Newsletter title

February 2013

In This Edition

Docent Reorientation & Recruiting

—Anita Springer

It’s time to gear up for another year at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Visitor Center. Our first reorientation date is Saturday, February 23 and our second date is Saturday, March 2, with each session beginning at 10am. Please try to fit one of these days into your schedule. As always, bring a lunch with you. Coffee, tea and water will be furnished by the staff beginning at 9:30am. On Saturday, February 23, Harvey Payne will bring us up to date regarding the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve and The Nature Conservancy. On March 2, Bob Hamilton will be there with his road show, which is always informative. Just a side note, Katie Hawk, Director of Communications, from the Conservancy’s Oklahoma City office, has tentatively agreed to be a guest speaker on March 2, with Bob. She will bring us information on the other Oklahoma projects that we can share with our visitors.

The Nature Conservancy requires an original signature to be on file. If you do not plan to attend a reorientation session on February 23 or March 2, please download the liability release form, sign and return to the address on the form. It is my understanding that a signed, original release must be on file your first volunteer day. The form will be available at the Visitor’s Center, also, so you can complete it on your first day at the Visitor Center.

I look forward to seeing each of you. This is one of the few times each year that we can get together and get acquainted and reacquainted.

I want to invite you to a New Docent Recruiting event at the Hardesty Library in Tulsa on Sunday, February 24th from 2pm - 4pm. It is always nice to have an experienced docent for the attendees to talk to. The date and time for the recruiting effort in Bartlesville has not been firmed up as yet. We think it will be sometime in early April. New Docent Training will occur on Saturday, April 20 where Bob Hamilton will bring his wonderful road show again, and April 27 with Harvey Payne as guest motivator. Please feel free to attend any of these events. Your input is always appreciated.

Prairie Road Crew Workday on March 9th

—Dennis Bires

Tallgrass Docents who have been anxious to step out in the wide open spaces will have an opportunity to do so on Saturday, March 9. The first Road Crew clean-up of 2013 will begin at 10:00 a.m. at the Preserve Visitor’s Center. Equipment and instructions will be provided. Just bring a lunch, water bottle, and appropriate spring weather attire. Our job will be removing trash from the roadside, but bison viewing, bird watching, and wildlife track identification are inevitable distractions on these trips. Work will finish around 3:00 p.m.

Prairie Watching: Early Spring

—Dwight Thomas

In just a few weeks, we will again be making our trips to the prairie to help visitors understand and appreciate the prairie and learn what the Nature Conservancy is doing at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve: remember, this is what we do as docents. But before then, we will have an opportunity to visit the preserve for our upcoming docent reorientation sessions. It is still Winter, but there are signs that Spring is just around the corner. As March approaches and progresses, we will see Spring advancing by the day. Let me relate some of what I have seen at the Preserve in March.

Spring by Dwight Thomas

March 22, 2010: On March 9, 2010, we had 7 inches of snow. After determining that the roads were open, I drove to the preserve to work my scheduled day. The prairie was beautiful. The snow covered the ground in many places, but there were also places where the snow had blown into drifts leaving the ground almost clear. The bison were out grazing just as on any other day. The sun was bright and the sky was blue. It was winter at its best.

Spring by Dwight Thomas

March 15, 2012: The day was cold and blustery with partly cloudy skies, but there were sure signs of Spring. The most obvious was the full bloom of the plums. There were thickets of plums everywhere. I hadn’t noticed so many before. Also, there were the tiny Spring Beauties and the Verbenas blooming. Seeing these required getting out on the prairie and looking closely, but there they were. There were also birds flitting about. I caught one striking Chickadee posing for my camera.

Spring by Dwight Thomas

March 23, 2012: The day was warm and sunny, and the prairie was abloom with Redbuds. Their purple branches outlined every valley. And by then, the elms were in full fruit making each elm tree a green spot on a tan and gray background. On the ground, the Anemones were blooming profusely, and many plants had begun their growth with rosettes of leaves just at ground level. Spring was here.

