Passport to Texas

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Anglers may not have a crystal ball to tell them where the best fishing is, but they have the next best thing.

02—Our fisheries biologists are a great deal of help.

Steve Lightfoot is a wildlife & fisheries information specialist with Parks and Wildlife; his article on the late winter/early spring fishing forecast appears in TPW magazine’s February digital fishing issue. He says fisheries biologists assess three areas when making their predictions.

29— One are the creel surveys they conduct at boat launches and around fishing areas where they talk to anglers and ask them what their catches were. The other is their own surveys, using mostly gill netting and other nets that they collect out in the water. They identify the fish and they go through algorithms and so forth, and come up something called a biomass. And a biomass is how healthy the fish populations [are] and what types of fish are at each lake.
The third element is their knowledge and experience. Most of these guys are anglers, too, so they have some input as well.

Lightfoot adds there’s good news for anglers.

10— The good news is most of our fish populations are in healthy condition. There are over a hundred lakes where you can go out and expect to have a reasonably good opportunity to catch a variety of different species.

But you’ll never know unless you go. How to use the fishing forecast to your best advantage on tomorrow’s show.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration program supports our series… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This is Passport to Texas

Flagler Ranch is 36 hundred acres of Texas Hill Country. Since George Matthews purchased it in 1992, he’s used an ecosystem management approach. Before his stewardship, the land had suffered 100 years of abuse.

03—As far as being overgrazed by cattle and sheep and goats.

Louis Scherer III manages Flagler Ranch, which he said, had too many white tail deer.

15—And through MLD3 permits, we have got the whitetails population down to one in twelve per acre. Since we’ve done that and the other management practices, our weight per animal, and antler growth has almost doubled.

Flagler Ranch was a Lone Star Land Steward eco-region award winner for the Edwards Plateau in 2010. Jerry Turrentine is a consulting biologist for the ranch.

17—We’re trying to integrate various techniques into an overall ranch management plan. We’re looking at food plots. We’re going to bring back some rare plants through some plantings. We’re going to do some reintroductions of forbes and grasses…we’re trying to be a learning area for other ranches in the plateau.

Water is vital in any ecosystem, and Joyce Moore with TPWD says Flagler Ranch has done an exemplary job of collecting it.

10—And so what the Flagler ranch has been doing, which is very innovative, is they’ve been placing these spreader dams along these drainages to capture every bit of rain that Mother nature does provide.

Learn about the Lone star Land Stewards Awards on the Texas parks and Wildlife website.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration program supports our series… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This is Passport to Texas

It’s a New Year and time for resolutions. For the past few days we’ve been talking about how time spent in nature can make us healthier…happier…and smarter. Outreach and Education director Nancy Herron says when we say “smarter”, we don’t necessarily mean increasing one’s IQ.

54—Being outdoors helps you with focus, and concentration – it clears your mind in a little different way. So when you come back inside, you’re actually more ready to work. And they have neuroscientists who talk about the importance of before an important meeting … a job interview …something you anticipate is going to be stressful: take a walk around the block. Get outside. It clears your mind a little bit. I don’t think you can find a more fertile ground for creativity than nature and outdoors. So, if you want to spark wonder – and that’s the key to learning – that’s getting outside in nature. Put these things on your calendar. Make a commitment to that in those resolutions sop, once a day you’re getting outside to be a little healthier. Once a week you’re going to do something that will help reduce that stress. And once a month get out there – put it on the calendar – you can do this. And they’re fun. They’re really fun resolutions to have.

Thanks, Nancy. Remember: Life’s Better outside.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration program supports our series… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This is Passport to Texas

Happy New Year! We hope it’s going to be the best yet. Nancy Herron, director of Outreach and Education at Parks and Wildlife says resolving to be happier is as easy as spending more time outdoors.

28—Allowing yourself a little playtime outside does so many great things for you. If you put it on your calendar that once a week I’m going to do something fun for myself and it might be laying out in the grass and looking up and listening to birds, or maybe it’s riding a bike again, or trying another kind of fishing or something like that. You just feel better about yourself; you actually do feel more confident when you’ve been able to be out.

Nancy is outdoors regularly as you might imagine; she told me about coming across a sprawling live oak tree while on a walk in the woods with her granddaughter.

16— It was the best climbing tree ever. And my little monkey granddaughter just ran right up…and yes…I couldn’t resist, and I climbed up, too. It was so much fun. I felt pretty good about myself – I could actually do it at my age.

Tomorrow, Nancy Herron tells us how spending time outdoors can make us smarter.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration program supports our series… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Passport to Texas with support from the Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program

When it comes to quail, TPW biologist, Robert Perez, says they’ve had it rough. Habitat fragmentation and drought beat them up in Texas. Working with adjacent landowners to manage their properties for quail is helping to address fragmentation – but what about drought?

26— Where it’s dry, what you can do is be proactive. And so you have proactive strategies for drought, which is leaving residual cover; leaving standing grasses; leaving standing vegetation and not mowing it down; shredding it, or putting cattle on it or other livestock that will remove that vegetation. So you have to have something standing there for them, which is difficult to do in a drought. But there are areas that you can protect. And those quail will kind of hole up in those refugia until things turn around.

Thanks to a new grant from the Wildlife Restoration program, Robert Perez says the agency can now monitor the recovery efforts to help these native game birds.

20–By monitoring I mean you need to go in and count how many animals there are on the front end, and then you have your treatment or your improvements. You then continue counting and seeing if there is actual response by that species. So, we just got a grant from the Pittman Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act Fund – a federal grant – to go in and start measuring the impacts of our works at three different locations in the state over the next four years.

And we’ll follow along and report on their progress.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program supports our series and funds diverse conservation programs throughout Texas.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti