Free Great Texas Wildlife Trail maps available for limited time!

Dear Great Texas Wildlife Trail Site Partners and Communities,

Texas AgriLife Extension Bookstore has discontinued selling third party publications on its website, including the Great Texas Wildlife Trail maps. As a result of this we have partnered with them to offer their remaining inventory of The Great Texas Wildlife Trails maps to you at NO COST, including FREE SHIPPING on a first come, first served basis.

This is a great opportunity to promote your sites or your region to visitors. You can give these maps out for free or sell them (suggested retail price of $2/map). Texas Parks & Wildlife will also promote the locations of all organizations and sites on our website so people can easily find where to pick up these maps for free or for sale within each region.

But as in most things in life, the early bird gets the worm! As the attached table shows, we only have limited numbers of boxes left for some maps, and Texas AgriLife is already out of two of the map trail regions. The table shows you the “Number of boxes available for FREE SHIPPING” as of today’s date. Please also be aware that we will only be shipping complete boxes. We will be sending AgriLife a complete order list for them to drop ship to this summer in two shipments only. One shipment will go out on Friday, July 29th and the final order will go out on Wednesday, August 31st, so act soon.

However we also have inventory of the trail map boxes at our TPWD warehouse which we can offer at a very low cost to partners such as yourselves, but we are not able to offer free shipping due to our budget limitations at TPWD. The attached table shows the available boxes in the column “Number of boxes available from TPWD – WHOLESALE or RETAIL PRICE” and the charge for these boxes in the final two columns of the table based on whether your organization is tax-exempt (WHOLESALE PRICE) or not tax-exempt (RETAIL PRICE). I will contact you if we are not able to fill your order with the “FREE SHIPPING” boxes to see if you are interested in purchasing “WHOLESALE” or “RETAIL” boxes from TPWD.

We are in the process now of developing the most effective plan for continuing to offer these valuable wildlife maps since it looks unlikely that we will be able to find an online vendor who could provide this service as cost-effectively as AgriLife has in the past. We are very hopeful that we can work with communities and corporate sponsors to raise enough sponsorship dollars to print the next generation of each of the trail maps; this model was very successful for the new Far West Wildlife Trail map that launched this summer. I’m very excited about this next phase in map development and look forward to discussing these projects with you.

I will be in touch soon with coastal sites and communities to discuss a plan of action for reprinting the three coastal birding trail maps, which were the very first wildlife trail maps in the Great Texas Wildlife Trails program.  The other maps would be printed over the next several years on a schedule that corresponds to how long they have been in the program.

As always I am happy to answer any questions you may have or hear any suggestions you might have to help make this program as successful as possible.

Best Regards,

Shelly Plante
Nature Tourism Manager, Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept.
4200 Smith School Road, Austin, Texas 78744
Phone: 512-389-4500; Cell: 512-241-9163; Fax: 512-389-8029
Great Texas Wildlife Trails - www.tpwd.state.tx.us/wildlifetrails