- 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... - We are here on the Matador Wildlife Management Area looking for Texas horned lizards as part of our ongoing reintroduction project.

- For a female Northern Harrier, her stretch of the coastal prairie is worth defending.

- We get to create opportunities for a lot of people who never get a chance to fish.

[splash] And that's a great thing.

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

♪ ♪ [wind blowing] [gentle acoustic music] ♪ ♪ - NARRATOR: This is a tale of two wildlife management areas, one in the Llano Uplift of the Texas Hill Country, the other in the rolling plains of northwest Texas.

Although they are hundreds of miles apart, they have something special in common.

- NATHAN RAINS: We are here on the Matador Wildlife Management area, looking for Texas horned lizards as part of our ongoing, Texas horned lizard reintroduction project.

So these lizards here are some of the founder lizards that the various zoos use to breed in captivity.

And then we release babies back into the wild.

So we are driving the roads on the wildlife management area.

We've done this for many years and found that there's really the only effective way to find lizards is just to drive these WMA roads or county roads slowly looking for lizards.

They're very difficult to find just by walking through the pasture.

They're very camouflaged, very cryptic.

So we spend most of our time just driving roads.

And it's a pretty effective way of finding them.

- It's a nice female Texas horned lizard.

- NARRATOR: Another crew is also on the lookout for horned lizards.

- We are collecting both males and females to take morphological data and then also, try to collect semen on males and bring back a couple for the breeding population.

[upbeat music] - PHOTOGRAPHER: What do we have here?

- Male horned lizard.

- PHOTOGRAPHER: And this is what we're looking for, right?

- Yes.

We need breeding males.

[upbeat music] - NARRATOR: Back at the bunkhouse, the biologists collect a variety of data and samples.

[upbeat music] Semen specimens are evaluated for a new artificial insemination program.

♪ ♪ Graduate student, Mycah Van Allen, is testing for the presence of pesticides.

Some of the males will go to the Fort Worth Zoo.

All the rest will be released back to the locations where they were caught.

♪ ♪ Texas horned lizards are listed as a threatened species.

Only individuals with a proper permit can pick up, touch, or possess them in Texas.

[soft energetic music] - NATHAN: Right now, all of the babies that we are producing at the Fort Worth Zoo and Dallas Zoo and Caldwell Zoo, they're all going to Mason Mountain Wildlife Management Area.

That's been our site now for about six or seven years, so we're releasing the hatchlings and we're going to continue to do that until we feel that we've got a, you know, a self-sustaining population there, and then we'll consider moving on to other areas.

- NARRATOR: Since 2017, over 3,000 horned lizard hatchlings have been released at Mason Mountain.

Here, too, and at a nearby private ranch, research on horned lizards is ongoing and extensive.

[beeping] - KIRA: Right there.

My name is Kira Gangbin.

I am a PhD candidate and I am currently studying, ways to enhance the reintroduction efforts for the Texas horned lizard.

My dissertation has three main chapters to it.

So the first chapter is focusing on studying nesting ecology of Texas horn lizards.

The thought is if we can figure out where female horned lizards are choosing to make nests at, that would probably give us some good insight as to where we should be releasing lizards in the future for our reintroduction program we have for the species.

So this is one of our horn lizard nests.

And the only reason I know that there's a horn lizard nest here is because I was here about a day ago, and I watched the female lizard make this nest.

If you came up to the same spot today, you'd have no idea that this is a horned lizard nest because female horned lizards cover their nest so completely that it's perfectly camouflaged now.

- NARRATOR: At each nest, she finds, Kira takes a variety of measurements and samples.

- KIRA: This is measuring the slope of the ground of where she made her nest site.

[upbeat music] So this is a soil moisture probe.

This measures approximately the water content of the soil right next to the nest.

So in this case, we have a volumetric water content of about 20.8%.

And the second way we measure soil moisture is with a soil core.

So we'll take a soil core, we'll dry that core in the lab to figure out about the percentage of moisture that was in there.

So now I am taking a picture of the micro habitat square so we can get an idea of the approximation of how much bushes, shrubs, grass and open space there is around her nest site.

