May 2011

In This Edition

• American Golden Plover
  by Nicholas Del Grosso
• Docent Coverage of Season Days
  by Andrew Donovan-Shead
• Other Places to Visit
• Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Visitor’s Center Latitude & Longitude
• Kiosk Maintenance
• Back Issues
• Newsletter Publication

American Golden Plover

—Nicholas Del Grosso

The American Golden Plover is another long distance migrant that briefly visits the Tallgrass Prairie on its way to its summer breeding grounds on the Arctic Tundra. This medium sized bird, about 9 inches and weighing only 0.5 pounds, flies from southern South America to Alaska east to Baffin Island. Amazingly this is a round trip flight of 20,000 miles.

This little shorebird takes a long circuitous migration route. In the fall it stages in Nova Scotia and the Maritime Provinces. Here they feed on insects and crowberries to store the fat they need for their long flight south. The adults fly south first, followed by the juveniles of the year, who make this flight without any adult guidance; it appears that the migration route is instinctive. From this point these birds fly across open ocean to the northern coast of South America. These southern flying birds do not make any stops, which is an amazing feat because this bird is not built for swimming; it does not have webbed feet and cannot alight on the ocean to rest. I can find no documentation that they rest on islands along the way. The American Golden Plover can travel at speeds of up to 60 mph, which means at a maximum speed it could take upwards of 50 hours to complete this trip. After completing the ocean portion of their journey they travel across the Amazon Basin to winter on the pampas of Argentina, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego.

In spring, the return trip is made across land. It flies from South America through Central America to the Yucatan and across the Gulf of Mexico through the central part of the continent to the Arctic. In researching the American Golden Plover I have not been able to discern why they return to their high Arctic breeding grounds by a different migration route. The most obvious reason is the availability of resting and foraging habitat along the way. This is a bird of the shores and prairies and this spring migration route maximizes the availability of these environments and ensures they arrive in the Arctic in prime condition to breed. They move north behind the retreating winter.

The best time to see this bird at the Tallgrass Prairie is during the month of April as it migrates through this area. I saw a large group of these birds while I was driving home from the headquarters after a docent shift on April 2nd. As an aside, a group of plovers has many collective nouns, including a brace, congregation, deceit, ponderance and wing of plovers. There were about 75 to 100 birds in a tight foraging group on the ground. True to the descriptions in the field guides these birds were foraging in an area burned last fall. When on the prairie you are most likely to see them in short or grazed grass. I pulled off to the side of the road to better scope the birds. When I exited the truck the Plover’s took off as a group with a loud quee-dol circled the area and landed a few yards further on. These birds have a jerky motion as they forage. They move with a stop-run-stop, scan action capturing prey at the stop, usually by a single peck. I spent about 30 minutes watching the birds, when they got too close to me they lifted into the air as a group and made another circuitous flight landing at what they obviously felt was a safer distance away from me. When in flight they have a light under wing and belly which is very visible.

When they are migrating in the early spring they are still in their winter plumage. Things to look for to identify this Plover is the broad white eye line, the black pointed bill, brown back with white spots, pale under side with brown streaking and dark legs. When they are in their breeding plumage they look like an entirely different bird. Note the S shaped white marking, golden brown feathers with white spots, dark brown breast feathers and long dark legs with three toes on its feet. This is the bird you would see on the Tundra breeding grounds.

This species has been brought back from the brink of extinction. Market Hunting in the 19th and early twentieth centuries reduced the population of this long distant flyer. Thousands were killed during their migration flights. They were an easy target because of their tight traveling flocks and unsuspicious nature. This made it possible for large numbers to be brought down with a single shot. During the heyday of market gunning one estimate of a single days kill near New Orleans was 48,000. The numbers have now recovered as the result of the end of hunting. They are now listed as a species of least concern. It is now estimated that the current population of American Golden Plovers is about 150,000 individual birds.

The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is a rest stop along this bird’s path to the high Arctic. It’s important to remember that the Tallgrass Prairie is vital not only to wintering and summer breeding birds but it also provides habitat to birds migrating through the area. It is a vital rest stop where they can put on fat reserves for the completion of their long flight.

Click on this link to hear the cry of the American Golden Plover, provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Docent Coverage Of Season Days

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

We did good in April, better than last year. Keep up the good work.

 

Other Places to Visit

Here we provide some links to other places worth visiting.

• http://crosstimber.wordpress.com/. Observations from Oklahoma’s Osage Hills State Park by Ranger Kyle Thoreson. This site has excellent photography by Ranger Thoreson. The Park is downstream Sand Creek from the Visitor’s Center.
• http://keep.konza.ksu.edu/docents/. Konza Prairie Docent Program discovered by John Fisher.

Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Visitor’s Center Latitude & Longitude

Here is the latitude and longitude of the Visitor’s Center that you can give to visitors for entry into their GPS navigation device.

• N36° 50.774′
• W096° 25.381′

Kiosk Maintenance

The manufacturer’s instructions for cleaning the touch-screen recommend use of a soft dry cloth only. This proved inadequate for smeared fingerprints. Soft-paper kitchen towels work well, slightly damp with a small drop of soft handsoap. Application of a dry kichen towel removes any residual moisture.

Over time, a matter of several weeks continuous operation, I have noticed that calibration of the touch-screen drifts away from the initial set-point. If you notice that the cursor isn’t under your finger when you touch the screen then restart the kiosk by unplugging it from the wall, waiting a few moments and then re-inserting the power plug. It will restart and recalibrate.

This link points to the complete Kiosk Maintenance Manual.

Back Issues

Some printed back issues of the Docent Newsletter, to February 2009, can be found in the two green and one blue-black zip-binders, stored in the Perspex rack by the file cabinet in the office of the Visitor’s Center.

All back issues are available electronically via the links shown below. All newsletters prior to December 2007 are available in Portable Document Format (PDF), which means that you will need Adobe Reader installed on your computer to read these files. All newsletters from December 2007 onwards are in HTML format that is easily read using your web-browser.

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.

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