- 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 and Wildlife... - This is where the prairie chickens are being reintroduced into the wild.

- That's what's great about the program is that it does give you some solitude and some private access so that you can get away, right?

- Hueco Tanks is this labyrinth of rock and so much to get into and so much to explore.

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

[crickets chirp] [prairie chicken booms] [gentle orchestral music] - KIRK: The Attwater's prairie chicken is a native grouse species.

It's a lekking species, so every spring the males get together and they "boom" to attract females.

They have these really large orange air sacks and an orange comb over their eye, and so they'll stomp their feet and the air sacks will fill up and the combs will fill up with air.

They'll make a "booming" sound, which you can hear it up to three miles away.

[gentle orchestral music] ♪ ♪ [prairie chicken booms] The Attwater prairie chicken is an iconic species of the prairie of which only about one percent of this acreage is left.

[Film Narrator] The eerie mating call of the Attwater's prairie chicken is a haunting reminder that another wildlife species is on the verge of extinction.

Where millions of Atwater's prairie chickens once lived on the Gulf Coast, now only about one thousand remain.

[dramatic music] - MORGAN: They were almost at extinction.

And then The Nature Conservancy approached my mother.

She started the partnership and that has continued to this day.

My name is Morgan Dunn O'Connor.

This land has been in my family since 1834.

From an early age, my siblings and I felt this connection to this land.

[gentle music] - KIRK: Grasslands are very efficient in capturing carbon.

They're very important to the watershed.

They capture the rainfall and allow it to soak into the soil, to recharge the aquifers, but also allow that water to run off into the riparian areas and on into the bay in the Gulf at a little bit slower rate.

It's a major fly zone for many, many migratory species.

So it's a really unique area that a lot of animals depend on.

[gentle music] This is really the last best hope for the prairie chicken as far as being large enough to have a sustainable population.

♪ ♪ The main goal of the Coastal Prairies Project is to maintain a contiguous grassland and help landowners to economically and ecologically be sustainable.

We're able to facilitate and bridge that gap between the government and the landowners to really break ground on endangered species management and recovery.

- The partnership has been so beneficial to us in cost sharing and in just their general knowledge about the range conditions.

It's another tool in our toolkit.

We do prescribed burning on a regular basis.

The Nature Conservancy helps us evaluate the conditions.

You have the benefit of their scientists and their research.

Treating the invasive species and rotational grazing are the two most important things you can do to conserve your land.

So this is part of the rotational grazing system.

And you see we have this narrow lane and it's just to make it easier to move the cattle from pasture to pasture.

The rotational grazing makes all the difference.

You never lose all of your good, healthy grasses, and that's good for the cattle and it's good for the wildlife and good for the prairie chickens also.

This is where the prairie chickens are being reintroduced into the wild.

And this road that we were just on is often where you will see a dozen or more prairie chickens booming at the same time, which is about my favorite show out here.

[booming] When we started this, there were a handful in the wild and now we have over a hundred and a lot of them are breeding in the wild.

It's very exciting to me to be a part of the public-private partnership that enables these birds to thrive again in their native habitat.

And it's all part of the circle of life.

You know, the animals, the land, the humans that are managing the land, hopefully managing it well.

And leaving it in better shape for the next generation.

♪ ♪ [prairie chickens booming] ♪ ♪ [prairie chickens booming] [wind blowing] [gentle music] - JOHN: 95% Of the state is private property and the rivers are public domain.

Very, very few places to access.

- You have to put in some work to get to these sites.

But the good thing is, not a lot of people are doing that and then you get the beauty of solitude.

So that's what I really enjoy about it.

[gentle music] - NARRATOR: Russell Husted ... - Call them what's called matching the hatch so we want to match what's living in this river.

- NARRATOR: ... loves him some fly fishing.

- A really awesome pattern for Llano is the Umpqua swim baitfish in the shad color, it's beautiful.

[gentle music] - NARRATOR: Russell has called ahead and gained access to his own private put-in spot.

