Newsletter title

January 2012

In This Edition

Docent Reorientation & the 2012 Season

—Anita Springer

I hope everyone had a wonderful, relaxing holiday. We had a phenomenal 2011 at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Visitor’s center. I personally want to thank everyone for their time in 2011. I am looking forward to this year and hope you are too.

It is time to think about the 2012 season at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. We might think that 10 weeks is a long time, but March 1st rolls around pretty quick. We have scheduled Docent Reorientation for two dates this year to accommodate as many schedules as possible. Please mark either February 18th 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. or February 25th 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I urge everyone to attend one of these sessions. It is our time to exchange experiences, ideas, talk about any changes, check and/or update your roster information and to sign a Liability Release Form.

Barbara Bates has scheduled new docent recruiting in Tulsa at the Hardesty Library, Sunday, February 19th at 2 p.m. Bartlesville recruiting has been scheduled for March 1st in the meeting room A (upstairs) in the Bartlesville Public Library at 7 p.m. Please feel free to drop in at either of these events. Each of us has something to contribute to the recruiting effort.

I Look forward to seeing each of you this year.

The Nature Conservancy Buys New Property

—George Pierson

You may know about this already, but the Conservancy has purchased a new property on the Blue River. Click on the link for more information or try this one pointing to the article published by the Tulsa World.

Sustainable Economy Vision 2050

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

Our economy, and those of the other nations on the planet, is based on endless growth. You hear politicians, business people, and organizations talking about and promoting economic growth as the road to prosperity. Indeed, as many of us are painfully aware, we are experiencing an economic depression where growth has slowed and with it the means to earn a satisfactory livelihood. For many years it has been clear to me that this economic paradigm of endless growth is ultimately unsustainable as it is necessarily limited by the finite resources of our planet. To me, talk of endless growth is a delusion. To me, an economy of endless growth looks very much like a terminal cancer infecting human society. An individual with terminal cancer will die. Humanity founded on a growth-based economy will eventually die when it has consumed the available resources, if not die then it will pass through an evolutionary bottleneck in which a very small fraction of humanity will emerge to live in much reduced conditions. As Karl Marx might say if we were to conjure his spectre from beyond the grave: Endless growth is the seed of our destruction.

What does a sustainable economy looks like? How do we go about implementing a sustainable economy? What does an economy of conservation look like? How do we conserve and recycle in a way that sustains our lifestyle while conserving the natural world that ultimately gives us life?

At long, long last there is a glimmer of hope, an excellent start. I was delighted to read an opinion piece in the 17 December 2011 edition of New Scientist magazine by Robert E. Horn, entitled: To save the planet, listen to everyone. Horn says: Almost four years ago I joined what must be one of the world’s most ambitious projects: a plan to put Earth well on the way to global sustainability by 2050. The Vision 2050: The new agenda for business report produced 70 measures of success and 350 milestones to span the next four decades. The plan was billed as the most comprehensive, detailed description of what we must do to support or save much of civilisation from the ravages of climate change, overpopulation and declining renewable resources. Robert E. Horn is at the Human Science and Technology Advanced Research Institute within Stanford University, California. He specializes in translating complex ideas about everything from manufacturing projects to political arguments to scientific and philosophical debates into the visual language of large-scale maps and info-murals. Horn’s role in the Vision 2050 project was to summarize the results. He did this by producing a poster, a mural, and a two-page instruction sheet on how to use these materials; you can download them via the World Business Council for Sustainable Development web-site or you can download them direct via these links:

The best way to view these documents is to use Acrobat reader with the window maximized and the magnification set to about 50-percent. Use the scroll-wheel on your mouse to scroll vertically; hold down the Shift-key while using the scroll-wheel to pan across the document horizontally; hold down the Ctrl-key and use the scroll-wheel to change the magnification and zoom in and out. Read down the left-hand edge of the mural first. You can click-n-drag anywhere on the mural to move your point of view in any direction. Horn’s instructional summary is reproduced here:

How Can the Vision 2050 Pathway Info-Mural be Used?

The work of the Vision 2050 task force of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development has been synthesized into two large visual displays:

  1. Vision of 2050. This poster contains the 22 key elements that define the sustainable future identified by the task force of 29 companies involved in the WBCSD project.
  2. Pathway to a Sustainable 2050. Decade by decade this info-mural details 350 major milestones needed to be on track to a sustainable 2050. These milestones are portrayed on 10 tracks (energy, transportation, buildings, materials, economy, food, forests, governance, etc.). In addition, the mural also identifies 40 must haves and 40 big risks for the next 40 years.

How might companies use this mural?

These visual displays can be powerful tools for thinking about sustainable futures. Each group will use them for their own specific purposes. We describe and illustrate four such example uses on these pages.

