Newsletter title

May 2012

In This Edition

Road Clean-up, Cookout, and Hike—May 19

—Dennis Bires

Tallgrass Docents will not want to miss this year’s Road Clean-up, Cookout, and Hike on Saturday, May 19, at the Preserve, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Meet at the Visitor’s Center at 10:00 for equipment and assignments, or just start on litter pick-up at a county road location of your choice.

At noon, be at the Foreman’s (Stucco) House for our annual Cookout. Food and beverages will be provided.

Then, at about 1:30 we will caravan by car to a group hike location on the Tallgrass Preserve. The hike will be off-trail, but not strenuous. Be ready for possible muddy spots and rocky ground. The hike will conclude by 4:00 p.m.

Painting Workday—June 2

—Dennis Bires

Docents only are invited to join a painting work day at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve on Saturday, June 2, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Sorry, no portraits or landscapes, rather we will be painting the pipe signs that greet visitors near the south entrance to the Preserve, also the pipe barrier around the monument at that entrance, and the fence adjacent to the new cattle guard on the road to the nearby east entrance. All this will help make a good first impression for visitors to the Preserve.

Volunteers will meet at 10:00 at the south monument where the road from Pawhuska makes a T. All equipment will be provided. Wear clothes you are not too fond of, bring a couple of water bottles, and bring lunch. We will seek out a comfortable shady spot for lunch, for which lawn chairs are recommended.

Little-Flower-Killer Moon

—John Joseph Mathews

The Osage call May the little-flower-killer moon. It might seem that there is a paradox here, but actually the little flowers die during this month. They wanted to indicate that the thousands of little flowers that sprang up early in the seasons of Just-Doing-That Moon and the Planting Moon pass away at this time to appear again the following year.

These little flowers are those that grow close to the earth and even appear before the grass has begun to sprout, in some years even before the snows stop falling. These are the Johnny-jump-up, spring beauties, and hundreds of others that I cannot name which grow on the ridges and on the burned-over places and on the prairie, where they make the black, desolated spots gay with their beauty.

The spring beauties cover the blackjack ridges with their striped petals, and among them appear little blue and yellow flowers. They are so profuse that they give the impression that some spring festival of the gods had left confetti there.

[Excerpt from Chapter V of Mathews’ book Talking To The Moon, available at the Visitor’s Center of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.]

Haiku on the Prairie

—Jerry Wagener

Home on the prairie;
Now long gone from the tallgrass,
The news brings me back.

[For those of you who have never met Jerry, he was the Docent Program Coordinator for approximately the three years from 2002 to 2004. Jerry says: Since moving to western Massachusetts, though not involved with The Nature Conservancy, I volunteer as treasurer for three separate local nonprofit environmental or land conservation groups, and am chair of our town’s Open Space Committee. So I’m still in the fold, so to speak. Jerry continues to receive The Docent Newsletter each month. Editor]

Docent Coverage Of Season Days

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

Like last year, April was a perfect month with every day open at the Visitor’s Center.

Docent Coverage of Season Days Visitor Counts Recent Months Visitor Counts Recent Years

 

Visitor Counts

—Iris McPherson

Since I have three months of visitor counts to report, I will use tables to display the data.

During March the top four states were Texas (27), Kansas (15) and Arkansas and Iowa (14). There were 29 states and 8 countries represented during the first 3 months of the year.

The second table displays the total counts for January, February and March, 2012, with those months in previous years.

I encourage each of you, as we are about to start a new year of staffing the visitor’s center, that you make sure to ask our visitors to sign the guest book. I think we have been doing a good job. Just keep it up. Here’s to a high visitor count in 2012 and a great year for the prairie!

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.

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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  December2002
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1998January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December1998
1997January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December1997
1996—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December1996
1995—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December1995

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.