- ANNOUNCER: The Texas Parks and Wildlife Television Series is supported in part by Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation -- conserving the wild things and wild places of Texas, thanks to members across the state.

Additional funding is provided by Toyota.

Your local Toyota dealers are proud to support outdoor recreation and conservation in Texas.

Toyota -- Let's Go Places.

- NARRATOR: Coming up on Texas Parks & Wildlife... - Say the magic words.

- Arby!

[gun shot] - Nice!

Hee hee!

- I just love getting out onto these places and seeing how people lived in the past.

- The paddlefish doesn't start reproducing until they're six to ten years old.

But we're just now starting to be able to test that.

[theme music] ♪ ♪ - NARRATOR: Texas Parks and Wildlife, a television series for all outdoors.

- When moving through the field, you're either here, or you're here at all times.

Never here, never down here.

- Okay.

[upbeat music] My name is Ashley Taylor.

I am a native Texan.

I've lived here my entire life.

Okay.

- You now have a live loaded gun.

[takes deep breath] - I have a background in education, and prior to what I do now, I was a principal.

Oh, geez, okay.

I've never even shot a shotgun before.

- Pretty good.

- All right, I did it!

Oh, well, that's new.

I am excited about giving it a try, and it's just something completely outside of anything I would ever do prior to this.

[upbeat music] - I'm Josh Crumpton, at Spoke Hollow Outfitters.

So, in my thirties, I was pretty interested in the sustainable food movement, which, in a roundabout way, led me to hunting.

[upbeat music] As I got into it, I realized that I really had a fuel and a passion for introducing people to hunting, bringing new people into the outdoors.

[upbeat music] Sometimes the bird is gonna fly right into our face.

You're gonna go to shoot it like this, it's gonna come, go over your head.

Instead of doing this, you get in the process of doing this.

[upbeat music] [dog whining] - That makes sense to me.

- Then I'll turn this over to you.

- Okay.

[upbeat music] Well, I guess, too, that you have to know what birds you're allowed to shoot too, right?

- JOSH: And when you're allowed to shoot them, and when you're not.

- There's so much more to it.

When it comes to hunting, I really have no background, really no experience.

Oh God.

[gun firing] They were right in my face.

[upbeat music] [gun firing] Aw, it just, again, it just happened so quickly.

Oh, there he is.

Oh God, it's right there.

[upbeat music] [Ashley laughing] - Line 'em up.

[upbeat music] - I don't wanna shoot that way.

I gotta be ready.

- JOSH: Working with Ashley's been fantastic.

- I don't wanna miss the bird.

- JOSH: A lot of times we get people who come out, and, in one day, we cram in a lot.

We go from clay shooting to into the field, to shooting birds.

Good boy.

But working with the stewards program, and having Ashley as a mentee, has given me an opportunity to, really, over a few months, really talk about the dynamics of shooting.

Do it!

[gun firing] Nice, there it is, yes!

- Yeah!

- Good job.

Nice, Sally, here.

Sally, here.

- Oh my gosh, I did it.

- JOSH: Dead bird.

Arby, dead bird.

- Here, sit.

Sit.

- JOSH: Tell him sit first.

- Sit.

- JOSH: Hand on it.

[dog panting] - Good boy.

- You can tell it's a hen because-- It's gonna be really cool to follow Ashley through this season, and watch the challenge get turned up each time.

[Ashley gasping] - I have a bird in the back.

[upbeat music] I am so excited right now.

Yes!

I wanna keep going.

- JOSH: You wanna keep going?

- Yes, I love it.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ Ready?

Follow me this way.

Arby, come on.

Get used to this idea of keeping track, mentally.

- ASHLEY: All the moving parts, yeah.

Last year, my sister went on a mentored hunt.

And on the hunt, she was talking about how it completely changed the way she viewed hunting, and viewed hunters, and so, I really wanted to be a part of that.

I wanted to see what it was like.

- JOSH: We got the dog on point in front of us.

- ASHLEY: Okay.

- Keep moving.

- Right there?

- JOSH: Keep moving right there.

Now call him.

- ASHLEY: Oh, there's two right here.

- JOSH: Okay, now call for Arby.

- ASHLEY: So, they're gonna go that way, or at my face?

- JOSH: Maybe at your face, but I'm gonna get down.

Go ahead.

You're in charge, boss lady.

- All right.

- Say the magic words.

