Texas Wildlife: Our Future

Funding for this program was provided by... At HEB, our commitment to Texas extends beyond our own aisles to the miles and miles of Texas State Parks.

You can learn more about our efforts at OurTexasOurFuture.com [wind blowing] [crickets chirping] [psychedelic rock music] Oh, that was terrible!

Terrible!

[laughter] I didn't even know what that was.

Oh, make sure you get that in there for sure.

[laughter] Ready to get whooped?

[laughter] That's better.

Thanks.

Thanks, friend.

My name is Sarah Fritz.

[laughter] That's my best friend Sara Weaver.

She's weird, but I love her.

We're both wildlife biologists working in Texas, and we're kind of obsessed with bats.

Nice!

Hello!

Hi.

How are you?

I'm good.

How are you?

Yeah, what are y'all studying for?

Animology.

Ooh-hoo!

Y'all get it!

Yeah, bats are awesome.

They're so misunderstood.

They're so under-researched.

There's so much that we don't know about bats.

The more you learn about them, the more surprises that just keep coming and coming.

But bats in Texas are facing many threats, like habitat loss, white-nose syndrome, climate change, and now a new challenge: wind turbines.

As important as wind turbines are at fighting climate change, they're causing unintended consequences for bats, and Sara and I are trying to figure out why.

[car whooshing] So I started working with bats and wind energy in about 2012.

I went back to do my PhD at Texas State University with two children while working a full-time job, taking classes, kicking off a research project.

It was a lot of work.

It's definitely thrilling.

I absolutely love what I do.

We are collecting data at various wind energy facilities as we are looking for carcasses on the landscape.

Seeing all of these, you know, bats that are dead underneath wind turbines, and it can be very hard.

It's very personal to have that individual bat in your hand.

We still don't really understand why bats are being killed, but the research that we are conducting right now is extremely vital and could give us a solution.

[birds chirping] We take a lot of precautions to make sure that we're not doing anything harmful to bat populations.

Masks, gloves, we're actually trying to protect them from us.

Hi, babes.

She's like, "Ah, I didn't want to wake up yet."

Hi, cutie.

[laughing] Oh, my goodness, it's tiny.

Little face.

[laughing] There you go.

Nothing like waking up to breakfast.

Yeah, right?

Definitely not the scary animals that some people think they are.

[laughing] Hello.

We try not to get pictures with their mouth open or teeth because, you know, it just gives a bad impression of the bat because this is really, usually often how they are unless they're just feeling threatened.

Mm-hmm.

[laughing] They're very sweet-natured.

They have little individual personalities.

People tend to like the animals that are pretty and colorful.

I don't know.

I guess bats have been used as a scapegoat for death and disease, but they're very different.

And I just find them extremely cool.

[psychedelic rock music] Bats.

They play a huge role in our economy and our food system.

And every summer night, hundreds of millions of bats emerge and hunt insects.

And you can watch on Doppler radar as the bats collide with these swarms of insects and are going out to basically feast on the buffet.

[psychedelic rock music] The impact of bats here in Texas on agriculture, I mean, they save cotton farmers millions of dollars every year.

They're pretty incredible animals.

They are such an integral part of our entire environment, our ecosystem, and we have to do everything we possibly can to save them.

I was here--when was I here?

It was last semester.

No?

End of spring semester.

My tattoo of Bracken.

This was my PhD present to myself when I graduated.

I've been here for the emergence probably more than 30 times and every single time I get goosebumps.

It's spectacular.

Oh, they are going to emerge!

I was wondering if they were.

It is right on that borderline temperature.

They are going to come out.

That's so great.

If you put your hands behind your ears like this, and cup them, you can hear them.

[sound of wings flapping] [music] Okay Rob, you ready?

Once I go, they're going to start flying a little bit.

Hey babies.

They are just curious little creatures.

Go for it.

I've got my hand on one--oh!

You're leaking bats!

Goodness gracious.

Come on, babies.

Come on.

Bat baby.

Hello, babies.

Come on.

Come out.

That's a bat, that's a bat.

Got you.

So we have crews that will either mist net or go to culverts or bridges and collect bats.

And then we bring them back to the flight cage.

Yeah, the research that Fritz has been doing in the flight cage is helping us reduce fatalities at wind turbines.

It's really important work.

Wait.

Hold on.

All right.

Let's back up a sec.

When you're driving past a wind turbine, it's difficult to tell how fast they're actually going.

But they're going really, really fast, like over 100 miles per hour.

