Newsletter title

December 2007

In This Edition

Christmas Bird Count

—John Fisher

The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Christmas Bird Count is scheduled for Jan. 5, 2008. Please contact Don Wolfe at 918-336-7778 or dwolfe@ou.edu for area assignments, meeting places, and times. We finish off the day and compile the list at the Stucco House with some great chili made by Don and Bob Hamilton. Bring veggies, crackers, dessert, etc. to share for dinner. Bring a lunch and be prepared for the weather. In addition to a chance to see some great birds, this is also a chance to see and explore parts of the preserve that aren’t open to the public. See ya there.

Docent Reorientation for 2008

—Anita Springer

The 2007 season is drawing to a close. We hope that everyone has a happy and safe holiday. Docent reorientation for 2008 is scheduled on Saturday, February 23, at 9:30 a.m. at the Research Station. As usual, bring a bag lunch. Our featured speaker this year is Dr. Carmen Greenwood, Assistant Professor, Entomology and Plant Pathology Department at Oklahoma State University. Her presentation will cover insects on the prairie. We will also have the usual suspects such as Bob Hamilton and Harvey Payne. Please mark your calendars for that date. See you there!

Bison Roundup Support Recognized

—Nancy Hatfield, Associate Directory of Philanthropy for The Nature Conservancy

We Oklahoma Chapter Philanthropy Staff extend our sincere gratitude for all the efforts of the Tallgrass Docents who supported, so exceptionally well, our Bison Roundup event. We want to thank all who helped us with our visitors during the week-long event. You are the best, and we are so blessed to have you and your support.

Visitor Counts for October

—Iris McPherson

Here’s the rundown on the number of visitors we had at the prairie in October. Total for the month was 688. Oklahoma led the way, as usual, with 413. The top three states were California (30), Illinois (29) and Florida (25). This is an unusual combination of the top 3. Texas is usually one of the 3, and there were only 3 Texans who signed in during October. The counts for the top four places for the year to this point are Oklahoma (2976), Texas (241), Kansas (190) and California (132). North Dakota and Wyoming are the only states still not represented this year. Visitors from Myanmar, Singapore, Turkey and United Arab Emirates were the first representatives from their countries in the 12 months, since I’ve been doing the counts. There were visitors from 11 countries in October. There have been 257 foreign visitors this year with Germany in the lead with 54. The year-to-date number of visitors is 5076.

A New Look for the Docent Newsletter

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

I am proposing a new look for the Docent Newsletter and what I hope is a more direct way of reading. Until now we have been receiving the newsletter as a file in Portable Document Format (PDF); this has required that we have Adobe Reader installed on our computers and that we download the file from The Nature Conservancy web-site. While PDF ensures that the page-layout is the same on every computer, it is not the simplest way of doing things. I have been concerned that reading the newsletter is a challenge for those of us who find using computers difficult and frustrating.

With the foregoing in mind, I have recast the newsletter as a web-page compliant with the latest World Wide Web Consortium standards that can be viewed in an ordinary web-browser. Anyone using a computer and browsing the Internet should be using some kind of web-browser application. Each month, George Pierson will send an email broadcast to the docent membership, containing a hyperlink to the current issue. Clicking on this link should open the newsletter in a browser window. There will be no further need to download and open a separate file in a separate application.

Printing won’t be as good as it is from a PDF file, but it should be adequate for those of you who like to print and then read your newsletter. You might need to experiment with your margin settings for optimum results. I have no control over your printer, but I have set the print media to a serif font and tried to control the widows and orphans.

Screen reading should be easier. You can zoom the text and invoke text-to-voice reading programs should you so desire. External links to other web-pages will be easier to implement and use. And, finally, note that the In This Issue index has active hyperlinks that will take you directly to the article of interest when you click on them; clicking on the title of an article should return you to the index.

I hope that you come to prefer the new layout. You can now view the newsletter anywhere on any computer. With the addition of an appropriate Cascading Style Sheet, it should be possible to read the newsletter on a mobile computing device like a telephone, but this is for the future. Please be prepared to express your opinion about the newsletter during our reorientation meeting in February. If you insist upon doing so, we can return to publishing PDF files.

Back Issues

Back issues of the Docent Newsletter, to November 2007, can be found in the two green and one blue zip-binders, stored in the Perspex rack by the file cabinet in the office of the Visitor’s Center.

Newsletter Publication

Deadline for submission of articles for inclusion in the newsletter is the 10th of each month. Publication date is on the 15th. All docents, Nature Conservancy staff, university scientists, philosophers, and historians are welcome to submit articles and pictures about the various preserves in Oklahoma, but of course the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in particular.