TPW TV Series on PBS this week.

The Sport Fish Restoration Program supports our series.

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

Horned lizard

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This is Passport to Texas

Urbanization and invasive species are two impacts that’ve led to the decline of the iconic Texas horned lizard. The San Antonio Zoo plans to eventually release lizards from its captive breeding program into the wild.

Management is the first step in this process.

Andy Gluesenkamp is Director of Conservation at the zoo. He says he and his staff will consider environmental factors before releasing lizards onto a property.

One is: are they within the historic range of the species. Two is: are there horned lizards there now? This is a really important question. Because if there are horned lizards on that property, then that’s really a matter of managing existing populations. And I tell landowners that they are much better off than having to try and start anew and establish a population where one doesn’t exist. Other criteria are the size of the parcel; is there enough habitat for the lizards that—if we get a population established—that it will not just persist. The idea for them is to metastasize out into other habitat. And so, we’re putting lizards back onto the landscape, and not just on parcels of the landscape.

Andy Gluesenkamp says he uses high-resolution satellite-based maps from the Texas Parks and Wildlife GIS department to help assess whether areas have quality habitat for newly minted lizards.

We receive support in part from RAM Trucks: Built to Serve

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

A very handsome Texas Horned Lizard.

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This is Passport to Texas

Once a common sight in Texas, horned lizards are in decline. The past three decades of urban development coincide with their disappearance.

Not a coincidence at all. And although there’s no single smoking gun in the decline of horned lizards, generally urbanization is a common factor.

Andy Gluesenkamp is Director of Conservation at San Antonio Zoo, where he developed and oversees a horned lizard breeding program. Urbanization is just one impact.

There have been other, less obvious impacts. Like the introduction of non-native invasive grasses. [It] fundamentally changes the landscape from a lizard’s perspective. A lot of the grasses that we would look at and think that’s perfectly normal Texas grassland habitat, is kind of like an impenetrable bamboo thicket for these guys.

Such habitat changes mean lower diversity and density of arthropods, the lizard’s prey base. And then, there’s the red imported fire ant.

Although they’re not a deal-breaker for horned lizards, they’re not good for horned lizards. And a lot of places where horned lizards used to occur, there are now too many red imported fire ants for them even to get stablished in those places anymore. The red imported fire ants tend to eat the young as soon as they hatch out of the eggs.

Horned lizards from the San Antonio Zoo breeding program will be released back into the wild. But that takes planning. Details next time.

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

Texas Horned Lizard

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This is Passport to Texas

The horned lizard, or horny toad, is a charismatic creature and beloved by Texans of a certain age.

Mostly people my age. So, anyone that wasn’t around in the eighties probably hasn’t seen a horned lizard in the wild.

That’s Dr. Andy Gluesenkamp, Director of Conservation at San Antonio Zoo. Let’s just say he’s not a millennial. Andy heads up a horned lizard breeding program at the zoo, which is where I visited him in early October of last year.

We are in the main room of the conservation center. And if you look around the walls, there are rack after rack of ten-gallon aquariums. Each one with a Texas horned lizard in it. And this is what I like to call the beginning of our horned lizard factory.

You might wonder why we need a horned lizard factory—or breeding program—for the Texas State Reptile. Truth is: the little critters are getting scarce.

Although horned lizards are still doing really well in parts of their range, they’ve disappeared from about a third of their range in Texas. And that just so happens to be that portion of Texas where most Texans live.

Urbanization and the introduction of non-native grasses impact horned lizard populations. Andy Gluesenkamp says once lizards reach maturity, they will be released into areas that can support them.

We receive support in part from RAM Trucks: built to serve.

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