- That's what's great about the program is that it does give you some solitude and some private access so that you can get away, right?

That looks real good over there.

There's a lot of places that you can go fish that get pounded by people all the time, and you're just not going to get the experience that you are when you access one of these sites.

[gentle music] - This program allows everyday folks to explore and experience wild parts of Texas that not a lot of people have been able to enjoy in the past.

Best way to get information about our leased accessed sites is to check online at our website.

There you'll find contact information for the landowner and any special conditions, and you will find some great information on where to go river fishing.

- Fly fishing is tough when you have to go more than five to 10 foot deep.

And this river is just perfect for that, because I'd say the average depth is anywhere from three to seven feet, which is ideal for fly fishing.

[water flowing] Fly fishing is an art.

It is a thing of beauty to see a line with a tight loop flying out of the water.

There's one.

And going to a tight spot to catch a fish.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, this is what we came here for, woo, nice.

All right, so this is a Guadalupe bass, state fish of Texas.

You can tell by the spots on the belly, if you also look at the tongue.

You can tell by that little spot on the tongue.

It's in really good shape, probably about a pound.

And this is an average fish in the Guadalupe range, so, it's beautiful fish.

[water flowing] Try to miss this big rock in the middle.

You know, I've used this program on the Brazos River, I've used it on the Colorado River.

Oh yeah, this is easy.

I'm here today on the Llano river and there's these access points all across the state.

Nice.

[metal clanking] [gentle music] - The water's beautiful.

- Oh it is.

- NARRATOR: This is Joana Laake's place.

It's called Pete's Pecan Patch.

- JOANA: I can remember going out on here with my father in a boat and it was some of the best memories I have of remembering my father.

- JOHN: Oh, that's awesome.

[gentle music] - This is a little bit deeper part, there a lot of people catch catfish in here.

- Yeah, I can see that.

- But we're happy to share it with the people that want to make use of it because, we feel like this river does belong to everybody.

- This is on the Llano River.

You can float from here down to Grobe Crossing.

It's about five miles of Llano River.

You can fish and paddle year-round.

- It is important to me that everyone should be able to experience the joys of the out of doors.

It's remote, it's secluded.

It's just a wonderful opportunity to get away from the cities and just relax and be with nature.

[bird chirping] - JOHN: We lease access sites on East Texas rivers, down on the coastal plain, as well as in West Texas on the spring-fed Devils River.

Lots of different rivers to experience and we're constantly adding more sites.

[rapids flowing] - RUSSELL: I love being in nature, I love the challenge.

I love moving water.

You add all those things together, this is about the best experience that a fly fishermen can have.

Piece of cake.

And this is my escape.

A little hill country fun.

Coming out here to the river, fly fishing for bass, for me it's like the top level.

I'm thinking right over there, looks really solid.

I like it, like it a lot.

That's a good one.

- What's great about this program is these sites are in remote locations.

- Just laying it out there.

- JOHN: But once you're out here, it feels like you're the only one in the world, you're the only one on the river.

- Right into the grass, right on edge, oh, that's perfect.

And then you gotta be ready.

You gotta be ready.

Oh, ho, ho!

This is about the best experience that a fly fishermen can have.

This fish is way up here in that dark corner over there it's clobbered that bait.

You're catching a lot of fish, you're seeing nature at its best.

Ah, beautiful, beautiful.

[gentle music] It's just a great escape.

So you really want to put the effort in to get to these places so that you get the full experience.

[gentle music] Celebrating a century of Texas State Parks.

[crickets chirping, birds calling] [drumming music] ♪ ♪ - NICOLE ROQUE: You'll hear it over and over again that this is an oasis in the desert.

You look around and there's trees and there's water and there's ferns and mosses and things that you don't expect to see in the desert.

And it's just something really exciting.

- CASSIE COX: What makes Hueco Tanks special is that the Hueco mountains are an oasis in the desert.

The material that these mountains are made out of collect water.