Here in Texas, we're the largest wind-producing state in the US, and we have wind turbines all over in Texas.

Again, great for climate change but not great for bats.

So ultrasonic deterrents were manufactured to try to keep bats away from wind turbines.

They just emit really, really high frequency noises that bats don't like.

For the bats, it feels kind of like standing next to a speaker at a heavy metal concert.

They don't like it, so they move away.

So we are putting bats in the flight cage to test these deterrents.

That way we can find the best configurations to keep more bats away.

[psychedelic rock music] Having little allergy problems, and made me snore last night, so so Sara threw pillow at my face.

Apparently that didn't stop me, so she had to get up.

She was standing on the side of the bed like, "Sarah!

Sarah!"

Finally I woke up.

So that was fun.

Sorry, Sarah.

She's on the phone.

Okay, I'm going to do a run-through just to make sure I can get my timing correct.

Hello, I'm Sarah Fritz from Texas State University, and today I'm going to tell you the results of... Fritz: Sarah and I have been really close and really good friends for years.

ever since we met at Texas State.

We've really leaned on each other in hard times both personally and professionally.

Women and wildlife, you know?

It's not easy.

We've faced a lot.

And to present your work and be respected in the field, it's a lot of pressure.

But it's easier when you have a best friend who really gets it.

Look at you!

You crack me up.

This is so great.

These were actually historic Old Roman mines, and they did winter bat surveys there.

Sliding down.

Plenty of photos like that myself.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

[laughing] I've been asked this question a lot, that what does your cohort look like when you look around in the classroom?

When I started wildlife and I was at Texas State originally, we went from being largely male-dominated where I was one of a few women in the room to being more than 50% female.

If I hadn't had you there to be that collaborator, I don't know that I'd be doing what I am doing.

You are the reason.

You are who introduced me to the people, and our first big, huge grants and publications on this are together, and when something needs to be done, we get it done.

You're the person to call and we will do it.

Man.... that's a really cool feeling.

Yeah, I love you so much.

We've done this so many times and cried.

Aw, thank you Cheers!

[music] Fritz: Sara and I?

I think we feel pretty dang lucky.

We found a friendship that really inspires us to be better at what we do.

It's really hard to explain what it is about bats.

They're spectacular animals, and they need people to fight for them.

And we're going to give it everything we've got.

It's hard to believe that bears were historically found across Texas, much less in the desert.

But bears have a way of adapting to even the hardest conditions.

By the 1950s, Texans had driven them out of the state.

Black bears were forced to seek refuge across the border in the mountains of Mexico.

But in the 90s, without the hand of man and with a protected landscape, something amazing happened.

They returned and began to recolonize the Trans-Pecos.

[music] Decades later, their success is why I'm here.

[car driving by] So we're kind of in the beginning stages of this project and we're monitoring where bears are and get some of their movement patterns and try and get collars out on bears and try and get traps in front of them for as long as I can until we catch one.

There's been a bit of research that's been done in the National Park over the past 20, 30 years.

There's just a lot more bears now, as well as more people in this area.

This research is kind of stemming from preparing managers and residents for bears moving back into this area.

We've baited the trap now.

The bear is going to be lured in by the sweet-smelling foods.

So now we're going to set up some cameras and get the cellular camera ready and hooked up so we can see when this trap goes off.

[loud clinking] Through the trapping for this project, we're getting GPS locations from the collars.

We are also collecting blood, tissue samples, trying to get an understanding of what the genetic structure of the population might look like here and some local ecology of how the bears use this landscape.

The more collars we can get out the better data we'll have.

Matt Hewitt is a graduate student of ours that we recruited, and right now he's on point for the Black Bear Recollization Project.

We work a lot of different projects where we are actively restoring species to habitats, but in this situation, the Black Bear Project is really a unique opportunity for us to understand a very rare occasion of natural recolonization.

We lost black bears in the early 1900s.

They've basically been vacant from this landscape for almost 100 years.

In the grand scheme of things, we're really still on the front end of the recolonization process, but as bears start to recover and recolonize the area, we're going to have absolutely more conflicts.

That's why it's so important that we get this information today so that we can prepare for how black bears are going to return to really all portions of Texas and then again how landowners and communities are going to find a way to live with them.

Terlingua Ranch is sparsely populated, but is populated, and there are quite a few people here.

There are some open dumpsters, bird feeders, hummingbird feeders.

There is hunting in this area, so corn feeders, different supplemental feed, and that could definitely be one reason why there are so many bears hanging out here.

It's food sources.

Where there's food there's bears.