- ASHLEY: Arby!

[dog panting] [gun firing] Nice, hee hee!

That was awesome.

Tell him "dead bird."

- Dead bird, Arby.

[dog panting] Heel.

Sit.

Good boy.

Drop.

Good boy.

[upbeat music] - I work with Stewards of the Wild.

We've volunteered our time, provided our dogs, and helped this mission to get more adults into the uplands.

[upbeat music] - What a day!

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ I'm excited, I'm nervous.

[upbeat music] - Nothing new out here than anything else we've done before, just more challenging.

Let's go get your bird.

So, we're gonna walk from here all the way along that cliff van behind us.

[upbeat music] - This is super humbling.

- I got birds above me, and I got one single peeled off below me that Ashley took a couple shots at that we might be able to run that thing down.

Over.

- I was just like, oh my gosh.

This hunt was so different because we were always on the move.

You have to be ready to move quick.

[upbeat music] - Do it again.

[gun firing] There's a lot of youth programs out there, and youth programs are critical, but there's not enough adult-focused programs like this.

Yoo-hoo!

These are adults that have families, Ashley has kids, and these are also adults who can immediately start to support conservation efforts.

And now, she's out there to support and grow the mission.

So, we recruited one more person.

- ASHLEY: And I feel so blessed and so grateful to be a part of this.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music] - These sites like Hueco Tanks are like books in the sense that the artifacts, the cultural features, the natural setting tell us the story of the people that lived here.

I just love getting out onto these places and seeing these resources and how people lived in the past.

Mystery solving I guess to me, solving the puzzle, and learning the story of these people.

- Tim is the epitome of a Texas Parks and Wildlife employee who, through everything he does, conserves the valuable resources.

In the case of cultural resources, these are irreplaceable.

- Conservation is important because that's part of our heritage.

And when those things are lost, we lose the story of our lives.

In the case of Hueco Tanks, over 10,000 years of archeological deposits, thousands of pictographs, and it's basically the birthplace of the Kachina belief system that still guides Puebloan societies today.

I wrote the nomination for the National Historic Landmark designation of Hueco Tanks, which I believe was 129 pages.

It had to be reviewed at the regional level and also in Washington, DC.

- The National Historic Landmark Nomination is the highest recognition that can be given through the National Park Service.

This was a very complicated process and Tim spent, I think it was two years or more of his time writing a very, very detailed account of those resources.

Writing that was something that only Tim could have handled because that's the kind of guy he is.

- Some of the benefits of that designation is the fact that Hueco Tanks will get more national publicity.

It also opens the door to some grant funds that we can apply for to continue our preservation efforts.

- Hueco Tanks is an oasis in the desert.

As an NHL, it has now achieved the highest level of significance for an archeological site.

Every part of that National Historic Landmark nomination was documented to the nth degree.

And that's because of Tim's eye for detail.

Tim is extremely passionate about what he does.

He's the kind of person who will continue to do extraordinary work as he has for the last two decades for Texas Parks and Wildlife.

- The story of Hueco Tanks isn't finished.

It's ongoing even beyond Native American cultures, there's other people that visit Hueco Tanks and enjoy and recreate here.

So it's a book without an ending.

- PAUL KISEL: Here at Eisenhower State Park, there's 6 1/2 million potential visitors living down the road in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.

And the kids down there could stay there and be concrete jungle kids.

[honking] But what we try to do is do something to intrigue 'em, to tease 'em, and to do something to bring them up to the north woods up here at Eisenhower State Park.

[energetic music] - The boys just love to be out on the water playing around so we can sneak in some good outdoor skills, some scouting basics and have a lot of fun out on the lake, too.

- SCOUT: Mmmmm.

That tastes delectable.

- KEVIN: I think a lot of the life lessons are learned around the campfire when you get away for a little bit of time and you're in a tent.

It's getting them away from when mom and dad are taking care of them and they get to make some decisions for themselves.

[energetic music] - PAUL: We've got a wonderful swimming hole out here.

The geology of the area is set up just right in between two bluffs.

It's a nice sandy bottom, smooth, goes all the way out.

Having a big marina in the middle of state park is very unique.

If you have a problem with a boat or a problem with something, they have certified mechanics down there that can work on that.

They've got ice right there at the dock.

They sell bait.

The services they provide down there, campers need on a daily basis.

- HIKER: Look at that cardinal!