And so because of that, people have been visiting this park for 10,000 years.

[wind blowing] - This place is so special because you can step back in time.

And you can walk around and you can see why people have been here.

You can see why this is such an important special place.

- HIKER: This place is pretty amazing.

Check that out.

- NICOLE: There's the stories of these people, the history of these people in every single place that we step.

[wind blowing] - For us, as native people, this is our mother.

The land is us and we are the land.

When I come out here, I feel like I'm visiting my mother or my grandmother.

What makes it sacred doesn't start with us native people or what we left here, the sacredness starts with the place itself.

[wind blowing] So, I would say for someone never having come here before that that should be first and foremost in their mind.

[upbeat music] - NICOLE: Coming out to Hueco Tanks, there's plenty of things you can do out here.

Of course, you can hike.

You can climb.

[upbeat music] Birdwatching is also a really popular thing that you can come out here and you don't really have to have any sort of experience in it.

- BIRDWATCHER: He's looking right at us.

- NICOLE: There's over 200 species of birds that are here year-round.

- BIRDWATCHER: There's a curved bill thrasher.

There's a blue grosbeak way up there.

- CASSIE: The thing that most visitors come for that we're most known for are our rock painting pictographs.

We have pictographs that are thousands of years old up to modern historic graffiti, like the 49ers that were headed to California looking for gold.

Visitors can see over 200 Jornada Mogollon masks either on their own in the self-guided area or by signing up for a guided tour.

- GUIDE: Our first stop is going to be right up over here behind the ranch house.

I'll take you guys up.

There was a little story I want to tell you about it.

- NICOLE: You that you can come out on a pictograph tour with a guide who knows some of the history and some of the interpretation of the imagery.

You can see parts of the park that are typically closed to the public.

- GUIDE: Okay, so this is, where we're at is called Comanche Cave.

There are some white horn dancers pictographs right here, Mescalero Apache.

If you're wanting a time period, most likely you're talking about maybe 1600s.

Could be older than that.

- CASSIE: One of my favorite spots in the park that I send people to if they're willing to go on a treasure hunt per se is Cave Kiva.

You can crawl into this spot that you can tell that people have been crawling in there for maybe thousands of years.

And then you can turn around and lay on your back and up on the ceiling of the shelter are these beautiful masks made by the Jornada Mogollon people in different colors and different shapes and sizes.

And it's just really neat to lay there on your back and reflect on the people that made those thousands of years ago and what, what they meant to them.

- JASON KEHL: Hueco Tanks is this labyrinth of rock, just maze of fun and so much to get into and so much to explore.

Bouldering in Hueco Tanks is probably the best bouldering in the United States, in my opinion.

Everything is super steep.

You've got these crazy caves and the formations of rock are insane.

My favorite thing about Hueco Tanks is probably just the vastness, and I like going to a different spot every time I go out.

When I go out, I explore.

I look for new things, you always can find something under like some crevasse opens up into a huge room.

There's just so much life out here and you won't find this anywhere else.

It's really recharging.

You know, there's so much chaos in town and then you come out here and it's so nice and chill, and it's just like a great kind of meditation.

I think when you come here, you should respect it and respect that people have been here before you.

And, you know, just trying to leave it as nice as you found it.

- ALEX: I have yet to meet anybody that doesn't leave and have some sort of a different way of feeling and thinking and viewing the place.

And I can't say that 100% of the time everybody makes an emotional connection with the place, but I think more often than not, people do.

[dramatic music] [rolling waves] [boat revving] - Fishing is my getaway.

Fishing is my relaxation.

Fishing clears my head.

It's a good day for fishing.

Got a nice little wind.

- WOMAN: Water is a pretty color.

[boat revving] - My mom gave me a picture this past year at Christmas, and I think I was three years old and had my cane pole, and I've been just, God, just so fortunate.

My dad took me fishing at a very young age, introduced me to it.

I never turned back.

[water splashing] Perhaps one of the byproducts of COVID was how many more people it put on the water.