[door creaking open] Hey, man.

Yeah, awesome.

Want to look at some SD cards?

Yes.

[laughing] Wander in.

Come on in.

Yeah.

Okay.

I remember the first time I saw a bear... --it was you that saw the bear.

And I saw it here on this property, just happened to look out-- well actually, my dog barked.

This is Oso.

Our dog Oso saw the bear.

[laughing] I'm Alida Lorio, and he's William Rich.

And we are Terlingua Ranch property owners, and have been for 28 years.

My relationship with BRI started through my bear reporting to Texas Parks and Wildlife.

So it was they who connected us with BRI, because of the bear sightings.

He's looking around, checking the trap out.

We think of this as the start of our career in bear biology.

[laughs] Yeah!

Well, we certainly are seeing more bears here, for sure.

Yes.

We used to see a bear maybe once a year.

And when we moved out here, there were no bears at all, because they were still more or less in the Sierra del Carmen.

This year...

I mean, they really have been around.

Yes.

We've had-- just this year, we've probably had three or four bears.

We've had two-- one in the backyard, one right here in the driveway, one over there-- Crossing over there.

One crossing the hill over here.

So just, you know, we've had four sightings.

Well, it looks like he grabbed something there, he's got a donut in his mouth.

Oh, that's so exciting.

Man, that's a big bear.

No tags and he's huge.

Yeah, that's definitely a 300-pound bear.

Jesus.

Wow.

We've got lots of bears around here.

Apparently have lots of bears here.

We have a lot of bears.

[music] Yeah, this project is off to a great start.

We've had six captures so far with one recapture.

You know, things are really rocking and rolling.

We're trying to get more collars in get more bears collared, and I think it really sets a very strong foundation for where this project is headed.

[music] About a week ago, Texas Parks and Wildlife started getting reports of this bear kind of just causing problems in the Terlingua Ghost Town.

So it's important that Texas Parks and Wildlife is involved in this capture in particular because there is so much, you know, public interaction with this one You know, this bear has been causing some problems in the Ghost Town for about a week now, and we're fortunate enough to have the state mammalogist for Texas Parks and Widlife Dr. Dana Karelus, has traveled with us today, and I mean, I certainly feel fortunate to you know, be cooperating together to solve this conflict.

I'm the state mammal specialist, so I'm kind of watching out for bears across the whole state, and of course out here in West Texas, this is our biggest hotspot of bear activity.

This bear has been getting into dumpsters for the last week and a half or two weeks or so, so our goal is to find this bear.

This is DB's restaurant and barbecue place here in the Ghost Town, and this bear was just here last night out in their dumpsters, so we're going to go take a look and see if we can't kind of, see where he might have gone.

We don't want to move bears.

It's not in the best interest of the bear, and trapping and relocating is not always a great solution because they can come right back in a lot of cases.

Another thing that's unique in this situation is that this is late fall right now, and bears are in hyperphagia, so it means they are in that ravenous stage where they are trying to get up to somewhere around 20,000 calories a day to gain weight before denning in the winter.

So they already picked up what was out here, but you can see kind of where there was food garbage down here on the ground, and it looks like the bear drug it this way, pulling the trash and feasting in a little more secluded spot.

We do have an option for a release site for him nearby.

It's far enough away that it'll take him at least a day to get back if he does come back.

For that reason, we are going to try to take this bear and relocate him.

Down here in the Terlingual Ghost Town, this bear went into the trap around 11:50, kind of midnight time.

The message came in that the trap had closed.

Excited to work him out.

We've known each other for years now and worked together, so this is great.

We've talked about bear captures before, but it's the first one together so... Give it a go.

[loud banging and growling] [sound of dart shooting] Alright, two and a half.

[cranking sound] Neck is 29.

347.

Nice.

One, two, three.

[cars driving] [cranking] [clapping] Hey bear, come on!

[clapping] Let's go!

Turn around, door's open [airhorn blaring] Hey, hey, hey!

[clapping and shouting] Black bears are beloved.

Bears really symbolize wildness.

Today we see bears in Del Rio and in South Texas and in Terrell County and Sanderson and it's just part of their pioneering strategies that they have as a species to repopulate areas that they formerly occupied.

The tolerance of humans and Texans in particular is really going to be key to any successful recolonization that black bears are implementing today.

[splashing] Right now we're at a critical point in bears coming back to Texas A large part of that is working with people to make sure they're aware that there's bears in their area and work with them to secure their attractants that they might have on the landscape.

Bears really need the community to respond and the community to take these measures.

