On October 24, 2013, as a part of a Fullbright Scholar Workshop at the University of Tulsa sponsored by the Tulsa Global Alliance, about 70 Fullbright Scholars from about 40 different countries visited the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. The theme of the workshop was Old West to New West: The Role of Land in Shaping the American Story. The objective for visiting the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve was to learn of historic land uses and how those land uses have changed.
Jenk Jones and Dwight Thomas, Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Docents, met the buses in Tulsa to accompany the scholars to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. They provided commentary on the passing countryside including discussions on history, agriculture, land uses, geology, culture, and economy of the region. When the busses reached the Preserve, Bob Hamilton, Director of the Preserve, and Tony Brown, Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Staff Member boarded the busses and discussed the Preserve. The last stop on the Preserve tour was at the corrals where the Bison had been gathered for the upcoming roundup. At this stop, the visitors had an opportunity to view the Bison from a relatively close distance.
Following lunch at the Research Center, the scholars heard a discussion on
Red Dirt Music.
They also toured the Osage Nation Tribal Museum on the
way back to Tulsa. The comments heard on the bus on the trip back to Tulsa
were positive about the Preserve and its role in preserving the Tallgrass
Prairie ecosystem. Each of the scholars received a copy of Tallgrass
Growing,
which means that the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve story is being
spread around the world.
The Pied-billed Grebe is one of the most innocuous birds I have ever come across. It is laid back, calm and pleasant. If I were looking for a best friend these certainly are characteristics I would want to find in that person. This is a bird which is easily overlooked when you are in the field birding. It does not have flashy feathers, impressive size or noisy vocalizations. Most of the time it is floating like a pigeon sized cork in the middle of a pond or amongst the floating marsh vegetation, but like a blind date it does have personality.
The Pied-billed Grebe is a small diving water bird. It is about the size
of a small diving duck but it’s head has a small chicken-like beak rather
than a broad duck bill. The Pied-billed Grebe is the only member of the
genus Podilymbus. As always Linnaeus was spot on with his selection of its
binomial name. It roughly translates as diver - feet at the buttocks
.
This bird is engineered for swimming and diving. The feet are poorly
located for running on land but they perform admirably in the water. I
cannot ever recall seeing this bird on dry land. The Pied-billed Grebe is
the master of its own buoyancy. This non-descript little bird never flies
away from danger. When danger threatens it disappears at a moments notice
like a water witch. Here one minute gone the next! This remarkable feat is
accomplished by squeezing out both the air trapped in its feathers and in
its internal air-sacs which allows it to sink as effortlessly as a
submarine. It will often stay submerged for about 30 seconds, after
traveling about 20 feet or so under water it slowly emerges its head like
a periscope to check whether the danger has passed. Without the air
trapped in its feathers it is a much more efficient diver than most ducks
who must leap forward and stroke powerfully with their feet to overcome
their inherent buoyancy. Also unlike ducks which have fully webbed feet,
the toes of the Pied-billed Grebe are lobbed and not connected. Each toe
has skin extending out on the sides that provide the extra surface area to
assist in paddling.
Water encompasses the Pied-billed Grebes world, it generally flies from one body of water to another, even when they migrate. They are strong fliers but they can only take off from water and they need a long runway prior to take off. They fly and migrate at night so it is rare to see these birds in the air. Typically you can see them in the early morning swimming around becoming acquainted with their new surroundings. When I duck hunt I usually set my decoys up in the dark and it is not unusual to see Grebes land at the edge of my spread before dawn and swim around. When they realize the decoys aren’t real they extend their necks, look around and quickly disappear under water.
Pied-billed Grebes are smaller than the American Coot and unlike the jet black Coot they sport brown above and silvery white below. During the breeding season adults have a black throat and a dark band around the bill. Male and female Pied-billed grebes look the same with the males being larger. Unlike most water bird species there is no sexual dimorphism.
Pied-billed Grebes have a long breeding season, running from mid-April through the end of June. They usually double brood. During the breeding season they are normally found among the emergent vegetation and are hard to spot because of their shy nature and color pattern. Courtship consists of head bobbing and vocalizations which sound like a whooping kuk kuk cow cow cow cowp cowp. The males are very territorial and will challenge any male entering its territory. Both the male and female care for the young. Their nests sit on top of the water in emergent vegetation. The female lays three to ten bluish white eggs. The female starts and ends the incubation, but both parents share brooding in between. It takes 23 days before the eggs hatch. If the nest is left for an extended period the adults will cover the nest with nesting material. If a nest is disturbed by a predator the Grebes will abandon the nest and build a new nest to begin again. Hatchlings will leave the nest about one day after hatching. Chicks will spend their first days after hatching on the backs of their parents. They are poor swimmers at first and usually hitch a ride for the first week or so. It takes about four weeks before they master their swimming skills. Sometimes the parents even dive underwater to get food with the chicks on their backs. The chicks have wildly different plumage than their parents, especially on the face, which is striped in black, white and reddish-brown. The striped zoot suit effect must aid them when hiding in the floating emergent vegetation.
The Pied-billed Grebe has a varied diet of aquatic invertebrates, small fish and amphibians. They also eat aquatic vegetation. The oddest item they ingest is their own feathers, which aid them in digestion protecting them from the small bones of the prey they eat. They are very fond of crawfish and their bills are powerful enough to make short work of that delicacy.