The second chapter of my dissertation is focusing on ways to poison the red imported fire ant.

This is an invasive ant that came into the United States in about the 1930s, and this ant has just wreaked havoc on our ecosystems because they outcompete a lot of the native ants here in Texas.

And these native ants are really important for the horned lizard's diet.

The small native ants we have are important for the hatchling horned lizards to eat and the big red harvester ants, often call them red ants here in Texas, those are important for adults to eat.

They think they comprise about 85% of their diet.

The third chapter of my dissertation is going to be focusing on looking at where horned lizards are selecting to brumate at.

Brumation is essentially hibernation for reptiles.

And so if we can figure out where lizards are brumating, we can apply this information to our captive breeding programs at the zoos.

So currently at the zoos, the number one time in which these lizards are dying is when they go into brumation.

And this is really weird because in brumation, that's when horned lizards typically have their highest survival in the wild.

About 90 to 95% of them can live throughout brumation in the wild.

But in the zoos, it's much, much lower.

And so if we can figure out where these horned lizards are brumating in the wild, figure out if maybe they're picking a specific temperature, a specific micro habitat, or a specific soil moisture, we can apply this information to the zoos, hopefully have higher survival in our zoos, which will then lead us to have more individuals to release at future reintroductions.

- NATHAN: This will be, I believe, our eighth year to reintroduce babies there at Mason Mountain.

In the past couple of years, actually, we're finding reproduction from babies that we released several years prior.

So we're finally having lizards that we're reintroducing as babies that are growing up and having babies of their own out there.

So that was a pretty important milestone.

[beeping] - KIRA: We apply different trackers to them.

For the baby horned lizards, we have something called harmonic tags and these are much lighter weight.

Those types of tags don't have a battery.

So we actually just apply it to the lizard using superglue and does not hurt the lizards.

They end up shedding the tag off actually in about three weeks.

Adult lizards get things called radio trackers glued to their back with eyelash glue.

And the reason we use eyelash glue is because the trackers that they have on their back have batteries in them.

And so after eight weeks, we need to change out the batteries.

With eyelash glue, it comes with an eyelash glue remover.

And so we can apply that to the back of the lizards, we can change out their tags.

[engine revs] [gentle upbeat music] When I saw them, I fell in love.

I felt like they had so much personality.

And so for grad school, I decided I wanted to work on horned lizards, and here I am today.

I am one person on a long chain of people that have been working on Texas horn lizards, and I'm very grateful to be a part of it.

- NARRATOR: To accomplish this scale of research and reintroduction, a vast collaboration has evolved with a variety of partners.

[gentle music] - KIRA: I've had an endless list of supporters for this project.

Some of the biggest supporters I have to say is, of course, TCU, Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Fort Worth Zoo.

But there's other zoos like the Dallas Zoo, the Caldwell Zoo.

There's cities.

The city of Pearland has been involved in this reintroduction, Fossil Rim has.

And then I've also had a lot of different organizations that have provided things like grants for me, like the Horn Lizard Conservation Society, as well as the Study for Amphibians and Reptiles.

Another really huge supporter in this project is the White Ranch.

That's the private ranch that I'm working on.

The family and the land managers have really provided a tremendous amount of support.

This year on the project, I have a really spectacular intern.

Her name is Julianne Lee.

She graduated from University of Oklahoma, and I would not be able to do this project without her either.

She's the one that's out here sweating, and really putting in the work.

[gentle music] I love working at Mason Mountain Wildlife Management Area.

The staff there is just so supportive.

They make me a better version of myself.

At least once a week I will wake up and say, "Wow, I'm currently living the best years of my life."

[gentle music] [birds chirping] - NARRATOR: Along the wind-swept grasslands near Houston, you'll find one of North America's rarest ecosystems: The Coastal Prairie.

Hidden beneath the grasses, life flourishes.

[bee buzzing] The prairie shelters countless small creatures, creating a refuge rich enough to sustain the hunters that depend on its abundance.

And where prey is abundant, hunters gather.

[hawk calling] Here, a Northern Harrier stalks from above.

[dramatic music] While most hawks soar, the harrier takes a different approach.

