- NARRATOR: 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 provided by the Toyota Tundra.

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

Adventure-- it's what we share.

Funding also provided by Academy Sports and Outdoors.

Helping hunters, anglers, and outdoor enthusiasts of all ages get outside.

Out here, fun can't lose.

[theme music] - ANNOUNCER: Coming up on Texas Parks & Wildlife... - Drive just a few minutes and you're out here in the wilderness among a beautiful natural environment.

- This weekend we're having the RUTA 806 off-highway vehicle event here in Potter County at the Canadian River.

- This is the first time to rehabilitate bears and release back into the wild.

[theme music] - ANNOUNCER: Texas Parks & Wildlife , a television series for all outdoors.

♪ ♪ [birds chirping] [wind howling] - McKinney Falls State Park is a great location within Austin city limits.

We're 13 miles away from the capital of Texas.

[birds chirping] [car hooting] It's what I like to call an urban oasis.

[gentle music] ♪ ♪ [gentle music] ♪ ♪ For a small park, McKinney Falls has everything that the larger parks have to offer.

We're just over 600 acres total.

We have 12 miles of hiking and biking trail.

[leaves rustling] People will come out here to go fishing, rock climbing-- - Woo.

- camping.

We've got 85 water and electric campsites.

There's birding opportunities.

There's a little bit of everything for anyone who comes to visit our park.

Even though we are a busy location, it's easy to get lost in nature.

[bird crowing] [water splashing] [insects chirping] - Some of our most popular trails include the Onion Creek Trail, which is an entirely paved 2.8-mile trail.

As well as the Rock Shelter Trail.

- Watch your heads as you're coming in.

We actually know that people have been living here for nearly the past 8,000 years.

- Oh my gosh.

- Big rock.

- When you're here, don't forget to check out the bike trail system, which includes the Homestead Trail, where you can see the ruins of the old homestead.

The bike trail system is a little more wild.

It makes for a great opportunity to do biking and hiking and you're a little bit more secluded.

- Y'all ready?

All right, follow me bud.

- Yep.

[upbeat music] - Here comes the bridge.

[upbeat music] - Yeah.

♪ ♪ Go faster, Dad.

♪ ♪ - Okay.

- Wheeee.

Wheeee.

- I love this trail 'cause it's perfect for the whole family that they feel challenged because it's technical enough but not too technical that they can't ride it.

[upbeat music] Woo, go girl.

These trails are awesome.

We should do this every weekend.

[birds chirping] - The vast limestone expands above the Lower Falls area, which folks affectionately refer to as the moonscape.

It is a particularly unique geologic feature to the park.

You can really tell just by looking at it what it's been through, through weathering, throughout thousands of years of history.

[gentle music] One of the draws of McKinney Falls State Park is our proximity to downtown Austin.

Drive just a few minutes and you're out here in the wilderness among a beautiful natural environment.

[gentle music] [waterfall flowing] [engines revving] - This weekend, we're having the RUTA 806 annual off-highway vehicle event here in Potter County at the Canadian River off Highway vehicle area.

It's always been a very prevalent and popular recreational activity.

[engine revving] [upbeat music] The vast majority of people that I interact with, they're very thankful to be able to take their families.

[upbeat music] The off-highway vehicle enthusiasts have used this area because of its immense size and diversity of the terrain and the sand, cliffs, and canyons, and then you have a really good area too of trees along the river area that is unique in many ways in the panhandle area.

[upbeat music] - My husband likes it.

We've been off-roading for about seven years probably, and then we start bringing friends in, then family in.

I always bring my kids in with us.

We're always together.

[upbeat music] - So, we're coming up on the drag races for all these ATVs and Razors and side by sides.

They all line up on the side.

They kind of put up a perimeter.

[engine revving] [upbeat music] - This is my second time to do sand drags.

It's my first RUTA event.

Like you're really seeing firsthand how fast and easy accidents can happen out here.

[upbeat music] I know as a direct result that this will be a safer event for us being here.

[upbeat music] - We as game wardens here absolutely work as a part of a team to ensure the safety and well being of everyone who's going to attend what has increasingly become the largest public event we have here at the Canadian River.

