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October 2012

In This Edition

Docent Recognition Luncheon: October 20

—Anita Springer

Our annual Docent Recognition Luncheon will be held on Saturday, October 20, 2012. This is our annual feed at 11:30 a.m. Along with the great food, we will also be recognizing your dedication to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. I’m sure that we all have stories to share from our time at the Visitor’s Center this year. I look forward to seeing everyone. Please RSVP by October 6, so we will know how much food to prepare (I think Peach Cobbler is on the menu). Bob Hamilton and Harvey Payne have graciously accepted our invitation.

Bison Roundup Docent Day: November 3

—Anita Springer

Docent Day at Roundup this year is scheduled for Saturday, November 3. We will gather at the Visitor’s Center at 1 p.m. and caravan to the working pens from there. Don’t forget to bring a jacket as it can be cool at that time of year.

Just a reminder: Roundup is by invitation only and closed to the public.

Deer-Breeding Moon

—John Joseph Mathews

If I have not finished my work at the typewriter when this moon comes to the blackjacks, I must push it aside. If I attempt to carry on, the writing suffers; it loses so much in such a mysterious way that it is often useless and insipid. I do not always recognize this at the time, but it hits me in the face later, and I feel embarrassed. No winter mallard can be happier than I am from October to January. I often get up in the mornings and run down the ridge with the dogs until I am exhausted, from the sheer love of action and the feel of the frosty air in my face. This would certainly be an odd display if there were people here to see it; an odd expression of spirit in a country where everything is done from a sitting position, either behind a wheel or from a saddle. When a cowboy plays, he runs his horse, but he is as clumsy on the ground as an eagle or an airplane. I appreciate the feeling which inspires a cowhorse to buck on a frosty morning.

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

Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica erythrogaster)

—Nicholas Del Grosso

From April through September you can enjoy the aerial antics of this bird while you are sipping your coffee on the porch of the Visitor’s Center at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. This little speedster is the most widespread species of swallow in the world. In addition to being found in the Americas, it is also found in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. There are six subspecies of Barn Swallow which breed across the Northern Hemisphere. Four of the subspecies are strongly migratory and spend their winters across the Southern Hemisphere from Argentina, the Cape Province of South Africa and northern Australia. This little neo-tropical, as a species, has a world wide range of 19.96 million square miles. However, the bird we see from the Visitor’s Center front porch is limited in its range to the Americas and can be found across the entire state of Oklahoma.

Barn Swallow

This sub species was first described by Pieter Boddart in 1783, a Dutch physician and naturalist. The species name Hirundo rustica is an apt characterization of this bird; Hirundo is swallow and rustica is of the country. Aristotle was an astute observer of the natural world and was familiar with this species and his observations led him to say One swallow does not make a summer, nor does one fine day.

Before Europeans tamed the Americas the Barn Swallow most likely nested on cliff faces or in caves but this is now rare. In fact in Oklahoma there has never been a report of Barn Swallows using natural nesting sites. Where Ospreys are nesting, Barn Swallows will build their nest below the Osprey nest. This behavior appears to be instinctive and was probably part of the swallows original nest preference behavior. Both the Osprey and the Barn Swallow benefit from this behavior. The behavior is a form of mutualism; the Barn Swallow receives protection from birds of prey which are repelled by the fish-eating Ospreys, while the Ospreys are alerted to the presence of these predators by the alarm calls of the swallows.

As Europeans cleared the forests across North America Barn Swallows benefited from the expanded habitat. The Barn Swallow has a preference for pastures, meadows and farmland and this is what the original European settlement created. As the forests disappeared, Barn Swallow populations increased. If you look around the outside of the Visitor’s Center at the Tallgrass Prairie you will see everything this bird likes. There are barns and stables for nesting, wires and roof ridges for perching, a non paved parking area to obtain grit to aid in digestion and manure piles to supply a steady diet of flying insects. It is these amenities which attract such a large number of Barn Swallows to this area.

In pursuit of its insect prey this bird will skim the ground and make incredibly sharp turns. Their anatomy is made for swift flight, quick turns and long distance travel. They remind me of the dual tailed P-38 bomber escorts of World War II, They were made for long distance missions and close-in aerial combat. This is exactly what the Barn Swallow does. This little bird is 6.7 to 7.5 inches long and makes a 14,000 mile round trip migration every year of its 6 to 8 year life span. It will often fly 600 miles in a day during migration, capturing insects as it flies.

Barn Swallow

The Barn Swallow is a handsome bird, with a gun metal blue coloration above and a cinnamon buff coloration below. It has an incomplete blue breast band separating the deep cinnamon forehead and throat from the lighter chest and under belly. The tail is long and forked. The outer tail feathers are elongated, giving the distinctive deeply forked tail. Females look like males, but the tail streamers are shorter and the under parts are paler. The juveniles are browner and have a rufous face and white under parts. They also lack the long tail streamers of the adult bird.

These birds perform a beneficial service to farmers and ranchers. Their erratic flight targets flying flies, aphids, ants, beetles, bees, moths, mayflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers and other insects. In fact 70-percent of their diet consists of large flies which worry livestock around the barnyard.

The Barn Swallow is monogamous, but is not above cuckolding the mate of another male if the opportunity arises. They will engage in courtship preening and minor flight displays before mating. The male will arrive first on the breeding grounds and select the nest site. The longer the males tail streamers the more attractive he is to females. It has been shown that the long tail feathers are a sign of robustness. Those males with the longest tail feathers are more disease resistance and this trait is pasted on to the offspring. Once selected, the pair stays together for life. Both sexes will assist in constructing the cup shaped mud nest. It takes hundreds of trips to a water source to collect enough mud to construct or repair a nest.

Barn Swallow

These nests are usually constructed on a beam or other suitable vertical structure. These nests may be used in subsequent years by the same pair or reused by other pairs. The mated pair will have two broods a year; it has been documented that sometimes the first brood will assist the parents in the care of the second brood. The female will typically lay 4 to 5 reddish spotted eggs. She will incubate the eggs with the male assisting about 25-percent of the time. The incubation period is 14 to 19 days, with another 18 to 23 days to fledge.

Barn Swallows will nest in small colonies with the males aggressively defending their territories. They will often mob cats or anything that they perceive as a threat. Barn Swallows at these roosts will also attract predators which will prey upon eggs and hatchlings like the Rat and Gopher Snakes. House Sparrows also create problems as this aggressive bird competes with Barn Swallows for nest sites. Weather can also be a problem. In dry years, like this past summer, reduced rainfall impacts nesting success as the numbers of available insects are reduced and it becomes more difficult to find food for the hatchlings.

Barn Swallow Predation

At the Tallgrass Prairie male Barn Swallows usually arrive in April with the females arriving shortly afterwards. The first chicks are usually hatched in May and June. After nesting finishes at the end of July or early August the swallows will start to gather in migratory groups. You will often see hundreds of swallow perched on the overhead wires in the maintenance courtyard. By the end of September Barn Swallows have departed from the Tallgrass Prairie and are on their way to South America.

Even Shakespeare mentions the swallows annual migration saying in the Winters Tale, Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty: It will be a lonely winter with the sky bare of our swallows until April. I will miss the joy of birding from the Visitor’s Center front porch, watching a beautiful bird live out a portion of its life with incredible aerial displays.

Docent Coverage Of Season Days

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

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.

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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.