Pictured, from left to right, are: Adrian Sepulveda, Heart of the Pines VFD captain; Travis Ward, firefighter; Rick Arnic, LCRA Regional Affairs representative; Roderick Emanuel, Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative board member; Josh Lucas, fire department lieutenant; Lori A. Berger, LCRA Board member; Mizzy Hedge, fire chief; Bryan Bracewell, Bluebonnet board member; and Deborah Rogers, Bluebonnet community and development services representative.

By Will Holford

Heart of the Pines Volunteer Fire Department will purchase its first off-road utility vehicle to enable crews to better respond to wildland and other fires not easily accessible with large fire trucks, thanks to a $14,765 grant from the Lower Colorado River Authority and Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative.

The grant, combined with a $3,692 matching contribution from the Heart of the Pines VFD, will pay for a new smaller vehicle with fire suppression equipment to help firefighters get to fires in hard-to-reach areas.

“This utility vehicle will allow us to go off-road with water to places our brush trucks can’t, such as undeveloped land,” said James Lewey, fire department treasurer. “With the new vehicle, we will be better prepared to tackle wildland fires, vehicle emergencies, and structure and home fires.”

Heart of the Pines VFD provides emergency services to about 35 square miles in central Bastrop County between Bastrop and Smithville. The department has mutual aid agreements with the cities of Smithville and Bastrop, and Bastrop County Emergency Services District No. 2.

“The VFD is also in between two state parks – Bastrop and Buescher – which makes the utility vehicle all the more necessary,” Lewey said.

“Without the grant, we would still be tasked with the additional challenge of fighting fires with the resources we have now,” Lewey said. “This utility vehicle gives us better firefighting capabilities than we had before and that’s why we’re excited to get this grant.”

This grant is one of a number of grants recently awarded through LCRA’s Community Development Partnership Program, which provides economic development and community assistance grants to cities, counties, volunteer fire departments, regional development councils and other nonprofit organizations in LCRA’s wholesale electric and water service areas. The program is part of LCRA’s effort to give back to the communities it serves. Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative is one of LCRA’s wholesale electric customers and a partner in the grant program.

Applications for the next round of grants will be accepted Jan. 1-31, 2020. More information is available at lcra.org/cdpp.

By Melissa Segrest

As if to prove a point, Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative’s fourth annual Solar Day was hot and sunny – the perfect day to generate electricity from solar panels. More than 150 Bluebonnet members, employees, area residents and solar installers participated in the event, co-sponsored by the Texas Solar Energy Society and Solar Austin, on Saturday, Sept. 14, at the co-op’s Brenham Service Center on Longwood Drive. 

The four-hour event, broken out into two sessions, was packed with information for curious homeowners with a lot of questions about home solar arrays. Micah Jasuta, a member of the nonprofit Texas Solar Energy Society, provided a detailed presentation during each session, answering attendees’ questions about how solar works, installation and more. 

Bluebonnet members Judy Dickson, Margaret and Joel Shannon, and John Gardner were available to answer questions about their experience, expenses and the effectiveness of their systems. 

Bluebonnet continues to see an increase in members installing solar panels on their homes and businesses. In 2019, on average, the cooperative connects one new solar member to its grid each day. By the end of 2019, the cooperative expects to have 1,045 renewable energy systems connected to its grid. With federal tax credits, which are expected to be phased out in the next few years, and the declining cost of solar panels, some can recoup the cost of their investment in less than 15 years. 

Attendees could also visit with solar installers, who were hosted by the Texas Solar Energy Society. 

Bluebonnet’s nearby Eco Home gets a portion of its power from a 5-kilowatt solar array, a wind turbine, and underground geothermal heating and cooling system. You can find Jasuta’s presentation, along with more information about harnessing the sun’s power, at bluebonnet.coop.
 

By Patrick Beach

Victor Moberg grew up in the 1960s as the grandson of Austin’s king and queen of sausage making, so meat was a regular item on the menu at home. A lot of those meals included venison.

His grandparents — Smokey Denmark sausage company founders Albert “Smokey” and Eloise Denmark — showed reverence and enthusiasm for making food. Moberg and his family carry on that tradition today on their land south of Smithville where they raise animals and hunt deer. The Mobergs are among hundreds of thousands of Texans who will hunt white-tailed deer this season. Many of them will be up before the crack of dawn in early November for the start of the general hunting season for white-tailed deer in the Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative service area. Nov. 2 is the first day of the hunting season for adults in the North Texas hunting zone, which includes the Bluebonnet area. That season ends Jan. 5, 2020.

Deer hunting is big in Texas and so is the deer population.“Texas boasts a robust white-tailed deer population of about 5.4 million deer, which should contribute to hunter success this season,” according to a statement from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.

Even though much of Texas experienced triple digit heat over the late summer, “hunters should expect an excellent deer season with above average antler quality and fawn recruitment,” said Alan Cain, the department’s white-tailed deer program leader. Early rain in the fall of 2018 resulted in an excellent crop of winter weeds that lasted well into the spring, he said, and that provided the nutrition for white-tailed bucks to grow larger antlers.

In May 2006, Moberg said, he and his wife, Shana, bought property about seven miles south of Smithville when their daughter Dakota was 3 and son Mason was just 6 months old. The 33 acres are surrounded mostly by cow pastures, and a wet-weather creek runs through it. The family calls the low-lying land Swampy Acres.