Spring by Dwight Thomas

I can hardly wait to get back to regular visits to the prairie. I hope to see you there enjoying the prairie while we help the visitors.

Light-of-Day-Returns Moon

—John Joseph Mathews

If the Osage had had a better opinion of the coyote, or had he been more important in their lives as a symbol or otherwise, this moon might have been called Coyote-Breeding Moon. Certainly he has ever been with them, and with all his cleverness he has aided them as well as plagued them.

But this is really the coyote’s moon, although he greets all of them with his great variety of voices and emotions, asking each one of them the disturbing question, Why? During this time his voice has a new note in it. The eternal questioning is displaced by tender yearning and the most excited kind of jackal laughing. The warm, damp nights of this moon are filled with his love song.…

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

Canvasback Duck (Aytha valisineria)

—Nicholas Del Grosso

Canvasback Duck, Male

The Canvasback Duck is truly marsh royalty. In fact, the Canvasback is considered The King of Ducks. It is storied in history, myth and literature. From a physical perspective the Canvasback is one of the largest and heaviest ducks in North America. It has a wingspan of 35 inches and a length of 19 to 22 inches. It can weigh upwards of 3.5 pounds. It is easily distinguishable in a raft of ducks by its large size and sloping head. The Canvasback is a stunning diving duck with its weathered canvas gray colored body, black breast and tail and sloping red-brown head and long dark bill. The duck looks like carvings of ancient Mayan royalty. One of its most distinctive and haunting features is its blood red eyes.

The Canvasback or Can has a split personality; it breeds on the prairie potholes but winters on ocean bays, shore side marshes and large lakes. They use the three major flyways (the Atlantic, Mississippi and Pacific) to get to their wintering grounds in the estuarine bays and marshes along both Coasts and the Gulf.

The Can is a pochard, or diving duck, so its winter habitat must include submerged vegetation and invertebrates. This ducks diet consists of submerged seeds, buds, tubers, leaves, roots, snails and insect larvae. About 80-percent of its diet consists of vegetable matter. In fact the Canvasback gets its Latin name from its favorite food, wild celery Vallisneria Americana. Protein also becomes important just before the breeding season to assist in shell formation when mollusks become an important source during the pre-breeding season. The Cans anatomy aids it in pursuing this life style, the large webbed feet assists it in its deep dives and the large bill helps it to dig up tubers and roots on these dives. Because they strain their food out of the bottom mud, they used to ingest large amounts of lead shot and this made then susceptible to lead poisoning. This hazard was one of the main reasons why federal and state game statutes changed to ban the use of lead shot when waterfowling or hunting in waterfowl areas.

Because of its large size, the migrating Cans were a source of food for early Native Americans during the bird’s winter migrations. This was documented by pre-Columbian reed decoys resembling Canvasbacks.

The Canvasback is an excellent tasting bird and in the 1800s market hunters killed great numbers of these ducks for the restaurant trade in large cities. One myth about how the Canvasback got its name refers to the method of shipping the market hunters used. They would ship the ducks by rail in canvas bags, tagged with their name, address and euphemism painted on the tag canvas back meaning the bag should be returned to the sender. I doubt if this is true; I prefer to think the common name arose because the ducks colors resembled the color of a weathered canvas bag, but who knows?

In his novel Chesapeake, James Michener describes how market hunters used eleven foot guns mounted in punt boats to hunt the great rafts of Canvasbacks found in the early days on Chesapeake Bay.

They would load these guns with ¾ of a pound of black powder and 1½ pounds of number six shot and set out on a moonless night to hunt. They would locate a large raft of Canvasbacks, aim the punt boat and fire the gun. A second skiff would have retriever dogs which on command would jump into the cold bay to harvest the dead and wounded ducks. The heyday of this type of market hunting was from 1880 to 1920. Market hunters would kill dozens of birds in a single discharge. The 1918 Federal Migratory Bird Act brought an end to this type of hunting, helping to save the Canvasback.