Email of Appreciation

—Mark Hougardy

23 December 2011,

Hello Anita,

I visited the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve earlier in December with my father. We had a great outing and enjoyed our time; it will be fun to return in May to see the landscape dotted with wildflowers. During my visit I mentioned about writing an article for my blog and you asked to be kept in the loop. The article was published today at my site: www.letsgoexploring.com and is featured on the home page. Here is the direct link. The article is intended to be an introduction to the preserve and provides some basics if others are interested in visiting. If any factual information is in error and needs to be updated please let me know.

Thank you,
Mark.

Educational Opportunity

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

As you can see from the birds section of the Selected Topics Index, below, Nicholas Del Grosso has produced a score of articles. What I would like to do is incorporate a precis of each of his articles for the information kiosk in the Visitor’s Center to accompany a slide of each bird that reproduces the bird’s voice. I can do this, but think an interested class or sub-group of school children might find it an extra-curricula project worthy of their attention, just as the 6th Grade students of Holland Hall school did the creation of the kiosk.

Nowadays, The Docent News has wide distribution. Is there a teacher out there who has suitable pupils 6th Grade or older who would like to work this project? You may be located anywhere in the world because we would coordinate the work via the Internet.

Please register your interest by sending me email at awd.shead@gmail.com. If there is more than one teacher interested then we could divide the work among the interested parties. I will lead the effort by providing a statement of work and consulting services. I see this as a collaborative effort with the benefit of cultivating good working relationships with disparate people thereby fostering community. Let me know if you are interested.

Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus Pileatus)

—Nicholas Del Grosso

Pileated Woodpecker Pair by Andrew Brownsword

I am continually amazed when I see a Pileated Woodpecker fly across a road at the Tallgrass Prairie, going from one forested area to another. It is like stepping back in time to see a miniature pterodactyl in the sky.

The Pileated woodpecker is about 16—19 inches long with a 30-inch wing span. This is an impressive size for a woodpecker, but even at this size it is only the third largest woodpecker in North America. The top two on this list is the Imperial Woodpecker of Mexico’s high-altitude pine forest and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker of America’s southern bottomland swamp forests and bayous. These two woodpeckers are most probably extinct. Both the Imperial and the Ivory-billed Woodpeckers were habitat specialists and when their habitat’s disappeared because of unregulated logging, so did these birds.

Imperial, Ivory-billed, Pileated comparison

Fortunately for us we can still marvel at the size of the Pileated Woodpecker, which is at present the largest living woodpecker in North America. Its existence is a function of its lack of habitat preference. The Pileated is a habitat generalist. Any forest type such as broad leaved, coniferous, or mixed will sustain this woodpecker. The only limiting factor is that the forest tract or woodland has trees large enough for roosting and nesting.

On the Preserve I have seen these woodpeckers in Blackjack Oak woodlands and mixed deciduous areas. The Pileated Woodpecker can be found in both mature growth and young growth forests and woodlands, limited by tree diameter. As long as there are trees present with at least a 15- to 20-inch diameter, Pileateds can colonize the area.

The Pileated Woodpecker is an ecosystem engineer. Like the beaver it transforms the ecosystem where it lives. It is known as The Building Bird. Pileated Woodpeckers are primary excavators, they build their own nest and roost cavities. The literature reports that these woodpeckers only use their nest cavity for one breeding season but they remain in their home territory. This behavior has a profound effect on the area ecosystem over time as other small cavity dwelling birds and mammals take over the abandoned nest cavities. Pileated Woodpeckers influence habitat conditions for other species in three ways:

  1. Excavating nest cavities and cavity starts.
  2. Excavating openings into roost cavities.
  3. Through foraging activities by attracting Downey & Hairy woodpecker, and Nuthatch foraging in areas Pileated Woodpeckers have worked or are working.

More than twenty species of secondary cavity dwellers will use old cavities or openings excavated by these woodpeckers. This is a keystone species, its absence in the environment would be detrimental to the survival of these secondary cavity dwellers.

The Pileated Woodpecker is the original Woody Woodpecker. Its red crest was immortalized by the cartoonist Walter Lantz. They are mainly black with a red crest, the males have a red mustache from the bill to the throat. Both sexes have the red crest and white line down the side of the throat. They are not an easy bird to miss. In the forest it will usually glide from tree to tree or use slow measured flapping. However when it flies above the tree tops or for great distances its flight looks like the typical undulating flight of most woodpeckers. But its size, the red crest and the flashing white beneath its wings make it easy to identify.