This one already has a combo.

[rattling] Bears don't get in it.

It is up to us.

And we have a responsibility to do it.

If we want to live here I think we have a responsibility not only for ourselves and to mitigate our own interactions with bears but to educate when we can so that other property owners can learn to mitigate those interactions and not be so wound up about it.

I'm hoping my role in the conservation of bears in Texas is to learn as much as we can about this population and how they are using this landscape and hopefully learn enough to be able to give them the information they need to make informed, sound management decisions.

As a Texan, it's a second chance I mean we failed black bears 100 years ago and today they're giving us a second chance by coming back to this landscape and so it's really up to Texans to figure out what are we gonna do about it, and are we going to embrace them?

are we going to manage them?

are we going to scare them off landscape again?

[gate opening] Land is a really powerful thing.

Working not just on it but with it and in it.

It's important in ways that are difficult to describe.

It shaped your parents, how it's gonna shape your children.

[mooing] We fail to learn lessons from this land at our peril.

[cattle running] As a scientist, part of my job is to make sure that we learn those lessons well.

[torch blazing] [fire crackling] [hissing] [music] My name is Jason Sawyer I'm the chief science officer for East Foundation.

[whooshing] The East Foundation was formed by the East family.

Robert Claude East put his ranching legacy in trust and created the East Foundation, six separate ranching properties that operate as one large ranching system, they're integrated.

[mooing] [Spanish guitar music] [birds chirping] Ranching provides.

Our goal is to produce food for people but but also to, to steward this landscape in a way that provides for wildlife, for cattle.

The ranchers that operate on these lands are passioante about those things.

And one of the results of that is there's still space.

There's space for all kinds of things.

Space for cattle.

Space for wildlife.

Space for ocelots.

At the El Sauz Ranch in deep south Texas we're really fortunate and proud to have the largest known population of ocelots in the United States in one location.

Ocelots are really cool creatures.

It's a small cat covered in beautiful dappled spots.

This amazing jewel in the landscape.

[birds chirping] [film reel clicking] Ocelots used to have a really expansive range in the United States.

That range has shrunk down to deep south Texas on the Laguna Madre.

Their fur was valued and they were hunted and pursued.

And there's a lot more people in Texas than there used to be.

The open spaces that ocelots require diminished.

Deep South Texas?

one of the last places where large intact landscapes that they require exist.

[lasso whipping aorund] [speaking Spanish] Ranching in South Texas has a history that's so long that it's kind of lost in time.

[booming] It comes from the Vaquero tradition of northern Mexico.

We're fortunate that a lot of that culture is maintained.

In today's world, speed is valued.

[horse neighing] There's a lot of pressure to be in a hurry.

Or we can take our time.

[setting saddle down] Instead of trying to cover a 10,000 acre pasture in a few hours, we're willing to allow several days, sometimes even weeks.

[snoring] [cattling thundering] The closer that we live to the land, the more we tend to appreciate the diversity of life that surrounds us.

[ocelot chasing] Cattle graze and as they move through the landscape they create little micro disturbances.

Small mammals hide seeds and find seeds.

Turkeys scratch and root.

[storm booming] That's what provides our ability to capture rainfall.

The growth of plants provide both food and shelter [booming] And fires disturb that landscape [fire roaring] Each of those contributes to the aeration, turnover and accumulation of organic matter in our soil.

That's how we create a sustainable ranching system and secure wildlife populations for the future.

One of the things that is important to us is to learn as much as possible about ocelots so that we can make the best possible decisions for their future.

We're in the process here of establishing a trap line to evaluate their health, understand some more things about their life situation and actually collect semen for future artificial insemination and the production of progeny so that we can help expand this population.

What we mainly look at are all the small trails you'll see kind of going through all of the understory and so this trap is really set up to hit about four different spots.

So if that cat walks through any of these, one of the first things he's going to see, or she is going to see, that bird in the back of the cage.

Ashley Reeves, Ashley's been working on El Sauz for the past three years.

She's the expert in ocelot research and she's been trying to perfect the artificial insemination techniques so that we can do captive propagation.

Jason: "Ready?"

Ashley: "Yeah" So far we've set 14, today we're setting another 16 so we'll be at a total of 30 for now.

[rustling] [shovling] So if we get a cat we send out a large message and then we all travel from Kingsville to come down and process.

Success trapping ocelots means we get a handful each year.

They're difficult to capture and elusive, but this is the best place to do it.

We feel really proud and fortunate that we have the largest documented ocelot population in North America on one of our ranches.

