Passport to Texas

Stewardship: Sycamore Canyon Ranch Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ruthie and Johnny Russell, with their sons McLean and William, own and operate the 87-hundred acre Sycamore Canyon Ranch—along the Devil’s River in Val Verde County. This family understands the importance of preserving the wide, open spaces for both livestock and wildlife.

15— We don’t want fragmentation to occur here. We love the open spaces. And you really can’t protect water, wildlife and habitat without big, open spaces. If I were a billionaire I’d buy as many ranches as I could and protect them. [laughs]

Ruthie says their goal is to protect, share and communicate the public benefits of private lands stewardship, including preserving beautiful vistas, native wildlife habitats, clean air and water.

08—We look at this as a wilderness area. A wild area. We want to preserve it. We want to protect it. And, it’s just the perfect wild place to protect.

Some range management strategies they’ve used include deferred grazing and aggressive whitetail population control. In addition, they put their ranch under a conservation easement to protect it for generations.

11—My brother and I were both raised on ranches and in the outdoors. It would never have crossed our minds had this not been put under a conservation easement to sell this land.

The Russell’s Sycamore Canyon Ranch is a regional Lone Star Land Steward Award winner for 2014.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration program supports our series, and is funded by your purchase if fishing and hunting equipment and motorboat fuel.

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

Beauty of artificial reef

Angling: Value of Artificial Reefs Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

An article by Melissa Gaskill in the June issue of Texas parks and Wildlife magazine, explores the value of artificial reefs. These are retired structures like oil platforms that create much-needed hard substrate in the gulf. She asks whether the reefs increase marine populations, or simply aggregate existing populations.

07— The first thing that happens when you put any kind of structure in the water is that fish species will congregate around it; they’re attracted to that.

Dale Shively is Texas Parks and Wildlife program leader for artificial reefs. He says congregating is just the beginning.

20— There also is production that goes on. Once you get that marine life growing, you’re creating an ecosystem. You’re not only bringing fish species in, but they stay there, live there, they spawn there. You can find the juveniles on there. That doesn’t mean that some of those fish species don’t migrate away at times. But they actually use it for various life stages.

Through a monitoring program, Shively says they’re attempting to quantify various fish species by relative abundance.

21— There is also a debate about how valuable are oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. There are a lot of fishermen who claim that you remove these and you’re destroying the red snapper population. There’s another school of thought that the red snapper were here originally without the oil platforms. But, there’s no doubt that the red snapper population has increased since we have more structure out there.

Read about this debate in the June issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program supports our Series. For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.

Diving near an artificial reef.

Angling: Artificial Reefs Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What do concrete, decommissioned ships and retired oil platforms have in common? They’re all materials used to create artificial reefs in the Gulf of Mexico. But if you ask Dale Shively which is best material for creating this marine habitat, he says: it depends.

04— We have all of those materials in our program, and they all serve a different purpose.

Shively is Texas Parks and Wildlife program leader for artificial reefs.

27— Farther off shore, we have mainly petroleum platforms. They’re solid, stable, and durable. They’re massive structures that give a lot of area to invertebrate growth and bring in a lot of fish species. Ships that we put out are good habitat, but they’re also primarily to bring in diving opportunities. And then as you move in closer to shore, in our near shore reefs, we use a lot of concrete – bridge rubble and things like that – that are good for fishing.

The reefs create habitat for marine species, and this leads to better angling and diving opportunities.

12— What we’ve seen with the Texas Clipper project, is that economic returns for angling could be over a million dollars a year back to the local economy. Whereas diving could be several million.

Find an article on the value of artificial reefs in the June issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

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

Box of zebra mussels.

Invasives: Clean, Drain and Dry Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Arriving in the ballast of ships from Eastern Europe, zebra mussels reached the Great Lakes in the 1980s.

05— They’ve been pretty steadily moving across much of the eastern and central portion of the United States.

Inland fisheries biologist Brian Van Zee says they arrived in Lake Texoma in 2009; and occupy waters of 6 lakes in north and Central Texas.

10—They’re primarily moved from water body to water body by boaters, who don’t take the time to clean, drain and dry when heading from an infested lake to a non-infested lake.

As filter feeders Zebra Mussels impact the aquatic food chain and compete for plankton. They clog water intake pipes of municipal utility districts, causing significant increases in maintenance and operational costs. It’s vital boaters clean, drain and dry their boats after every outing.

19—We recommend boaters dry their boats for at least a week before they go from one lake to the next. If they pull the plug out of the bottom of the boat, lower the engines down, and make sure there’s no water in them, and make sure the live wells are empty, and open those compartments up and let them dry in between going from one lake to the next, you really reduce that risk of moving zebra mussels from one lake to another.

At this time, clean, drain and dry is the law in 47 Texas counties, and could expand to statewide. [NOTE: Since the program was first produced, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission met and approved a new regulation requiring that all boats operating on public fresh water anywhere in Texas be drained before leaving or approaching a lake or river to help combat the further spread of zebra mussels and other invasive species. The new measure takes effect July 1, 2014.]

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

Blue catfish – a fighter and biter for those who “noodle.”

Fishing: Giving Fish a Hand Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Noodling or hand fishing is a preferred way to land big catfish, for some.

15— What they do is they find holes that are typically on the bank, or in structure timber, what have you. And, fishermen will search around in the water blindly, feeling in holes until they find these fish, and then they’ll pull them out with their hands.

Whether the anglers get the catfish, or the catfish get the anglers is up for debate.

07— Some of them will tell you they’ll be as gentle as a kitty cat, and some of them will meet you at the door, ready to snap on.

Kris Bodine is a research scientist at Heart of the Hills Fisheries Science Center.

09—They [hand fishers] tell me that actually blue catfish are a little more aggressive than the flat head catfish, and a lot of the hand fishers don’t want to catch blue catfish because they’re so aggressive.

Although hand fishing is not a new sport, it only became legal in Texas in 2011, which means researchers are in the beginning stages of studying this unique user group.

16—It seems at the outset right now, in terms of the data we’re collecting, that we don’t have a very big user group. There’s probably not a lot of folks going out there hand fishing. In fact, they don’t even have a very long window to do it. It’s typically during the spawning season, so they only have a couple months to hand fish.

A survey for hand-fishing enthusiasts. That’s tomorrow.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration program supports our series and is funded by your purchase of hunting and fishing equipment and motorboat fuel.

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