Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

You may know about bird houses… but Bat Conservation International, known as Bat Conservation International, wants you to know about bat houses, too.

A bat house is a structure that’s generally made out of wood and it has chambers inside of it. Rather than having an opening on the side, as you would for instance in a bird house, a bat house is open on the bottom. So the bats are able to fly in from underneath and them climb up into these chambers inside of the wooden house. You may have a bat house that holds 50 or fewer bats, or you may have a bat house that could hold 300 or more bats. Bats are very small, so a lot of bats can roost in a very small space.

Barbara French is a Biologist and Science Officer for Bat Conservation International.

We generally recommend that they are on a pole. Sometimes they’re on a side of a building, but it’s better that they’re not in trees because they don’t seem to do as well when they’re put in trees as they do if they’re on a poll.

Ready to get started? Bat Conservation International makes it easy.

At BCI, we sell a bat house builder’s handbook. It has a lot of information on how to build a bat house with all of the instructions and all of the information you would need to build one in there.

Details about bat houses and the builder’s guide are available at www.batcon.org.

That’s our show for today…with research and writing help fro Loren Seeger…For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti

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Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

The Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, boasts a bat population numbering 1.5 million, making it a unique and appreciated tourist attraction. But that wasn’t always the case, says Barbara French.

There were modifications done to the bridge that ended up making just the perfect sized crevices underneath the bridge. There probably had been bats there for sometime, but they began moving in, in larger numbers then. It drew the attention of, you know, many different kinds of people and people began being worried, and thinking that this was a danger to the city. They were actually considering exterminating those bats.

French is a Biologist and Science Officer for Bat Conservation International. She says Austin had a change of heart about the bats thanks to Merlin Tuttle.

Merlin Tuttle, who is the founder of Bat Conservation International, was headquartered in Wisconsin, and he came here and talked to a lot of officials and explained that the bats were actually a tremendous benefit and was able to protect the colony. Once the colony started growing and once people started realizing just how important these bats were in helping to control the insect pests, they became more interested in having the bats. As it became a unique site and known to people around the country, and then even around the world, people began coming to Austin to visit just specifically to see these bats.

Learn more about Austin’s Congress Avenue Bridge bats at www.batcon.org.

That’s our show for today…with research and writing help from Loren Seeger…For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti

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Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

Austin, known for its music scene, is known for its bats! The downtown Congress Avenue Bridge is a hot-spot for bats and bat-watchers.

It’s mainly Mexican Free-tail bats under the bridge because this is a maternity colony. In other words, these are females that are going to have their babies under there.

Barbara French is a Biologist and Science Officer for Bat Conservation International. Bat-watchers congregate near the bridge to watch bat’s nightly emergence. French says
some months are better than other for bat-watching.

Most of the young are going to be born in June. August is tremendous. August is a great time because then all of the young are flying. You know, most of them are independent. You can see wonderful flights out of the bridge in August, even September. Then after that it becomes a little more unpredictable as the weather changes and we move into the fall. There’s an estimated one and a half million bats flying out of the bridge. So it’s an amazing site. It really is an amazing thing to watch.

Austinites take pride in these unique residents.

Today, it’s neat to see that teachers are teaching about bats. People are becoming a lot more bat savvy, particularly in Austin because of the Congress Avenue Bridge bats.

Details about the Congress Bats can be found on the Cat Conservation International website at www.batcon.org.

Tomorrow, the history of Austin’s bats.

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

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

In the mid-1970s, non-native Smallmouth Bass were introduced into the Guadalupe River as an additional sport fish, and an alternative to our native Guadalupe Bass. Then something unintended happened.

Even though they look very different, the problem is, they can’t tell each other apart. Evidentially, they act similar enough, behaviorally, that they’ll reproduce, and they have hybrids.

Dr. Gary Garrett is a biologist at Heart of the Hills Fisheries Science Center in Kerrville. The hybrid offspring of these two species started to outnumber pure Guadalupe bass. For the past thirteen years — and with support from the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, http://www.ugra.org/, and the Hill Country Fly Fishers, http://www.hillcountryflyfishers.com/, researchers at Heart of the Hills have worked to reverse this trend.

We’re raising thousands of pure Guadalupe Bass here at the research station. And every year we stock them back into nature. Basically what we’re doing is replacing the hybrids that are out there with the pure Guadalupe Bass. And we’ll let nature takes its course from there. Here in Johnson Creek, where we began the study, about thirty percent of the fish were hybrids. And that wasn’t stable. It was still increasing when we started. It’s now down to around three percent, which is excellent. Now we want to go from three to zero.

Dr. Garrett says fish will be released in May and June.

That’s our show…we had help from Tom Harvey… our series receives support from the Sport Fish Restoration program, which funds research at the Heart of the Hills Fisheries Science Center…

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti

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

Biologists at the Heart of the Hills Fisheries Science Center in Kerrville for the past thirteen years have worked to reestablish the Guadalupe Bass, which had experienced a significant population decline.

It has two different problems it’s facing throughout its range. One is just habitat loss – which a lot of animals face. Here, and in most of the places it occurs, that’s not nearly as much of a problem as hybridization with the smallmouth bass.

Dr. Gary Garrett is a fisheries biologist at Heart of the Hills. The Guadalupe bass occurs only in the Texas Hill Country, in the headwaters of the streams that drain the Edwards Plateau. Smallmouth bass, introduced to these waters in the mid-1970s to provide additional sport fish for anglers, hybridized with the native species.

So, they’re not as well adapted for their environment. They may do well in the short run, but in the long haul they’re really not going to be as good a species.

Efforts to restore the Guadalupe bass population began with a study of Johnson Creek.

Here in Johnson Creek where we began the study, we started with about thirty percent of the fish were hybrids –and that wasn’t stable – it was still increasing when we started.

The prognosis for the state fish of Texas is excellent. And we’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

That’s our show for today…supported by the Sport Fish Restoration program, which funds research at the Heart of the Hills Fisheries Science Center…

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti

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