[upbeat music] - We travel about seven hours.

- There's definitely a lot more people as well.

- A lot of people.

It was fun.

- Super fun.

- Yeah, we like it.

- RYAN: We get folks here from Kansas, New Mexico, other parts of Texas, Nebraska.

I've seen people here from Colorado as well because of the uniqueness in many ways of the Canadian River, publicly accessible land.

[upbeat music] - Every trip has it's challenges and memories and every time that we go off-roading, it's like a whole different experience and we always have fun.

[upbeat music] - I'm Morgan O'Hanlon, a Senior Staff Writer at "Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine".

- And I'm David Yoskowitz, Executive Director Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

♪ Better outside ♪ - MORGAN: Together, we're bringing you a new show about how life's better outside and the people who work every day to make outside better.

♪ Better outside ♪ In each episode, we'll take you into the great outdoors.

- This will be good.

- MORGAN: Whether we're out counting sheep.

- Gotcha.

- Good shot.

- MORGAN: On the hunt for invasive species or just taking a trip down the river, you'll learn something new about conservation in the Lone Star State.

♪ Better outside ♪ So are you ready to go outside?

♪ Better outside ♪ [upbeat rock music] [birds chirping] - Here at Boggy Slough, we're fortunate to have a wide range of different habitats.

We've got 18 miles of the Neches River flowing along our eastern boundary.

And we've got a large acreage of upland pine forest.

We've got several thousand acres of wetland and bottomland forests that are associated with our stream systems.

[gentle music] So all of that makes the property, our 19,000 acres, a really diverse set of habitats and forest types.

This looks pretty good.

Which is different than most of these Texas forested areas.

- You know, Boggy Slough is a special place.

It's a different management style.

This particular tree was harvested to let the other trees mature and prosper and become a more valuable tree.

And also more importantly, let sunlight reach the ground.

Lots of forbs and native grasses will begin to come up in here.

It makes for a healthy forest, and when you're a biologist like I am, diversity is key.

- With our diversity of forest types, [machine sawing] we use a lot of forest management techniques.

We do a lot of selection based harvest.

We choose which trees are gonna be cut.

[tree thudding] [gentle music] We also do a whole lot of prescribed fire.

Fire's a natural part of these forest systems in the uplands.

It helps promote a lot of the native plant species.

[fire crackling] Ideally, over time we would hope that the grasses and forbs dominate in the ground cover.

They tend to germinate best on that bare soil.

[gentle music] So, one of the tools that we use for our management and restoration is herbicides.

And one very targeted method of applying herbicides is using backpack sprayers where you can spray just the plants that you wanna control.

We also use what's called hack and squirt.

What you do is use the machete to make a wound in the tree and then spray some of the herbicide into those wounds and the tree takes it up.

Good patch of regeneration.

- Short leaf in here.

- Yeah.

- It looks like the under story's coming in good.

Big bluestem here.

- STEVE: Yeah, the native bunch grasses are what we're after.

- Yeah.

This place is special because it's got very little brush underneath and it's very open.

It's good for a lot of different wildlife species, including birds, pollinator species, and white-tailed deer.

This is unique to East Texas.

- Here at Boggy Slough, we exist because of a commitment to conservation.

[turkey gobbles] We also are really involved in a lot of outreach.

We team up with partners to bring in others.

- Whoa, sick.

[crowd laughing] - It's kind of nasty.

[birds chirping] - DAN: Let's get to the top of the hill.

- STEVE: And we're really excited about the research that we do here as well.

Trying to understand this forest.

- It's an automated recording unit, so we set up the recorder, program it to come on 30 minutes after sunrise every single day.

We found in our study, and it sites like these, open forests that are well managed, you get the rare species, things like Red-cockaded woodpecker, Bobwhite quail.

Those are species that require habitat like this.

[gentle music] - They have large mature pine trees out here at Boggy Slough and they do management techniques that help to keep this area nice and open for the woodpecker.

That's how they like it, they like it nice and open where they can fly through it well.

I'm Donna Work, a biologist with the Texas A&M Forest Service.