That's a really special thing.

We're proud of the fact they still want to call it home.

[ocelot running] We work very hard to make sure that large landscapes are left intact and we do that through ranching.

By being engaged in an economically-viable ranching system, the ranch stays whole.

[cattle running] And when the ranch stays whole, it continues to be a place wildlife thrive.

Where we create ecosystem services like healthy soils, clean air and clean water that are good for society that people want and need.

You know, every good rancher I know, really has a primary goal.

And that's to leave the ranch better than they found it for the benefit of future generations.

[horse galloping] [ocean lapping] [intense music] The coast is where a lot of magic happens.

The eco that salt water creates is pretty raw.

That complex part that's so appealing and that there's life everywhere.

Redfish definitely embody the survivor.

I mean they were heading towards extinction.

We have 14 anglers who come together in Houston, Texas and say, "We got to make a difference."

because they cared about that species.

They loved catching it, eating them, taking their kids fishing.

All the things that bring people to the coast, they didn't want that to go away and it's kind of a fabled story.

[music] I'm Pat Murray.

I've dedicated my life to conservation.

There's a great Japanese saying is, "Never lose your beginner spirit."

It started with my dad taking me fishing.

Maybe every one of those types of stories start that way Three-year-old Snoopy rod fishing in Port Aransas and just being all in immediately.

As I got a little older I was fortunate that my dad would hire guides and that changed everything for me because I had no conception that you could actually make a living doing this.

I was like, "I want to be a fishing guide."

and so, was in college and was fortunate to have some guides that were mentors and they would send me overflow trips.

I'm getting paid and I'm fishing.

I'm like, "I'll live in my truck if I have to."

I did it full-time and just woke up on fire every morning for it.

That's what fueled my passion for conservation.

You're wading through these seagrass flats and you're getting to see the resource, you're getting to see the Redfis but also everything that rests around it.

You know everything from mullet to oysters to stingrays all of it.

You know it's all intertwined all of it's connected.

and... this little area.

[splashing] That is a healthy redfish right there.

The tail is gorgeous.

If you show up in Rockport, Texas or Port Aransas or Galveston you're going to look and you're going to see the estuary, the marsh, the off-colored water.

That's the bread basket.

That's life and strangely it's all connected.

That careful blend of salt and fresh that makes oysters thrive and shrimp thrive and Redfish thrive.

There's just so much to get excited about Redfish.

Often they spawn during during hurricane season.

The large mature Redfish, they go offshore and they get these big balls of them.

Where literally the water will turn orangish-red when they're up on the surface.

There's lots of big inflows with big tides, big winds and all of that spawn gets blown into the bays.

and goes up into the estuaries to grow.

And so tiny redfish become bigger and bigger and bigger.

Eventually they move back offshore to spawn.

But the problem is, when you got a bunch of giant Redfish up on the surface and you got humans around, we're going to figure out a way to catch them.

[seagulls calling] For an East Texas boy, I fell in love with the coast.

I'm Troy Williamson and I practice law in Corpus Christi, Texas.

First time I caught a redfish I was hooked.

[laughs] A jerk on both ends of the line.

In the early 1970's most people were happy to go to a restaurant and have a fine fish dinner of Redfish.

If you take yourself back to the 70's you had this big black and Redfish craze and it became a very popular food fish.

The other problem is they're fairly easy to target when you're using destructive gear like gill nets, so monofilament entanglement nets.

Through the 70's it really became acute.

The population just got beat down enough that recreational anglers were really noticing it.

Most people just saw the nets in the water, dead fish hanging on them, large catches of fish.

It was a group of people that saw what was happening to the resource.

have 14 recreational anglers that are disgruntled.

They'd be on a school of fish, come back the next day to find a gill net that's going to wipe out that entire school.

[laughing] Too damn many commercial fishermen and not enough resource to go around for them.

[music] They immediately realized that to change trajectory of a species that's being over harvested you've got to affect policy and they were going to have to work with the Texas legislature.

At the beginning it was not a popular issue.

and it took a lot of concentrated effort and it took a lot of money to sway the legislators.

1977, the first protection was the Red Drum Conservation Act and it set bag limits.

After a couple of years, House Bill 1000 made Redfish illegal to sell them commercially.

When the nets were supposed to come out of the water, the commercial folks were still resisting it.

People were having their lives threatened.

Those folks that were extremely active in lobbying efforts, Ron Young, Dick Ingram, Jim Atkins.

Jim's cabin, floating cabin, the church, was burned down.

