- 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... - Been a pretty good spot over the years, but it's a grind.

- When we did the wetland, it was amazing, they just showed up.

- Aquatic systems and rivers, unless you're really looking, you don't see all those species and the diversity that lives below the surface.

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

[seagulls squawk] - NARRATOR: Oyster season is underway in Lavaca Bay.

- MAURICIO BLANCO: This is my home port right here, Port Lavaca, Texas.

[dredge clanks] It's been a pretty good spot over the years.

But, it's a grind.

[chain grinding] This is what I do for a long time.

That was 30 years yesterday.

That's what I've been fishing over here this bay.

We got so much salt in our blood, that's what I love to do.

If you love what you do, I mean, you are going to stay for a long time like me.

Thirty years.

[clanking] They culling the oysters.

What they are doing right now is, they are making sure that they got three-inch oysters.

The state law says that they have to be three inches.

Plus, you see it's a cluster is what they come up, they don't come pretty like when you put them on your table.

- NARRATOR: Historically, Texas has been one of the top states in oyster production, dating as far back to the late 1800s.

Texas reefs held what seemed like an endless supply.

But times have changed.

[chain grinds] Over the years the daily sack limits have been cut back.

- MAURICIO: It used to be 150 sack a day.

- NARRATOR: Now Mauricio can keep a fifth of that.

- MAURICIO: Now it's went down from 150 sacks to 90 sacks, and then from 90 sacks, they went down to 50 sacks, this year the state limit is 30 sacks.

So, every year we getting less, and less, and less.

And the bad part is that fuel, it don't go down, it goes up and up.

[dredge slams] But like right now, we probably going to make 20 sacks all day long.

Maybe.

- Recent science has indicated that really most oyster reefs are operating right on the border of sustainability.

Everybody realizes that something needs to be done.

- NARRATOR: This part of Galveston Bay is getting some much-needed TLC, in the form of a new reef bottom.

- BILL: The key to restoring the habitat is putting fresh cultch out there.

Cultch can be any materials that oysters can grow on.

- NARRATOR: This reef's getting 7,000 tons of crushed limestone.

- Looks good, it's really amazing how your able to operate this giant piece of machinery on a barge.

This is really important because the oyster reefs are in pretty bad shape.

They've been suffering from a number of stressors, including drought and hurricanes.

On top of that, there is a lot of heavy fishing pressure being put on.

Pretty sad state of affairs for the oyster reefs currently.

So, these materials provide a nice clean, what we call a substrate for oyster larva to attach to and grow into spat which are baby oysters.

The site will be closed to commercial harvest for two years, allowing the baby oysters time to grow to adulthood.

By the fall there should be millions of baby oysters growing on this rock out here.

- NARRATOR: Galveston Bay is not alone.

Many Texas bays are temporarily closed to oystering as the reefs recover.

[police siren chirps] - GAME WARDEN: You the captain today.

- NARRATOR: To protect the bays as they rest, Game Wardens are on the water.

This area is open to oystering, but nearby San Antonio Bay is closed and off limits.

- Today what we did, we tried a different technique that we hadn't tried yet.

We actually stuck a boat in the water that was an undercover vessel.

And he actually drove out into San Antonio Bay, hid up in the brush for a little bit.

- T X four zero five one.

- JASON: And he drove down that line and basically wrote down the TX numbers of every boat that was located in the San Antonio Bay system side.

- They were too close to land and they were in closed waters, and they don't have any tags.

[siren chirps] - GAME WARDEN: State Game Warden.

Y'all were in closed waters this morning!

- Me?

- Yes.

- No!

- Yes.

- JASON: It's not all the oyster industry that's actually doing this, there's a few bad apples.

- GAME WARDEN: He observed you in close waters.

- No!

- GAME WARDEN: Yes, you're going to have to dump the oysters too!

- JASON: If we let them do what they want, then they would take too much of the resource and there wouldn't be any more of the resource left.

- GAME WARDEN: Ok, one ticket for oystering in closed waters, ok, contact Judge Hunt.

- GAME WARDEN: You have your license on you.

- JASON: If they overharvest an area, it does them no good the next year and the year after that, and the year after that.

Short term gain, long term loss is what we're looking at!

- It's going to be nothing.

How the bays going to come back?

If you kill the chicken, you ain't going to have eggs.