When Canvasbacks were numerous, it must have been a magical sight on a cold dreary December day to see a large wedge shaped mass of birds passing overhead, their moving wings flashing white in the sunlight. Canvasbacks are magnificent flyers reaching speeds of up to 70 m.p.h.The great numbers of migrating Canvasbacks are gone now. In the 1950s, upwards of 250,000 Canvasbacks wintered on Chesapeake Bay, today that same bay supports only 50,000 birds. The Canvasback population suffers from toxins entering their food supply, disturbance from shoreline development and recreational activities, oil spills, disease and misidentification of females during hunting season and reduction of their prairie pothole breeding habitat. During the 1990s, across its range the Canvasback numbers have stabilized at about 600,000 birds. It is now list as a species of least concern.

Canvasback Duck, Pair

The breeding season starts on the wintering grounds when the males and females pair up on their ocean bay sanctuaries. Each year a new mate is selected and they arrive at their prairie pothole breeding grounds in May already paired up.

The Canvasback breeds from Alaska, south and east to Nebraska and Minnesota. They also utilize the subarctic river deltas in Saskatchewan and the interior of Alaska. When nesting it is attracted to emergent vegetation, such as cattails and bulrushes, which provide cover for the nest. It will produce 5-11 greenish drab eggs. Incubation takes 24 to 29 days. Females will lead their brood away from the nest within 24 hours and will generally stay amongst the emergent vegetation for cover. The males do not assist in rearing the brood and will retreat to lakes with an abundance of open water and submerged vegetation. The hen must protect her brood from raccoons, skunks, crows and magpies. Hens that lay early will stay with their brood until they can fly; this usually takes about 55 days from the hatch. Late laying hens will abandon their brood after 2-3 weeks. Sometimes Canvasback hens will deposit their eggs in the nests of other Canvasbacks, Red Heads will also parasitize existing Canvasback nests.

The Canvasback is a shy bird staying away from shorelines, preferring the safety of open water. When they are migrating they can sometimes be found in mixed flocks of divers such as Red Heads, Ring Necked Ducks and Scaups.

The Canvasbacks we see at the Tallgrass Prairie are on their way to the Gulf Coast to winter and are probably coming from the prairie pot holes of Nebraska and the Dakotas. The drought over the past two years has reduced water levels on the prairie ponds at the preserve, reducing their size which makes sighting Canvasback at the TGP problematic. I have seen them rafting with Red Heads on Copan and Skiatook this year. Usually they can be spotted in December and January. Because of the size of the water available at the Tallgrass Prairie, Canvasbacks are infrequent visitors. They have only been sighted twice during the Christmas Bird Count in 2004 and 2009.

Visitor Counts

—Iris McPherson

Visitor Counts

In October we had a total of 416 visitors. Of that number there were 399 visitors representing 34 states and 17 international visitors representing 5 countries. Following Oklahoma (233) in number of visitors were the top 2 states of Kansas (23) and California (17).

In November we had a total of 466 visitors. Of that number there were 441 visitors representing 29 states and 25 international visitors representing 9 countries. Following Oklahoma (265) in number of visitors were the top 3 states of Louisiana (23), Texas (20) and Colorado (14). There were 3 new countries added in November. They were Costa Rica, Greenland and Madagascar.

The table on the right displays the total counts for October and November, 2012, with those months in previous years.

We are still missing visitors from Rhode Island and Vermont. As soon as I get the count for December, which will probably not add very much, I will be able to give you the total for the year.

Docent Coverage Of Season Days

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

Docent Coverage of Season Days Docent Coverage of Season Days Summary

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.

2013January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December—2013
2012January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2012
2011January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2011
2010January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2010
2009January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2009
2008January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2008
2007January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2007
2006—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2006
2005January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2005
2004—January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2004
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
2001January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2001
2000January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December2000
1999January  February  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December1999
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.