You know, that year, there was an increase in licenses, all these people coming to the coast.

If we don't manage it soundly and do it with science, then we have nothing.

- Parks and Wildlife mission is to preserve the resources to ensure that future generations have access to it.

- The sample size seems to be the place where the mean and the standard error tend to stabilize.

As an agency, we've been monitoring our coastal resources for over 40 years in a lot of cases.

So we have a lot of data at our disposal to understand patterns and populations and how these organisms interact with each other and interact with different sorts of habitats.

This is some satellite imagery of the area.

Fish and Wildlife science really is a little late to the game in terms of using big data.

It's really come to fields like advertising and business and finance.

But really our coastal resources are incredibly valuable to us not only as humans but to the local communities that rely on them.

And so, you know, why wouldn't we use those same technologies to help us predict what's going to happen when certain things change in those coastal ecosystems?

[water sloshing] We collect data on everything from commercially and recreation important fish to those that really no one is fishing for because we want to understand a larger ecosystem structure and trends.

But when large things happen to these ecosystems, the first thing we want to know is what changed.

And so it's really this baseline data that we collect that helps us understand exactly what's changed and what we need to do going forward to remedy whatever has changed.

We're just going to walk parallel to shore here for 50 foot and then we're going to wrap it around and beach everything we catch.

And from there, we'll work up the sample.

So, a lot of times, anglers really like to catch the big, you know, big red fish, big trout, whatever it might be.

But it's important to remember they all start as little fish coming into our estuaries.

And so it's important for us to capture their abundance right off the bat and to know that they have a good recruitment event this year.

What affects their spawning?

What affects their abundance as juvenile?

Because that, down the road, affects their abundance as adults, the ones that everybody likes to catch.

You also see that we catch a lot of species that really aren't on anybody's radar from a fishing standpoint.

You'll see a lot of little crabs, a lot of little shrimp in those samples.

And it's important for us to understand those abundances across time so that we can then understand how that affects the abundances of a lot of those fish and invertebrates that people like to catch.

And we'll get some pretty good lengths and measurements.

- The average person may look at a dataset and not know what that means.

It is that information that directly affects how they utilize the resources.

- 78.

- And it's that information that then provides us the best course to preserve and conserve the resources.

- 64.

- We have programs we've been running for 40-plus years, and a lot of those are just going out and setting nets and counting fish.

And I think that sort of data collection is always going to be important.

But in the past couple of decades, we really have started to incorporate a lot of remote sensing and habitat mapping type technologies.

And just really using some of the most cutting-edge technology to help us understand what habitats are out there and how are they changing across time.

And we look at that together, I think we have a more holistic and better understanding of why we see those trends across time and what's causing those trends across time.

- 78.

What we do is so important to have buy-in from the public because if they don't understand it, if they don't see an importance to it, what are we doing if we can't convey it to the public?

And I've always thought that that was a really important part of Parks and Wildlife, but we're doing it so that way your children, your grandchildren, their grandchildren, can have a place in this world where they can enjoy what you enjoy as an adult.

- They're in love with it just as much as we are, and they want to see it flourish to be here not just for our generation but our kids generations and generations beyond that.

But it all comes back to having that science.

Where would this fishery be if we didn't have Parks and Wildlife Coastal Fisheries to help manage this resource and be a part of it?

[seagulls squawking] [upbeat music] - NARRATOR: Wish you could spend more time with nature?

Well, every month you can have the great outdoors delivered to you.

Since 1942, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine has been the outdoor magazine of Texas.

Every issue is packed with outstanding photography and writing about the wild things and wild places of this great state.

And now Texas' best outdoor ma gazine is available as an app, it's just that easy.

Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine, your connection to the great outdoors.

[insects, birds chirping] [insects, birds chirping] [insects, birds chirping] [insects, birds chirping] [insects, birds chirping] [insects, birds chirping] [insects, birds chirping] [insects, birds chirping] [insects, birds chirping] 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.