We need those oysters in restricted areas for them to spawn and get oyster everywhere.

It's the bottom line.

You kill the chicken, you ain't going to get no eggs.

- NARRATOR: To protect the reefs, at times there's more bays closed to oystering, than those that are open.

Which adds to the grind.

- MAURICIO: You know, you leave one small area open, everybody gonna put pressure on the area, because it's the only thing is open.

And that's what happened right now.

[tapping] When you overfish you're resources, they just gonna disappear.

A lot of small ones.

This oyster be ready within four weeks, they gonna reach three inches, they have to go back to the water.

This bay, for right now, should been closed for two months.

They keep it wide open, and there's nothing out there anymore.

You know by the time they close it, it's going to be too late.

- NARRATOR: It's hopefully not too late.

A historic restoration plan is in place.

All bays in Texas will now get some much-needed help.

As a new law requires oyster dealers to either pay a per sack restoration fee or recycle their old shell.

Supplier, Curtis Miller, opts to use his own shell.

- I felt that would be the quickest way to, you know, see some results.

This was a way to see the quickest turnaround right here at home.

- NARRATOR: This reef recovery plan now guarantees new cultch will be placed in depleted Texas bays.

This shell is on its way back to Lavaca Bay.

- CURTIS: We're going to put it out there in this area, it's not really a viable working area now, but we're hoping since it's a hard bottom, the shell will create a new reef that we can work in a couple years.

[water spraying] - This is going to happen all up and down the coast in every major oyster producing bay.

This is just the very beginning of something that will be an ongoing effort and should make a really big difference in the ecology of the bays.

- If everybody up and down the coast starts doing this, which I believe you're going to start seeing, that'll make more reefs in Galveston Bay, more reefs in Matagorda area, more reefs in Rockport area, more reefs in our area, and the boats will be able to stay home.

- MAURICIO: We need to change the habit.

We have to change the way we think, for those bays to give them a chance to come back, we have to do all those things you know.

For resources to be there, just, you got to take responsibility that's all.

- NARRATOR: And for Maurcio, a restored Lavaca Bay can't come soon enough.

His haul today barely covered the costs for his crew.

- MAURICIO: Well, we managed to make a day.

At least we're here.

You know, nobody got hurt.

[oysters dumped in sack] We were shooting for 20, as you can see we didn't have 20.

We had 17, but the boat didn't break.

We happy.

We ready to go home now!

- NARRATOR: But you can bet he'll be back here tomorrow.

- I enjoy it.

Every single day that I'm out there, I'm enjoy it.

I'm happy.

And that's the spirit of the fisherman, it don't matter how broke you are, if you love what you are doing, you going to keep doing it, and that's me!

- I've always wanted to live in the country, to be honest, ever since I was a kid.

Actually, one of my dad's friends who was a rancher is the one that found the property.

He's the one that convinced my parents that it'd be a good purchase.

I bought the initial property back in 1983, the 300 acres, and then over the years added to it.

Would like to add more, but don't know if that'll ever happen or not, but you never know.

- TIM: The biggest thing about the Shady W that makes it stand out from other properties in this area is that, part of it is Parten's patience with the process, you know, we really started with a, kind of a blank canvas.

I'd call him and give him some recommendations and the weather conditions wouldn't work out and he'd say, "Hey, it didn't work, what can we do?"

So we'd make another recommendation and go with it again.

And so he was just really patient with that process and it paid off.

We've had some really good restorations out here and it's been overall a very big success.

A lot of this area has been converted to non-native grasses historically and Parten has taken back over 70% of his property back to natives.

- PARTEN: Once they got established, we started seeing particularly the birds, when we did the wetland, it was amazing.

I thought it would take a while for the ducks to kind of figure it out.

It didn't take them any time.

They just showed up.

[fire crackling] We do burns.

Prescribed burns are one of the best tools around.

- TIM: And so, just kind of trying to refresh that growth, it kind of just resets and you get a lot more annual forest, things like that.

We're burning a little later than we usually have, so this is probably really helped a lot of summer grass growth.

[upbeat music] You know, when we started this that morning, it wasn't burning that well.

I was happy we got as much scorch on these.

- PARTEN: Yeah.

- TIM: Lower deals than we did.

I mean, it was really just creeping.

- PARTEN: Yeah.

- TIM: That wasn't even foot tall flames.