- PAUL: We've got a natural forest out here.

You can come out and you can hike the whole trail or you can bike the whole trail.

We've got some prairie restoration areas up here, some remnants of the tall grass prairie.

Eisenhower State Park has a wealth of outdoor education programs, everything from a ranger led hike to campfire programs.

We try to structure programs around the needs of the visitor.

- INSTRUCTOR: Beautiful!

Beautiful cast.

Beautiful move.

- Today our event includes free casting lessons because Eisenhower State Park is a wonderful place to go fish.

Lake Texoma is a great place and it's all about the wonderful fishing opportunities that are here at Lake Texoma.

- There's a bunch of fish down there!

- The person that comes out here and doesn't catch a fish is the one that needs to come up and just talk to myself or one of my staff.

We'll turn them on to where to go catch a fish, many times showing them exactly what we've been catching them on.

[energetic music] We've got over five miles of shoreline and a wealth of knowledge to share with you where to go fish, swim, put your boat in, go out on the lake and enjoy it.

[energetic music] We're in our third generation of campers and park visitors here at Eisenhower State Park.

The neat thing about it is we are the closest campground, closest marina to a major highway.

These people can leave busy lives behind down in Dallas and be up camping or be up at the marina in 55 minutes.

[energetic music] - CLIFF SHACKELFORD: We are in Brazos Bend State Park watching a common moorhen, in early October.

Busy preening.

And back in the marsh, a couple of moorhens that are not too happy with one another.

And boom, there they fight.

Punch, punch.

Using those feet with those sharp claws.

These are males that are fighting over territory.

They'll do this year round.

They are fighting over space that has food, and they're in a marsh.

They are sharing that marsh but they have their little territories carved out and they have to constantly protect it.

Wings back on the water to hold em up... that way they can tilt back and get those powerful feet forward.

Scratch!

Feet and beak, those are your only weapons.

Just a couple of boys duking it out.

And this happens all year long in the marsh.

It gets a lot worse as marshes start to dry up, territories have to get a little smaller.

You'll see it more in the spring when there's babies to protect, babies to feed, but you'll see this year round with birds that are sharing a limited resource.

A little bit of insight into the world of a common moorhen.

[moorhens cackle] [water flowing] [crickets chirp] - MIKE MONTAGNE: We'll do one more to make sure.

- NARRATOR: Alongside a bayou is an unusual place for a surgical procedure... - Okay, so I'm going to make an incision.

- NARRATOR: ...unless it is for a pretty unusual patient.

That patient is a kind of fish more than 300 million years old, a paddlefish.

- Go ahead and give him some anesthetic.

- NARRATOR: The surgeon is Mike Montagne with the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service.

And this operation is about bringing these fish back to these waters.

- 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.

- NARRATOR: Paddlefish are living fossils, a fish species older than dinosaurs.

[roar] While they may be the oldest surviving animal species in North America, they need some help surviving mankind.

Historic harvest for meat and caviar has pressured populations, but the greatest threat to paddlefish has been how humans have altered their habitat.

[water gently flows] - Paddlefish were originally in the Big Cypress system.

Once Lake O' the Pines was put in in the late 50s and the dam at Lake O' the Pines really changed the river's natural flow.

Due to the changes in the water flow, loss of flood pulses throughout the year to cue spawning events, loss of suitable spawning habitat, over the years, populations declined.

So we get to that point where paddlefish just don't exist here anymore.

- NARRATOR: Downstream, the loss of seasonal flows impacted not only a threatened fish, but an entire ecosystem.

- LAURA-ASHLEY OVERDYKE: After the dam, flows of water almost ceased and we didn't have those natural variations.

We realized that a main problem for Caddo Lake was the quantity of water.

The Caddo Lake Institute worked together with the Corps of Engineers and with Parks and Wildlife and many other partners over the years to try and recreate what natural flows would look like.

[rushing water] 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-- help restore the habitat.

- TIM: Got it.

[fish splashing] - MIKE: We've been reintroducing paddlefish since about 2014.

We started off with about 50 fish that we radio tagged and put inside the Big Cypress and Caddo Lake, and we followed those around for about a year while the battery in the tags worked.

[radar beeping] One of the things we really wanted to find out is if the fish would stay in the system of if they would go over the dam at the downstream end of Caddo Lake.

- Well after that year, the paddlefish stayed in the system, so we've moved on over the last few years continuing to stock paddlefish.