The Pied-billed Grebe is a year round resident of the lower 48 states and some will migrate to Canada during the breeding season. They have become less common in the eastern portion of the United States as water quality deteriorates and loss of habitat becomes a problem. They are year round residents of Oklahoma. They are found in freshwater wetlands with emergent vegetation like cattails. During the winter they are found primarily in open water, if the water freezes they simply fly to an area with open water. At the Tallgrass Prairie look for these interesting water birds from January through June and again from October through December. I have no idea what happens to them in Osage County from July though September. E-bird does not document any sightings of Pied-billed Grebes during this time but they are present in Oklahoma. In fact the Tallgrass Prairie Christmas Bird count has not had a single sighting of a Pied-billed Grebe during the last fourteen years. I think they are there but are missed in the count because they are active in the early dawn. I have seen them in the early morning on older ponds on the preserve with emergent vegetation.
Spend sometime watching Grebes. They are an entertaining and endearing bird who goes about its business with a purpose and a little magic.
One of the features of the prairie that creates the prairie feeling is the sky. With nothing to block the view, the sky dominates the entire scene. I grew up in western Oklahoma where the sky was always a major part of any vista, and I didn’t even know how much it was a part of my idea of normalcy until I moved to Tennessee. In Tennessee, I could never see much of the sky at any one time, and I missed the big blue dome. Coming back to Oklahoma for visits always provided a sense of pleasure in seeing so much sky. I still find that visiting the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is almost like a homecoming, partly because of the sky experience.
I am fascinated by the variety of sky views and by the constant and sometimes sudden changes. One day it is a clear, deep, transparent blue, and on another day, it is white and opaque, or we might have those and more changes in a single day. Of course, we know that the clarity of the sky is a function of the amount of water and dust in the atmosphere. This means that we only get the clear blue skies in this part of the continent when the air is clean and dry, often just after a cold front has passed through. For example, look at the photograph that shows snow on the ground. The cold front on March 22, 2009, brought 7 inches of snow as it whizzed through and left the air cold, clean, and dry. The blueness is caused by the particles in the Earth’s upper atmosphere being just the right size to scatter the blue wavelengths of the Sun’s light. We see the blue best when there is nothing in the lower atmosphere to block out or alter the color. This type of sky tells me that the air will feel good as well as look good — low humidity and minimal pollutants such as dust and pollen. This good feeling is especially true when we get this condition in the warm seasons.
But normally we have an abundance of water in the atmosphere, located as we are in a 40-inch rainfall zone, being only about 500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and even closer to other large bodies of water like Lake Keystone for example. The water molecules absorb some of the Sun’s light and provide a filter that alters its color — hence, when the humidity is high, we see the white skies of hot Summer days or even a thick haze. If the water content is high enough to foster condensation, and temperature of the lower atmosphere is low enough for condensation, we have clouds of suspended water droplets or even fog.
When we add clouds to the sky, we complicate the view immensely. On Friday, November 1, 2013, we had high thin cirrus clouds in a blue sky. These ice crystal clouds signal an approaching cold front and provide a beautiful visual effect as well as provide us with a warning of a change in the weather. On Tuesday, November 5, 2013, we had low stratus clouds that produced intermittent rain over the entire region. And we all have seen the towering cumulus clouds in Spring and Summer that bring thunderstorms and the fair-weather cumulus clouds of summer. Watching the variety of clouds in the prairie sky is both an exercise in science and art. They exist because of specific weather conditions, but their variety and beauty enhance the prairie experience.
Another factor that affects our view of the sky is the amount of suspended particles in the air — dust, pollen, soot, and smoke. Most of these particles are introduced into the air by wind, plants, animals, and human activities such as the trucks on the Preserve’s county roads. These particles absorb, scatter, and bend the Sun’s light so that its intensity and color are often changed. Dust and smog is a negative factor in our enjoyment and use of the atmosphere, but our beautiful prairie sunrises and sunsets are also a function of the water and solid particles in the air. How’s that for extracting beauty and pleasure from dirt?
Just before that sunrise on November 1, 2013, when the sunrise photograph was taken, the sky was mostly dark, but millions of stars, planets, nebulae, comets, asteroids, galaxies, etc. were shining brightly as points of light. The Preserve is free of most of the light pollution we experience in so many places, and this lack of ambient light makes the night sky there much more brilliant than we are used to seeing. On that morning, a few hours earlier, two of the Sun’s planets, Jupiter and Mars were almost straight overhead, a bit brighter than the stars seen in the same part of the sky and in a slightly different position than they were the night before. Earlier in the night, the planet Venus had been a beacon of light in the Western sky near the crescent moon, both setting a few hours after the Sun. We don’t have to limit our appreciation of the prairie sky to the daylight hours, but it does take little more planning to be there to view the night sky.
The sky is part of the prairie. While I often like to view it scientifically, I also enjoy its beauty and variety.
In September we had a total of 543 visitors. Of that number there were 506 visitors representing 30 states and 37 international visitors representing 8 countries. Following Oklahoma (334) in number of visitors were the top three states of Kansas (32), and Missouri and Texas (19).
The table displays the total counts for September, 2013, with that month in previous years.
I encourage each of you to make sure to ask our visitors to sign the guest book. I think the pleasant weather this summer has certainly helped to increase the number of visitors. It still requires everyone’s help to see that our guest book records our visitors. Here’s to a high visitor count in 2013 and a great year for the prairie!
Here we provide some links to other places worth visiting.
Here is the latitude and longitude of the Visitor’s Center that you can give to visitors for entry into their GPS navigation device.
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.
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.
2013—January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December—2013
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
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July
August
September
October
November
December—1996
1995—January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December—1995
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.
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.