♪ ♪ With wings held in a shallow V, gliding just feet above the grass, it scans the fields.

Using its keen vision, the harrier scans the grass below, alert to the slightest movement of small rodents.

But it isn't just looking, it's listening.

Unusually for a hawk, the Northern Harrier shares one of the owl's most powerful traits.

A facial disc that funnels sound directly to its ears, revealing prey hidden deep within the grass.

In this open landscape, sound can be as revealing as movement.

[rodent squeaking] [soft dramatic music] ♪ ♪ The harrier commits in an instant, adjusting mid-air, responding to prey it can't always see.

Most dives fail, but success comes with repetition.

[bright adventurous music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ In winter, prime hunting grounds are scarce.

For a female Northern Harrier, her stretch of the Coastal Prairie is worth defending, and she will not share it.

[bright adventurous music] ♪ ♪ The message is clear.

This ground belongs to her.

♪ ♪ As the day wanes, another hunter arrives.

A short-eared owl slips low over the grass.

[soft dramatic music] A different bird entirely, yet shaped by the same landscape into a strikingly similar hunter.

♪ ♪ Having migrated from the tundra of Northern Canada, it finds itself here, drawn to these fertile hunting grounds.

Where such places persist, so will these raptors.

These hunters need these natural wide open spaces.

Their presence is a sign of a healthy prairie.

An ecosystem of life all interconnected here in this rare Coastal Prairie.

[upbeat music] - DONOVAN: Today we're harvesting fish to deliver for the Neighborhood Fishing Program.

- TECHNICIAN: 15.4.

[upbeat music] - DONOVAN: To produce these catfish, it usually takes between 16 and 18 months.

We need like 10 baskets.

- Yeah.

- DONOVAN: It takes a couple other hatcheries to help us out, all working together to make this happen.

Gotta be getting close to that truck being done.

Now that more and more people are living in the cities, we wanna bring fishing opportunities to those people.

Historically, everyone's first fishing opportunity was grandpa's farm, and now grandpa's farm isn't really a thing that people experience anymore, and so we're bringing that experience to the neighborhood park ponds that people are close to to provide a fishing opportunity.

- TECHNICIAN: 13.8.

- DONOVAN: Today we're delivering about 1,600 fish.

[water splashing] Think of all the people that are going to have those similar experiences that I had because of programs like this.

[engine revving] [gentle music] When I was little, I used to fish in neighborhood ponds around my house, and being able to provide those fish to the people, is the reason we do what we do.

[gentle music] - Whenever I come here, I enjoy fishing here.

I also bring my kids and we love this pond.

And I'm sure I'll get some more good size today.

♪ ♪ - One of the main goals of the Neighborhood Fishing Program is to create opportunity within urban areas where there is not easy access to a large lake or river banks, and create a great fishery that would not exist unless we stock it so that these people can enjoy fishing close to home.

- That's a couple of sandwiches.

- NEIL: And those fish will all be at least 12 inches on average so that you can take those home and eat them.

- Mm-hmm, oh yeah, I'm going to like that.

- I'm having a great time.

This is a great catch.

Great time.

Great moments.

- We're gonna filet him.

He gonna still be kicking.

I'm gonna drop him in the grease.

- When you stock a fish that's 12 inches long and then you can watch somebody catch it 10 minutes later, you know you've made an impact.

And maybe that person's gonna throw that fish back or maybe that person's gonna take it home, and it's gonna become an important meal that they share with their family.

The Neighborhood Fishing Program encompasses 18 sites across the state, stretching from all the way up in Amarillo, all the way down to San Antonio, concentrated in urban areas that have good amenities where people feel safe taking their families for that first fishing experience.

And then, we continue to stock those sites every two weeks with channel catfish throughout the spring, summer, and through the fall.

And then during the winter, we transition to trout stockings so that year round we create a close to home fishing experience that anyone of any skill level can enjoy.

[water splashing] One of the main goals of the Neighborhood Fishing Program is to create fishing opportunities close to home so that parents can take their children, get them exposed to fishing, and then hopefully we get those kids hooked for life.

- Nice.