We're stocking fish over the next 10 years to try and build the numbers of paddlefish in the Big Cypress-Caddo Lake system.

Now that we're four years down the road and we've seen fish survive and grow to some larger sizes, the next big question is just, "Will they spawn, reproduce and help their own numbers grow?"

- NARRATOR: To answer that question, a crew must recapture some older fish to implant new transmitters.

[boat revs] - MIKE: Today, we're going to be electrofishing right below the spillway of Lake O' the Pines dam because that's where they like to congregate.

- TIM: They are attracted to the flow to go upstream.

They can't go any further, so we can actually find quite a few of them here.

To capture these paddlefish, we're going to use our electrofishing equipment.

The fish get stunned by the electricity and we're able to net them onto the boat.

- JOSH: Come on.

[energetic music] - It's like a grab bag, you really never know what you're going to get, so it's Christmas every time a fish pops up.

- NARRATOR: The fish are not harmed, but not stunned for long, so crews must stay alert.

- They come up from this murky bottom, so you could see nothing for a solid minute and then, all of the sudden, just this wave and rush of fish species come up.

Largemouth Bowfin!

- JOSH: Big flathead.

[laughs] - MARGARET: Whoa!

No, nope.

Paddlefish.

We want paddlefish.

Come on fish.

Things go wrong every once in a while, so it's great to have that other person to just reach over - "You're coming back in the boat, buddy!"

- It's slippery on the boat sometimes.

- We have not lost anybody today.

We're going to keep it that way.

[music] - JOSH: [sigh] Give me another shot.

I'll get you, I swear!

- Whoa!

[energetic music] - MARGARET: Yeah!

- JOSH: Whew.

Beautiful fish, beautiful fish.

And I'm glad that we're taking part in the restoration program to bring them back.

It's really cool.

Whew!

- When the crew that's electrofishing catches a fish, they'll bring them up to the surgical unit that we're gonna have set up.

We're going to cut them open, implant a sonic tag inside of their abdomen, and sew them back up.

And then release them back into the river.

The paddlefish doesn't start reproducing until they're six to ten years old.

But we're just now starting to be able to test that.

Let's put him in the recovery bin and we'll release him back out into the river.

Surgery went well.

About as fast as I can do it.

These are just sutures that will eventually just dissolve.

We'll be able to really track what they're hopefully using for spawning areas, and we're going to start looking for eggs, we're going to start looking for little larval fish, so if they're in there, we're going to know for sure.

So I'll trade with you guys.

You got one?

- Yep.

- Let's trade and you can take him farther away and release him.

- TIM: It's been really satisfying to stock small fish that haven't been here for probably years, and find paddlefish that have grown to over three feet in length.

Because the ultimate goal is to get enough paddlefish in the system, with the right environmental conditions, where they're going to be able to spawn and be a self-sustaining population.

- MIKE: Woo!

I am optimistic about the chances for the paddlefish.

The paddlefish is so charismatic that actually more and more people want to get involved with it.

- I mean here's this prehistoric creature that's right in our backyards.

- MARGARET: I love these fish.

These fish are fantastic.

They haven't evolved much from the time of the dinosaurs, and they still exist, and they're just cool.

They're just absolutely fascinating.

- TIM: It's brought a lot of groups together.

- LAURA-ASHLEY: We're grateful that so many different layers, federal, state, and local, have come together to make this possible.

- NARRATOR: Some might ask if one old fish, off-limits to Texas anglers, could be worth all this effort.

But restoring this fish only happens by restoring a more natural ecosystem.

[water gently flowing] - TIM: The work that we're doing for paddlefish doesn't just benefit the paddlefish.

It benefits the river ecology and probably more than 30 different species of fish that live in the river.

[uplifting music] - MIKE: It's still early, but the optimism is there.

They are an excellent indicator of what's going on here, and if we are able to keep a population in here because we've changed the flows to a more natural state, we're taking a huge step how we manage reservoirs and our flows coming out of those reservoirs for our natural resources.

All good.

Exactly what we want to see.

Fade to black!

[laughs] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] [gentle wind blowing] This series is supported in part by Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation -- conserving the wild things and wild places of Texas, thanks to members across the state.

Additional funding is provided by Toyota.

Your local Toyota dealers are proud to support outdoor recreation and conservation in Texas.

Toyota -- Let's Go Places.