Dakota and Mason are now 17 and 14, and they help their parents tend to the acreage. Both grew up sitting in the deer stand, sometimes quietly playing games on their phones. Shana hunts but would rather let the kids go. When Dakota was young, she would shoot while sitting on her dad’s lap. There are not a lot of rules in the Moberg family deer stand, a 4-by-8 foot box about 12 feet high and accessible by ladder. No perfume. No cologne. No smoking. Be really, really quiet. Once, all it took for Dakota to spook a deer was to accidentally tap the muzzle of her rifle very lightly against the roof.

Hunting for deer and working the land has left its mark on the Moberg children. Dakota graduated early and is now studying wildlife management at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Mason is thinking about becoming a game warden.

Wildlife and hunting were not the priority when the Mobergs moved to their property. They simply wanted their food to be as organic as possible. But the family got into wildlife management in a big way — preparing food plots, feeding hundreds of animals all year long, improving the area, plowing and planting.

“During the 2011 drought I realized it was about helping the wildlife,” Victor Moberg said. “We have good water wells. We irrigate a chunk of it. It’s hard work when it’s 100-plus degrees out. It becomes kind of an obsession."

As for hunting, “it’s not about the kill. It’s about being out there and appreciating everything Mother Nature has to offer,” he said.

When Victor Moberg was growing up in the Webberville area in eastern Travis County, he never saw deer. But after buying the Bastrop County property, he has seen plenty of deer thanks to a suggestion he received after moving to the land.

“I invited my brother-in-law to come out and he said, ‘This looks like a deer highway. Let’s put up a game camera.’ It was an instant hook,” Moberg said. 

“The photos were phenomenal — bobcats, coyotes, hogs, bucks, does. We’ve seen some unbelievable things that you don’t see when you’re sitting on a sofa or have your nose in your phone.”

It’s impossible to say how much land in Texas is used for deer hunting because it’s rarely if ever used for that exclusively. But it’s a lot. The King Ranch alone has more than 800,000 acres and some of the biggest white-tailed deer in Texas.

And the sport’s popularity is holding steady. “Deer hunting is just as popular as it’s been over the last several decades,” said Cain, the white-tailed deer expert at Texas Parks & Wildlife. “Our numbers have grown but so has the population. Other states have seen declines, but Texas has done pretty well. We're stable. That’s a good thing.”

Cain said his department doesn’t track much demographic data on who hunts, but anecdotally he sees businesses more aggressively marketing to women and young hunters.

“That's your next generation," he said. "It's important to educate youngsters about conservation and how hunting plays a role in it.”

And, Cain said, families like the Mobergs aren’t alone in their near-obsessive stewardship of the land and accumulation of data — everything from measuring antlers on bucks to lactation in does.

The Texas Deer Association puts the economic impact of breeding and hunting at about $1.6 billion annually. That includes payments on leases, lodging, ranch hunts and trophy fees. Like so many pastimes, hunting isn’t a question of how much it costs but how much someone is willing to pay. A hunting license costs $25 for Texas residents (or $7 for seniors). Out-of-state residents pay $315. A lifetime hunting license is $1,000. A 40-pound sack of deer corn is generally under $10 and available anywhere from the neighborhood feed store, Buc-ee’s and — of course — Amazon. Feeders start at under $100 but can cost as much as $1,000.

As for rifles, deer hunters gravitate to bolt- or lever-action and the sky’s the limit on price. Some guided hunts with fancy lodging and meals can cost $15,000 or more. Is hunting cost-effective? Almost certainly not, especially when factoring the cost of travel, land and processing. But hunters can’t put a price on the social aspect that goes with all the trouble and expense.

“Like Christmas only comes once a year, (the start of deer season) was traditionally a big social thing for people,” said Mike Leggett of Burnet, a Texas writer who has specialized in hunting and the outdoors for decades.

“On the first Saturday of deer season every year on the land we hunted, we’d have a gigantic dinner with hundreds of people and barbecue and pies and cakes and all kinds of vegetables. You’d hunt during the day and have this gigantic dinner at night. The high school kids would be sneaking off in the dark and the little kids would be playing hide and seek. That got ingrained in me, to enjoy that as a family activity.”

These days Leggett bow hunts for deer, meaning he’s likely to get one only every three or four years.

“I’m just looking,” he said. “Every time — and I mean every time (I hunt with a bow) — I see something I’ve never seen before. It may be a bird, a fox chasing a rabbit, a coyote, you just don’t know. I tell my grandkids, ‘Look at what this animal does.’ And there’s a link between them, me, my father and grandfather. That’s the biggest part of it.”

Victor and Shana Moberg agree.

With a freezer full of venison, a substantial part of the Moberg family’s animal protein comes from what they kill. Mason has taken one buck and one doe. The first animal Dakota shot was an elk weighing between 600 and 700 pounds on a guided hunt on a 1,100-acre ranch in Meridian, northwest of Waco. A fierce storm blew in from the north during the hunt. They slept in a tent and wondered if they’d make it through the night.

“I hardly believe it today,” Victor Moberg said. “She still rubs it in: ‘I shot an elk and you haven’t.’ It’s not about the kill, it’s about the memories.”

He hasn’t missed an opening day of white-tailed deer season since the family moved to Swampy Acres. Dakota and Mason squabble over who gets to go with dad.

It’s likely the deer hunting tradition will continue on through future generations of the Moberg family. If it’s November, a Moberg probably will be in a deer stand.

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