Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

The book Rare Plants of Texas from Texas A & M press gets up close and personal with…well…rare Texas plants.

There’s a lot of different definitions of rare.

Co-author, Jackie Poole, explains how the book’s authors defined the term “rare.”

What we basically use for the book is how many populations of those plants exist out there. So, usually, our cutoff criteria is twenty populations of fewer. And that’s on a worldwide basis—that’s not just in Texas.

Species listed as threatened or endangered by the federal and state government were also included in the 225 plants found in this illustrated field guide.

And, a lot of those plants have more than twenty populations known now—they didn’t when they were listed. But, because they get listed, lot more attention gets paid to the; a lot more people go out and find populations. So, they often end up being less rare than the plants that aren’t listed as endangered or threatened.

It’s imperative for us to know which plants are the rarest of the rare so we can protect them and their habitat.

Because they’re often indicators of something that’s going wrong in a particular habitat. And, we can pick up on this early on by noticing the rarest individuals in the community suffering first.

Find out more about rare plants in Texas at passportotexas.org.

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

Book: Rare Plants of Texas Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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

Playa lakes, which form in shallow depressions in the earth, are common in the High Plains of Texas, but are uncommon as water bodies go.

Well, with a playa lake, when a drop of water falls, it goes into the middle of the lake basin and that’s where it stays. This water may work its way down into the Ogallala Aquifer, or it may evaporate, but each playa lake is the lowest point in its own watershed.

Bill Johnson, is a waterfowl and wetlands biologist in Canyon, Texas, and says the water you see in the playa today, may not be there in a few months’ time.

Playas tend to go wet and dry. And there’s nothing wrong at all with a dry playa. We’re a semi-arid region, and our evaporation rate is much, much higher than our rainfall rate.

In fact, if a playa were wet all the time, says Johnson, it would not be nearly as important to waterfowl.

When a playa goes dry, it causes the germination and growth of moist soil plants. These plants are generally annual plants—such as the smartweed, or barnyard grass. Now these plants are very productive, and they produce the seeds that ducks eat. If these playas didn’t dry up, then they would have an entirely different pant community that wouldn’t be as productive—they just wouldn’t produce as much food.

Information about playas is at passporttotexas.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: Playa Lakes Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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

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

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

Abundant water and huge old cypress trees makes Caddo Lake ideal wildlife habitat.

Caddo Lake is the mother load for several species of neo-tropical migrants.

Cliff Shackelford is a non-game ornithologist stationed in Nacogdoches. The prothonotary warbler, northern parula, and yellow-throated warbler flock to Caddo.

A dawn chorus of those warblers singing is quite a neat thing. It’s good to be out in a boat, a canoe, a kayak, something where you can get out in the middle of the swamp to hear these things—they’re just loud and explosive. It’s really refreshing to hear things like that singing in the morning.

But warblers aren’t the only creatures that make use of Caddo’s resources. Vanessa Adams is the area biologist at the Caddo Lake Wildlife Management Area. And says you’ll find white-tailed deer and…

We unfortunately do have feral hog, but that is a huntable population, of course. We see several species of ducks. You’ll see wood duck year round. We get mallards; we have other unusual ducks. In fact, we’ve had black-bellied whistling ducks nest here.

We have links to Caddo Lake Wildlife Management Area at passporttotexas.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.
_____________________________________________________________

CLICK HERE for canoe rental information at Caddo Lake

CLICK HERE to watch a video of Caddol Lake.

Wetlands Month--Caddo Lake, 2 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download