This woodpecker can live for up to ten years in the wild and mates for life. It will cement the pair bond every spring with a courtship dance, consisting of one bird bowing, scraping, and stepping sideways in a circle around another bird. At the conclusion of the dance each bird acknowledges the other with a jerky movement ending the dance. The pair stays together all year. They actually form mated pairs for life.

Pileated Woodpecker Nest Cavity

Both the male and female will excavate the nesting cavity over several weeks with the male doing most of the excavating. Nest cavities only have one entrance, while roost cavities have multiple entrances for escape if molested by a predator such as a black rat snake. Typically the nesting tree stands in a valley or bottomland near the margin of a lake or stream or in a swamp. The nest cavity is typically 16 inches deep with a diameter that varies depending on the condition of the heartwood; the entrance is 6 to 8 inches high with a width of 4 inches. The female will lay between 3-5 white speckled eggs, which are surprisingly small considering the size of this bird. Both sexes will incubate the eggs during the day, but the male exclusively broods the eggs at night. No nest materials are put in the cavity with the excepting of some shavings which may fall in the hole during excavation. They are surprisingly clean housekeepers taking the broken shells and excrement from the cavity into the surrounding forest. The eggs will hatch in 18 days and the nestlings will fledge in 28 days. Both sexes fed the hatchlings by regurgitation. The adults and young will stay together until the fall teaching the juveniles what and how to forage. In the fall the juveniles will fly off to establish new territories. Typically the mated pair will defend a territory of about 200 acres. It announces its presence through drumming. The nest cavity can be from 15 feet to 45 feet high and can be made in a dead stub or the dead part of a living tree. These birds do not migrate, but stay in a contiguous are as resources dictate.

The Pileated Woodpecker lives on insects that infest standing and fallen timber and supplements this diet with wild berries and acorns. Their favorite food is the carpenter ant. They can smell the formic acid through the bark which gives away the colonies location. You often see them hitching up dead or dying trees tearing off bark in pursuit of their prey. This past December I watched a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers for 30 minutes gliding from tree to tree in search of ants. Constantly calling to each other as they combed their territory while intermittently drumming a warning to other Pileated Woodpeckers that this was their home.

Analysis of stomach contents indicate that about 83-percent of their diet is made up of ants and beetles, while the remaining 17-percent is vegetable matter. All their food comes from the forest so this is not an agricultural pest.

Last year in late summer I saw a family of three Pileated Woodpeckers along Sand Creek high in an old Sycamore Tree peeling bark and giving the juvenile foraging lessons. It makes you wonder what happened to the other siblings from that nest. I think the best time to see these magnificent woodpeckers is in the winter. During the 2011 Christmas Bird Count I was lucky enough to spot two Pileated Woodpeckers. The twelve-year average at the Tallgrass Prairie is seven. This is rated as a bird of least concern by The Cornell Ornithological Lab. And the Oklahoma Breeding Bird Survey says it is increasing in Oklahoma. I have seen the most Pileated Woodpeckers in the Blackjack Oak and mixed deciduous woods along the road leaving the southeastern section of the preserve. Now that you know where to look, get out this winter and look for these majestic birds. If you have the Audubon birding app. on your smart-phone they will come in on a Pileated call. If you are interested in attracting Pileated Woodpeckers to your yard Wild Birds Unlimited has a Pileated Nest Box or you can build one according to these specifications, below. Pileated Woodpeckers will use a nest box if appropriately placed high enough in a wooded area with the hole facing east or south.

Pileated Woodpecker Nesting Box Plan

Click this link to hear the voice of the Pileated Woodpecker.

Docent Coverage Of Season Days

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

We improved our coverage again in 2011 compared to previous years by reducing the shop closures from 13 days in 2010 to 6 in 2011, giving us 98-percent coverage of the Visitor’s Center. We are making steady improvements. Can we do better in 2012? Here is the history since we started measuring Docent Coverage of Season Days:

Docent Coverage of Season Days

 

Other Places to Visit

Here we provide some links to other places worth visiting.

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.

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.

2012—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2012
2011—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2011
2010—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2010
2009—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2009
2008—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2008
2007—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2007
2006—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2006
2005—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2005
2004—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2004
2003—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2003
2002—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2002
2001—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2001
2000—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2000
1999—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—1999
1998—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—1998
1997—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—1997
1996—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—1996
1995—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—1995

Selected Topics Index

This persistent index of selected topics should make finding articles of interest easier. The list will grow as I move further into the past and it will grow as I add interesting topics from each new newsletter. Iris McPherson lent me the paper copies of the newsletter from the very early years of the docent program; I ran them through a scanner equipped with a document feeder, saving them as PDF files, then added them to Back Issues section above. Let me know of any dead links that you discover. Also, please lend me any paper copies of the newsletter that are missing so that I can scan and add them to the list of back issues.

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.