This is an artificial cavity that we can insert into a live pine tree to make a ready-made home for the Red-cockaded woodpecker.

It takes less than an hour to insert one of these, whereas it takes the woodpecker years to put one in.

If more private landowners and a lot of our woodpeckers on the national forest, if they can continue to grow the larger older pine trees and keep the area nice and open like this, that will help these populations to thrive and to continue to grow.

- My name is Parker Trifiletti.

I'm a master student.

So, we are using these auditory playback devices that are going to play a sound and then we can record how deer are responding to these different sounds.

So, we are using coyotes representing kind of the main predator of deer.

[coyote howling] [pig grunting] Pigs representing that main competitor for them.

It was surprising to see that the deer are actually pretty responsive to the pig sounds.

We thought since pigs are everywhere, that deer were gonna be used to them.

Oh no, deer are actually, you know, kind of scared of the pig noises.

[pig grunting] It's a really cool forest system to get to kind of dig into and spend a lot of time in and learn about what these, you know, rolling hills of pine forest with these bottomland areas and these wet slews and the river and it creates kind of a really cool forest ecosystem that I've really enjoyed getting to learn from.

[gentle music] - One of the most important aspects of the property, it has a conservation easement that covers the entire property.

So, the future of this property is bright as far as management and research and just being a great asset to East Texas.

- There's a long history of good management here at Boggy Slough to promote the forest ecosystem.

What we're trying to do is continue that legacy and improve upon it and make sure that those characteristics are carried far into the future and I feel really fortunate to be part of that.

[gentle music] [birds chirping] - With Waco being in between Dallas and Austin, we have a perfect opportunity for people from the metropolitan areas to come out here and you can paddle, you can have fun, lots of opportunity for people to get outside and have fun outdoors.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ - It's a really fun place to start your kayaking and paddling journey.

[water sloshes] [Gabriel laughs] - MICHAEL: So here along the Brazos River, we have overhang on cliffs, and with that, you'll run into a various amount of wildlife.

[upbeat music] - GABRIEL: Hey, guys, look at that bird over there.

[Gabriel laughs] - I would definitely encourage residents here in the state of Texas to come to Waco, enjoy our waterways, especially these paddling trails.

- GABRIEL: Whoa.

Hey, hey.

- Hey.

♪ ♪ - GABRIEL: It had a fun echo, though.

Did you hear the echo?

[upbeat music] Nature has cycles.

It has a tempo, and our bodies are actually used to that tempo, and sometimes in urban life, things are faster.

They're flashier.

They're more congested.

When you get away from that, they have the ability to breathe slower.

They can relax their shoulders a little bit more.

They're able to think clearer, because there's not so many distractions.

There's not the next thing they have to do.

There's just what they are doing.

[soft music] - RYAN: The habitat here is undisturbed.

Some of the best habitat in the area.

To get to adequate bear country which we've selected here, Devil's River State Natural Area, you have to get off the beaten path.

We're hoping that this is the first step in reestablishing this population of bears in west Texas.

[bear growling] It's a great opportunity to put some bears back on the landscape.

[dramatic music] - NARRATOR: This is a happy story about bears but it did not start that way.

- REPORTER: A black bear and her cub were spotted roaming around a Del Rio neighborhood causing quite a scene with neighbors.

It was a somewhat chaotic situation that had a tragic ending.

Officials said the mother bear was shot and killed by a resident.

The cub is now in custody of state officials.

- NARRATOR: Two separate black bears in sad circumstances.

- One was orphaned from a Del Rio resident that shot the mother.

The other bear was in a horrific train accident.

The party that she was a part of two were killed by the train.

And this is the last one of the group.

Four to five year old female.

They weren't in good shape.

And given the age of the cub, it was my feeling that we weren't gonna be able to do anything for these bears.

- This bear has gone from 60 pounds, she weighed in at 128.

- NARRATOR: Enter Dr.

Kathleen Ramsey.

- So she's really put on a lot of weight.

- NARRATOR: She is a veterinarian in New Mexico.

- Such good hound dogs.

Animals need help.

That's why I'm a veterinarian.

I will look again.

They can't just knock on your door and say, here I am.