- Yeah, it did a good number up front.

- TIM: Oh yeah.

Looking at it up from the edge, I was curious how well that fire was going to carry through when we burned it, but man, it... - PARTEN: It did, it did exceedingly well.

- TIM: It did very, very well.

- PARTEN: There's little stuff that's just sprouted everywhere.

In fact, that first night after the burn, there was an owl over there by the wetland, - Yeah.

- where it was burned.

I was like, man, you didn't waste any time, did you?

- I'm about as pleased as I can be with how this turned out.

- PARTEN: Well, in particularly, as green as it was, I don't think any of us expected it to be as good of burn as it was.

- With all the winter grass.

- PARTEN: Yeah.

[boat engine revs] - PARTEN: We're pretty proud of our fisheries program and John Jones and his crew have done a great job.

Whoa.

Now for the fun part.

- Now for the fun part.

- We currently actually hold, I think four state record, fly fishing on private water state records, I'm trying to beat the state record, large mouth bass, but it's eluded me yet, but I'm still working at it.

[bright music] - TIM: You can just tell he just loves being on the land and being a part of the land and seeing it benefit from his management.

- PARTEN: It's just the learning experience as you go along, to me it's what's so fascinating.

You know, I learnt something every year and I hope I keep learning.

[chuckles] - TIM: All the stuff he's done out here is pretty unique.

I think it sets him apart from most other landowners in the area, the willingness he has to let people out here and see it, learn from it and just share what makes him happy with other people to make them happy.

I think that's pretty special.

[dramatic music] - SARAH: So I see rivers as really the lifeblood of our ecosystems.

You know, they provide water, habitat and food, and there's just a huge diversity across the state of Texas of all of our aquatic species.

Aquatic systems and rivers, they're not well understood and they can kind of be easily ignored.

Unless you're really looking, you don't see all those species and the diversity that lives below the surface.

Devil's River minnow.

Rivers don't just support aquatic species, but they're important for people and for terrestrial species, birds, plants.

Part of our mission is to protect these resources for future generations.

Texas' population is growing, as we all know, and as there's more urban development, more people moving here, a lot of our natural lands and big ranches are being subdivided.

We see a lot of changes to the landscape, and that all has a direct impact to the rivers.

And that can really impact the species.

And so that's part of what we try to do is restore lands that have been degradated and help protect those lands that are still intact.

Texas shiner.

- Sarah has a good personality for working with people.

That's been pretty evident in the number of partnerships she's been able to build.

- SARAH: All the work we do in the river studies program is based on partnerships and collaborating.

So we work with nonprofits and landowners and universities to conduct this research and then to also implement practices to help conserve and protect our rivers.

- Sarah is just a remarkable person.

She forges relationships with people that go beyond what they're trying to accomplish, and she's able to do so much conservation good across the state.

- Sarah has been an exceptional employee.

The things that she's accomplished in a relatively short time, I feel hopeful that our environment will be protected and managed in the best way possible.

- So it's always been in the back of my mind when I do this work that we want to preserve these places and these rivers and these species for future generations.

But now that I'm a mom myself, I really see some of these places under threat, and I want to make sure that they're there for my son to visit and for us to visit and spend time at as he grows up.

[dramatic music] [river flows] [upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - NARRATOR: At the new public library in Austin, there are many ways to learn about ecology, sustainability, and wildlife like birds and butterflies.

- Come on in.

- NARRATOR: One way is to go to the top.

Before opening day, library facilities manager, John Gillum, discusses some of the building's more unique features.

- Homage to the grackle.

Everybody goes, "Why is it red?"

Because it's art.

- NARRATOR: The art may be red.

- A third of our energy is going to be produced by solar power.

- NARRATOR: But the building is all green.

- JOHN: It will be the greenest building that the green City of Austin has yet produced.

- NARRATOR: Right up to the roof.

- This is the rooftop garden, which we also call the butterfly garden.

It is a green roof.

It means a roof that's actually landscaped.

- NARRATOR: The library is crowned with an outdoor habitat, landscaped with native plants.

- We wanted to do something to help out our little pollinators.

We will do anything we can to attract them.

If we can come up with different plants we think will draw more butterflies, we'll do it.

- NARRATOR: An oasis of native plants can help bees and butterflies, like migrating monarchs, make their way through increasingly urban landscapes.

