Passport to Texas

A gobbler in its natural habitat.

Habitat and Turkey Restoration Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is Passport to Texas

Texas has three sub-species of Turkey: the Rio Grande is the most abundant, followed by the Eastern and then by the Merriam. Without good habitat, none will thrive.

They have to have good structural cover.

Jason Hardin, Turkey Program Leader at TPW, says this may include low-growing, woody cover for nesting.

It provides like an umbrella that they sit underneath to protect from avian predators and then also weather elements. And then also, grasses, weeds, forbes growing up to provide vertical cover.

Think of woody cover as you would a deer blind: you can see out, but nothing sees in. This feature is critical when hens are on nests and raising poults. The biggest threat to good turkey recruitment (nest success and poult survival) overall is weather.

Because that nesting rate, re-nesting rate, poult survival—all that’s driven essentially by moisture and the climate. So, if we have three years of drought, you’re going to see that Rio Grande type turkey population begin to decline. So, it’s something we try to pay attention to. And over a long term—five ten years—is there something beyond weather that’s causing a shift in that population.

In addition, the lack of fire to burn out dense understory growth from an abundance of rain, impacts Eastern turkey habitat. The value of fire when managing habitat—that’s tomorrow.

The Wildlife Restoration Program Supports our Series.

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

Wild turkey in Palo Duro

Wild Turkeys Making Comeback Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is Passport to Texas

Unregulated hunting and loss of habitat nearly caused Turkeys to disappear from Texas. Jason Hardin, Turkey Program Leader at TPW, says thanks to hunter and landowner support, bag limits and a restocking program, they’re making a comeback.

In Texas, we’ve been working hard since the 1930s and 40s to put turkeys back on the landscape in Texas. We’ve been tremendously successful with the Rio Grande—500 to 600-thousand birds in the state today. But with the Eastern sub-species, we haven’t been as successful.

Nevertheless, TPW and its partners continued eastern turkey restoration efforts in the state.

In 1979, we brought our first eastern wild turkeys over from Louisiana—put them in Tyler County—they did pretty good. In 1987, we worked with the National Wild Turkey Federation, their Making Tracks program. We started working with lots of states, bringing turkeys into east Texas. Using what we referred to at the time, using a block stocking approach.

That involved releasing 15 – 20 birds at five to 10 locations in a county; they’d work in that county for two years, and then move to the next.

During the latter part of that block stocking era—mid-nineties, Dr. Raul Lopez was doing some research, and he found that we were doing two things that he thought we could improve on: we could put larger number of birds on the ground—increase that up to 70 or 80 [birds]; he referred to it as super stocking.

The second area for improvement was the habitat into which they released the birds. More on that tomorrow.

The Wildlife Restoration Program Supports our Series.

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

NOTE: Find our 30 minute podcast on turkey conservation, turkey calling and cooking wild turkey when you visit Under the Texas Sky.org

Green Jay

TPW TV--Green Jay Study in Rio Grande Valley Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is Passport to Texas

A new study in South Texas focuses on the Green Jay.

We don’t know a lot about green jays, first of all, so it’s important to know what they’re doing, if we want to be able to manage for them, and we want to manage for them because we have a lot of birdwatchers that come into the Valley and one of the species that they really want to see are green jays.

Tony Henehan is a Wildlife Biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The Green Jay occurs from South America, north to Texas.

The Rio Grande Valley is, I think, the third fastest growing urban area in the country. It’s expanding at a rapid rate. A lot of urbanization, a lot of habitat change is going on, and so these birds have been able to adapt to a certain extent.

To understand how Green Jays are adapting to the rapidly changing environment of The Valley, Tony plans to trap, tag and track up to ten birds a year. RGV resident, Donna McCowan let Tony place a trap in her backyard.

Well, Tony brought this cage to me about a week and a half ago and had me set it up here under the shade. With the cage door open we were putting corn and peanuts in it, so the birds would get used to it and just assume it’s supposed to be there, and they had no problem with getting in and out of it. This morning, we’re going close the top of it and watch and wait for the birds to show up.

Find out if Tony and Donna trapped a Green Jay when you watch the Texas Parks and Wildlife TV series on PBS the week of April 14.

The Wildlife Restoration Program Supports our Series.

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

Paddlefish

TPW TV--Progress on Paddlefish Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

TPW TV--Blanco River Recovery Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is Passport to Texas

When a forty-foot wall of water thundered down the Blanco River on Memorial Day weekend of 2015, it claimed 13 lives, destroyed hundreds of homes, and ravaged the land along the banks. The recovery process for humans and nature continues.

The flood of 2015 caused massive devastation to the Blanco River landscape, there was a loss of a lot of vegetation, a lot of trees, a lot of soil scour, and what we see here is an eco-system in recovery.

Ryan McGillicuddy is a Texas Parks and Wildlife conservation ecologist with Inland Fisheries.

Healthy native stream-side vegetation provides a number of ecological functions including bank stability, because its roots are deep and strong.  It also provides a water quality function by filtering run-off and pollutants, but also, importantly, this healthy stream-side vegetation is also an extreme benefit to our fish and wildlife populations.

Healthy stream-side vegetation benefits our fish and wildlife populations, including the Guadalupe Bass. At one time this fish had been pushed completely out of the Blanco River system by non-native small mouth bass. But through management and restocking, it’s rebounding.

We’ve been able to document that the fish that we’ve stocked are now reproducing in the wild, so it’s been a pretty remarkable success story.

Experience the story of the recovery of a community, a river and wildlife on the Texas Parks and Wildlife TV series the week of March 10 on PBS.

The Sport Fish Restoration Program supports our series.

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