Hawk Tower Bird Watching. This is Passport to Texas Texas Parks and Wildlife brought the nature tourism movement to Texas in the 1990’s. Madge Lindsay worked with a couple of other people and developed this idea of a birding trail. Shelly Plante is the Nature Tourism Manager. No one had ever linked together sites that were drivable distances from one another to say, here’s a marketing platform of ways that people can come to your area and enjoy nature. Wouldn’t it be great if we worked with local communities on this concept of nature tourism and developing the sites they already have and telling people about these wonderful birding sites because right now bird watchers know that they exist but people that just like nature may not realize it. Local knowledge wasn’t always reliably shared. So, let’s put them together in one big map and they can go from site to site to site and see a variety of habitat a variety of birds and have enhancements there that make it easy for them like boardwalks to viewing blinds, that sort of thing. So, there was a grant and they got it and the great Texas coastal birding trail was born out of that. We were the first state to do a birding trail. More than 40 states now have birding trails. It was really great timing and really great people at the right place at the right time made this amazing thing that’s been a boon for rural communities all over Texas. For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti…reminding you that life’s better outside.