Passport to Texas

Billy Hassell’s Powderhorn Ranch

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Billy Hassell may live in Fort Worth, but this full-time artist says nature is both his muse and his subject.

I grew up in a time when there was still come open spaces and creeks. And, I got to experience a little bit of nature even though I grew up in a pretty urban environment. I guess my love of nature was born from those experiences, and I’ve been searching for that throughout the rest of my life. I’ve been seeking out opportunities to be out in nature and find places to inspire my work.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation commissioned Billy to create a series of prints to celebrate wildlife habitat conservation in Texas. His first: Powderhorn Ranch, 17 thousand acres of coastal prairies and marsh along Matagorda Bay.

We decided on five land projects [30 prints each] around the state of Texas—Powderhorn being the jewel in the crown. It’s very heartening to me seeing large areas of land like this preserved for the future.

Billy is in awe of Powderhorn’s complexity.

And as I learn more and more about it, I’m fascinated by the complexities of it, and how practically every plant and every little creature plays a role in the overall balance of a place.

Proceeds from Billy Hassell’s lithographs help Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation keep places wild places wild forever. See photos of his prints, and where the prints are displayed at tpwf.org.

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

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Galleries that will carry the Keeping it Wild lithographs include:

Conduit Gallery, Dallas
www.conduitgallery.com

William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth
www.williamcampbellcontemporaryart.com

William Reaves Fine Art, Houston
www.reavesart.com

Questions? Contact TPWF at 214.720.1478.

Scary fun is in store during the Halloween season in Texas State Parks

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Make plans to visit state parks this month for a wide range of Halloween activities for the whole family.

On Friday, October 21, Galveston Island SP hosts a Zombie Apocalypse Hike. Rangers weave in scary fun with real life survival skills during an hour-long hike.

On Saturday, October 22, South Llano River SP in the Hill Country, where owls, bats, snakes and spiders take center stage for two-hours of show and tell with these kinda creepy, but very beneficial, critters.

Also on Saturday, October 22, Estero Llano Grande SP in the Rio Grande Valley celebrates its 10th Annual Spooky Science Fest. This year’s theme is Jurassic Estero; complete with a dinosaur program for the kids, as well as hayrides, costume contests, food vendors, and more.

And on Thursday, October 27th, it’s Halloween at the Hatchery at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens. Local businesses and organizations will hand out candy, and the center will be decorated throughout with a Halloween theme.

Find details for these and other events in the calendar section of the Texas Parks and Wildlife website.

That’s our show… Funding provided in part by Ram Trucks. Guts. Glory. Ram

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

Whitetail buck

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If you harvest multiple deer this season, perhaps you’d consider donating one of them to Hunters for the Hungry—a program of Feeding Texas.

Well, this is a wonderful program that helps us fight hunger.

Hunters and meat processors provide more than 9 million servings of venison to Texas families annually.

Celia Cole, CEO of Feeding Texas, says this year hunters and anglers have another way to donate to Hunters for the Hungry when they buy their license.

So, this is an opportunity for all sportsmen, who want to give back to their communities, they don’t have to donate venison directly—but they can make a financial contribution when they check that box on the hunting or fishing license. [Now], for the first time, this program has a revenue stream to support it. So, for us, this is an opportunity to grow this program in a way we’ve never been able to in the past.

Celia Cole of Feeding Texas tells us how she envisions these tax deductible donations being used.

My biggest hope is that we will be able to minimize the cost to the hunter and the processor of the donation. Ideally, we would want them to be able to request reimbursement from us for the cost of processing the meat. And then, it would be zero cost to the participating hunters and processors.

Purchase hunting and fishing licenses online from the Texas Parks and Wildlife website, or from license retailers statewide.

The Wildlife Restoration program supports our series.

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

The Texas Landscape Project

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The story of Texas conservation is a rich, evolving, and interconnected tale.

John Muir said back in 1911 or so: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’

David Todd “connects the dots” through Texas’ land, water, energy, wildlife, and people in the atlas The Texas Landscape Project. To do so, he dipped into a vast reservoir of existing research.

There’s a lot of what we call ‘Big Data’ out there. And that means digital information that’s on the web that state agencies, federal bureaucracies, academic institutions, individual researchers, citizen scientists put out there. And a lot of it hasn’t been mapped yet. And some of those connections haven’t been explored as much as they might be, or shared with the public. And so we’re trying to do that with this book.

With graphics from co-author Jonathan Ogren, readers can visualize Texas’ conservation past, present and future.

We try to touch on environmental issues across the state. So, if you’re an East Texas resident, you may be interested in the stories about the Big Thicket. If you live down on the coast, you might be interested in the stories of the recovery of the brown pelican or Kemps Ridley Sea Turtle. Or, if you live out in the Big Bend, you might be curious about the recovery of the Bighorn Mountain Sheep. So, we try to give examples of important conservation efforts that have happened in your corner of the state. And I’m hoping that’ll be a nice place for folks to enter the book and maybe start to explore what’s in there.

The Texas Landscape Project at texaslandscape.org.

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

Don Cash at the JD Murphee WMA

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This month, when you tune into the new season of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Television series on PBS, you’ll see some changes.

It’s going to have a little different look: new open, new music, new graphics—and as always—lots of new segments.

Series Producer, Don Cash, says new, shorter segments within episodes will offer viewers more variety.

We’re going to do a few less of the longer segments, and concentrate a little more on doing segments that are a little bit shorter—maybe three, four, five minutes. There’s just a lot of stuff that we want to put on the show. So, we’re going to concentrate a little bit more on doing some shorter things, and hopefully have more new segments than we’ve had in season’s past.

Viewers can still expect to see everything they love about the Texas outdoors on the show—and more. Improved, smaller cameras and micro-copters, help producers to tell stories on a more intimate scale.

These cameras allow you to get closer to things. Especially the Go-Pro cameras. You put a small camera on a kayak that you couldn’t do before. So, it does show a unique angle. And it allows us to really tell a story in a little different way.

The new season of the award-winning Texas Parks and Wildlife television series on PBS premiers the week of October 16. Check your local listings.

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