[car horns honking] And it also makes for a nice spot to sit and read.

[peaceful music] - JOHN: This is really the best part of the library as far as a natural setting to sit in.

It should be a lot of fun.

- NARRATOR: Putting a park on a building also saves space and lowers energy costs when temperatures soar.

- JOHN: We don't have a lot of yard here, right?

This is a very urban environment where we've built, and so we had to get really clever about how we got vegetation and nature into the immediate area.

As opposed to the concrete around us, this is going to be an area that really absorbs heat rather than reflects it out, so even in the kind of summers that we get here in Austin, this is still going to be a pretty pleasant place to be.

- NARRATOR: So, birds, bugs, and bookworms, in an age when news about nature is not always so cheery, look for some good news way up on the top shelf of Austin's central library.

[waves] [gentle acoustic music] - We're here on the southeast corner of Texas.

We are here at Sea Rim State Park, about 10 miles west of Sabine Pass.

[gentle acoustic music] We're a relatively small park.

- RIDER: I know, the water is going to eat you.

[laughing] - NATHAN: We do have five miles of beach.

[gentle acoustic music] The majority of this park is marshland, and a lot of people that come out here to enjoy the park, enjoy either the beach or they get a chance to enjoy and experience the marsh environment.

[water splash from paddling] [birds chirp] The neat thing about the Gambusia Nature Trail, is you're just right above the water.

- BOY: Crab, crab, crab!!

- NATHAN: It's a wonderful way to experience the marshland environment without getting your feet wet.

- BOY: Alligator, alligator, right here!

Baby alligator!

It's right here, you see em!

There's probably a mama nearby!

- BOY 2: Yeah, you're right!

- I think it's really cool, I've never experienced actually seeing an alligator in its natural habitat, and it's really cool to actually see on in person!

[footsteps] - It's easy, it's easily accessible, and it's a nice long trail where you're really isolated from the rest of the world.

And you don't realize that there is any civilization around.

And it's just a hidden gem I suppose you would call it!

[water splash from paddling] - NATHAN: We have over 10 miles of paddling trails.

- KAYAKER: It's so pretty out here!

[water splash from paddling] - NATHAN: There's different canals, lakes, small areas that people can get out and explore on their own.

You get a chance to observe, be one with nature!

- Ah, a fish jumped in my boat!

- NATHAN: We're out here on Sea Rims east beach... - Oh, I saw one!

- NATHAN: It's a wonderful spot to go crabbing.

I do have some chicken necks that are tied up to the string here!

- RICKY: It's like fishing!

- What's on it!

Yuck.

- I didn't have any idea it would involve chicken.

I thought you would just cast a net, pull them in, and it would be done!

[laughs] - MATT: That's a crabbies!

- MARTY BODDIE: Uh oh, I think you got a bite!

You do, pull it in real slow!

Been in Southeast Texas 15 years, this is my first time!

Lookie there Matt!

- MATT: That's a keeper!

- Oh it's great, the kids are having a blast and we are too!

I think I'm having more fun than the kids!

[Crab grabs chicken neck] - I got one!

I think!

Hazel, get it, get it, get it!

It's a big one?

- NICOLE: It is fun, I didn't know about it, and I don't think a lot of people do know about it!

- Got ya little scoundrel!

- Oh, oh got it!

- NICOLE: Especially if you are into crabs, we have caught so many crabs today!

- RICKY: You see it!

[splash] Oh I got two!

- NATHAN: Two for one, how bout that!

- Yeah!

Look Dad I caught two!

[waves lapping] - We come out here at least about every other weekend!

We just kinda grew up out here fishing!

- MRS. REYES: Oh you lost your bait baby!

- ROBERT: It's fun!

Family loves it!

My son loves it!

- R.J. REYES: Almost every day after work, he says, "Come on were going fishing!"

I'm like, "OK, its fine with me!"

- ROBERT: Oh!

You really never know what you are going to catch out here!

Bull Red, coming in with it!

It was pretty shallow probably second sand bar!

Have to tag this one, this one's over 28!

All right!

- MRS. REYES: Mira!

[inspirational music] - NATHAN: Sea Rim State Park is a park that not very many people are aware of!

You're not going to hear all buzzing traffic or anything like that, you are away from it all, and you can come out here and enjoy, enjoy life!

[waves lapping] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] [ducks quack] 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.