Wanna try to unhook it?

There we go.

- I love catching trout because you can just pull them right out of the water when you hook them, and then you can just get to see their beautiful colors.

[upbeat music] - So, I'm out here with my sons today.

They love fishing and they're introduced to it kind of the same way I was as a kid growing up in an urban area.

I used to go to urban ponds that were stocked by Texas Parks & Wildlife and I'm doing the same with them.

They love it and it's close to home, and it's really a great opportunity to spend time with the family and introduce them to the outdoors.

[upbeat music] - CONNOR: Yeah, good.

- PATRICK: These ponds were selected because they're in suburban and urban areas and they're usually the perfect size for stocking and catching fish.

Love seeing people out here fishing.

We are in the middle of our trout stocking season.

Channel catfish are typically a warm weather species fish.

We can stock them year round and catch them year round.

However, rainbow trout are a cold water species and it's a novelty in Texas to have rainbow trout and people really like them.

They're very pretty, they're very tasty.

So, we stock the rainbow trout in the winter because it's a cold water species.

- LEE: So with the probe, I'm checking the dissolved oxygen content and the temperature of the water to make sure those fish get a good transfer into the new water body.

[water splashing] - PATRICK: Trout love this type of weather.

Wintertime is the great time for stocking trout and it's a great time to come out and try to catch them.

- LARRY: Okay.

About 13, 14 inches.

Another rainbow trout.

And that's a beautiful one.

- That's 15-- - 14?

- 15 inches.

- 15?

Okay.

- Yeah.

- PATRICK: Channel catfish and rainbow trout are easy to catch.

- CONNOR: Sweet.

- PATRICK: Oh, that's awesome.

- CONNOR: That's a good one too.

- PATRICK: And they're great for beginners.

Oh, that's great, man.

Kids 16 and under don't need a fishing license, which is great.

It makes it easier to come out and have a fishing trip.

Look how pretty it is and look at the patterning and the colors.

Adults do need a fishing license, and those license dollars fund programs like this.

[Larry laughs] - LARRY: So far had a blast.

I enjoy it whether catch fish or not.

Just glad that I caught something.

That's my final catch so far.

And I think it's excellent for the youngsters and little ones.

- Two words, close and convenient.

We don't have to invest a lot of time 'cause everybody's busy, so we can come out here pretty quickly and there's a high chance of success 'cause it's stocked so often, which is great.

- Are there still channel catfish?

- PATRICK: Yep.

- They last all year round?

- The channel catfish, they don't all get caught out so they'll persist even through the winter.

So, there's always a chance that you can catch something big out here in addition to the rainbow trout that are stocked.

- CONNOR: This is a beautiful rainbow trout that you can find in these neighborhood fishing ponds.

Very fun to catch.

- That's our mission is trying to make fishing better and getting people out, engaged with the outdoors, getting families engaged with fishing in the outdoors and creating the next generation of anglers.

My advice for families wanting to get into fishing is don't overthink it.

Just give it a try.

The Neighborhood Fishing Program by design is supposed to be simple, so just grab a rod, come on out.

[upbeat music] - NEIL: We get to create opportunities for a lot of people that would never ever get a chance to fish, and that's a great thing.

Getting outside in nature and having a connection to nature in general gives people a true basis for valuing our environment.

Without that connection to nature, then people don't value clean water, clean air, green open areas where people can go out and enjoy nature.

It's very calming, it's relaxing, and we need to make sure, especially in the modern world, we maintain that connection to nature.

- NARRATOR: Next time on Texas Parks & Wildlife... - Everybody's got a bad habit.

The guns that are in Fort Chadbourne, I've been collecting since I was 10 years old.

- Now leafcutter ants cut leaves because their using the leaves to create a fungus that they consume.

They are sort of the gardeners of the ant world.

- Those memories and those special moments, you will not forget.

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

[birds chirping] [turkey gobbles] [birds chirping] [birds chirping] [birds chirping] [birds chirping] [birds chirping] [leaves crunching] [leaves crunching] [leaves crunching] [leaves crunching] [leaves crunching] [leaves crunching] [leaves crunching] - 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.