He was letting the game wardens use the church as a place to stay and the church of course got its name because when the guys would go fishing on Sunday or stay down here they were going to church.

[laughing] The commercial fishermen, if they're going back to Corpus, they're coming through this hole right here.

At night it was like a rodeo.

The game wardens, who were chasing commercial fishermen who were still outlaw fishing.

You know the fish were disappearing.

and ah... there were a lot of guys that didn't want to see that happen.

Even after the passage of House Bill 1000, the state of the fishery and the ecosystem, it was dire.

The next year there was a huge freeze and further decimated the redfish and trout.

When something's being extracted that significantly, it's the thing that you didn't see coming that gets it.

One little environmental blip and then it's gone.

And so you had such a degradation of Redfish populations The importance and the vision and the technology for hatcheries really came into focus.

Although commercial aquaculture of Red Drum has just begun, considerable information exists about fingerling production of this species because of extensive efforts to restock depleted populations of Red Drum in natural waters.

In Texas there are three facilities associated with this stock enhancement program.

Two of them are hatcheries and the third is the grow out facility where they have ponds to raise the fingerlings.

My name is Shane Bonnot and I work for Coastal Conservation Association the Texas chapter, and I'm the Advocacy Director for the state of Texas.

Isn't this cool?

I mean it's like a brewery for Redfish.

Every Redfish tank has five fish, three females and two males.

So each year about 15 million Redfish get released and 15 million Spotted Sea Trout get released.

The first Redfish that were released in Texas were in 1983 that came out of the facility out of Corpus Christi and released into Port O'Connor.

There's been a lot of laboratory research conducted between the late 70's all the way up to 1981 when the gill net ban went into place.

So you kind of had these things happening and coming together at the perfect time to allow for the farming of Redfish to take off.

The fish are put on photo thermal cycles.

So you manipulate the water temperature and the daylight hours and as long as they are well fed and you're taking care of them and they're not stressed out you can spawn them for several months at a time.

I mean this is perpetual.

I mean now you feel really good about this species, among others, being here long after we're gone.

Fish are sourced from the wild.

Fish are spawned indoors and then the brood stock and the larvae are released back into the wild.

The first fish released into our Texas bays happened in 1983.

By putting those small Redfish in the bays in the estuaries even though there weren't a lot of mature spawners They were able to restart that life cycle.

That's a really neat moment.

They proved you could take a concept in a lab and then scale it up to a commercial level production and not only release fish into the wild for fisheries enhancement but also prove that you could do this for a commercial scale to get food to the market you know for table fare.

It's something like that, that many, many years later ends up ushering in as aquaculture evolves that, wait a minute, you can have commercially sold Red Drum.

They just have to be raised in an aquaculture facility.

It's ironic if people haven't been issued eating them they wouldn't be as in good a shape now.

Only humans could come up with that.

doesn't make any sense.

Then we ate them to the point that now we've ensured their future.

And so it's kind of funny to think about that.

You know the cliche of the end being the begininng but it kind of is.

You know the Texas Redfish recovery and the conservation story behind it it's not only motivational to people in other regions but it actually it gave them something that they could emulate and and that model still plays out today across the U.S. A lot of species have a culture [waves crashing] and maybe it's like all good conservation stories.

The culture that started in Texas with Red Drum ends up making it really come to fruition and then it's a culture that maintains it.

The Redfish, it's everywhere.

It can be at a jetty in 30 feet of water and it can be in three inches of water where you don't even understand how something with gills could even live.

And the way you target that species, changes with that.

Putting a long rod in a sand spike, bowing a fly in super shallow water, they all love the brute force of that fish, the durability of that fish.

Texas is known as the Redfish state.

Our fishery was built on the success of the recovery of the Redfish species.

I've heard from a lot of people through the years that they were one of those 14.

But in the end it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter who was there.

Because it's really much more important of what they created.

and how many people are focused on issues like that now.

There is no doubt Texans value the coast and Texans have an approach to coastal resources that is a never say die.

Even in some of the most challenging issues we face, we continue to strive for good conservation.

Redfish are the same way.

No matter what challenges they face, be it through passes and through marshes and through ever they don't ever give up.

They they don't ever give up.

They keep going.

You can change whatever you want in the eco.

They're still going to try to make their way offshore.

And I think maybe that makes them uniquely Texan in their own special way.

[music] Funding for this program was provided by At HEB, our commitment to Texas extends beyond our own aisles to the miles and miles of Texas state parks.

You can learn more about our efforts at OurTexasOurFuture.com