All wildlife.

I don't care what it is, needs help.

So pretty.

Yes.

- NARRATOR: At her wildlife clinic, Dr.

Ramsey has successfully rehabilitated more than 600 black bears.

- Been doing rehabilitation for over 40 years, now.

It's been an interesting challenge.

The first two Texas bears that I know of being rehabilitated.

I live in Northern New Mexico, we do Northern New Mexico bears and not Mexico bears.

So I had to first figure out what does she eat?

They're getting their second chance.

This is what it's all about.

Okay, one, two, three.

- Okay.

Our success in rehabilitation is by getting these animals on the natural diets that they would be eating in the wild.

So she's been eating acorn, she's been eating pecans, road kill, Juniper berries, prickly pear fruit, prickly pear petals, making her eat what she should be eating in Texas.

- NARRATOR: The bears must have liked the menu because they put on some weight.

- RYAN: Gives them a better chance of survival.

- DR.

RAMSEY: The big bear, she came in about 60 pounds, went out at 128.

Yeah, right there Ty is probably good.

This little cub, she came in at 30 pounds and Miss Texas went out at a whopping 102 pounds.

- RYAN: All Right, she's ready to go.

[cage clanging] She's free.

- DR.

RAMSEY: Very healthy.

- RYAN: Good water, good food.

Good place to let her go.

- DR.

RAMSEY: Next couple of days are really hard for these bears.

They've gotta figure out where the other bears in the territory are.

They've gotta figure out where the food bases are.

So they've got a lot of exploring and a lot of learning to do.

And so they don't have to worry about eating.

[dramatic music] - NARRATOR: While the bears pose little threat to people, they can endanger one another.

So releases happen miles apart.

- This bear would just go turn around and go kill that other bear in minutes, just by nature.

And so I really like to keep my adult bears away from my younger bears to give 'em a better chance.

- This one?

- Yeah.

- DR.

RAMSEY: When you release an animal, it came in because something was wrong.

It wasn't doing well.

She's just been sniffing and sniffing and sniffing.

- RYAN: Smelled like home.

- It's home.

It's totally dependent on me making it do perfect so it can survive in the wild.

Did I do a good enough job?

Did I teach her well enough?

And unfortunately I'm not gonna know this for a while until Ryan calls me one day and says she's in a yard or we never ever hear about this bear again.

Then I did my job right.

- RYAN: Dr.

Ramsey did an outstanding job getting these bears ready for release.

- NARRATOR: And her fee for months of expert bear care, nothing.

- It's been an honor for me to be the veterinarian that gotta work with them.

Bring it to my door and I will make an honest attempt to get that animal back into the wild where it belongs.

Just watch her, she's pissy.

This bear is ready, ready to go.

- NARRATOR: It's a big day for a couple of bears, for the people who care about them.

- DR.

RAMSEY: Everybody ready?

- NARRATOR: And for West Texas wild.

- DR.

RAMSEY: Look at her, she's just gonna fall right out.

The joint effort between these two states has been phenomenal.

And that's what allowed these two kids to go back into the wild.

- RYAN: I am ecstatic.

I think she's gonna do quite well.

- DR.

RAMSEY: I'm hoping big mama within a year will raising her first baby big bear.

And we've increased the number here in Texas.

- NARRATOR: Next time on Texas Parks & Wildlife... - The beach has always been the place I go to to feel calm and peaceful and joyful.

- There's nothing quite as striking as Century Pine.

It's well over 120 feet and it usually takes three adults to hug around it.

- Bracken Cave is the largest single concentration of mammals on Earth.

[theme music] - NARRATOR: That's next time on Texas Parks & Wildlife.

[wind blowing] [wind blowing] [birds chirping] [birds chirping] [wind blowing] [wind blowing] [insects chirp] [insects chirp] [insects chirp] [insects chirp] [insects chirp] [birds chirping] - NARRATOR: 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 provided by the Toyota Tundra.

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

Adventure-- it's what we share.

Funding also provided by Academy Sports and Outdoors.

Helping hunters, anglers, and outdoor enthusiasts of all ages get outside.

Out here, fun can't lose.