Kudos to our recruitment chair Betty Turner and her assistant Barbara Bates for their wonderful success this year. Also thanks to the other docents who attended and supported the recruitment events in Tulsa and Bartlesville and to those who responded to the calls for reaching out to friends with our recruiting information. We currently have over seventy people interested in being trained. With 290 days during the year that the Visitor’s Center is open, a total of 150 docents should provide a high percentage of days that the Visitor’s Center could be open. With the exciting training/mentoring and re-orientation sessions being planned, we hope that a large majority of people will fulfill their training requirements and join the Active Docent group, which would bring our number of active docents close to the desired level. The Visitor’s Center provides a tremendous boost to the visitor experience at Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. Thank you, in advance, to all of the new and returning docents who will provide great visitor center coverage for 2015. Whether you work with another docent or serve alone to open the Visitor’s Center, a day on the tallgrass prairie is always a good day and your presence is much appreciated by the visitors.
Docent reorientation days are scheduled for two Saturdays in February: Feb. 21st & Feb. 28th at the Tallgrass Prairie Research Center. All docents should plan on attending at least one of these meetings to become aware of what is happening at the Tallgrass Prairie before the start of the new season. Bob Hamilton will be our morning speaker on the 21st and Harvey Payne will speak on the 28th. We will also be having optional hikes after the meeting led by Bob on the 21st and Harvey on the 28th — there was talk about checking out the John Jacob Matthews cabin.
Pack your own lunch and come join us starting at 10:00 a.m. Light refreshments will be served starting at 9:30 a.m. We plan on concluding around 3:00 p.m. Please email Karen Cruce at karate4kix@yahoo.com to RSVP for either session, or both, so that we can estimate how many will attend each day. Please join us and get reacquainted with all the returning docents and meet the new ones.
Besides the normal blue-bar docent sign-ups, intern schedules for new docents in training will also appear this year. We have a 2015 training class exceeding 70 people. Training consists of two Saturday morning training sessions and one of the reorientation sessions with an added short course that day. Session-1 on-site is allocated to the mentor who shows the interns how to do all of the tasks needed and supervises their practice. Session-2 on-site is devoted to interns actually doing the tasks with visitors while the mentor observes and answers any questions that arise. Once the training is over, interns will be graduated as docents and allowed to schedule their remaining day at the preserve to complete the annual three days minimum needed to qualify as an active docent, though many will schedule more days before the year is over to enjoy the ever changing prairie.
If you see in the blue docent signup bar showing name - mentor
, this
means a docent has signed up for training interns that day. This enables
interns to glance at the calendar and find a day they can
come and be trained. If you see a day with only the mentor and no other
docent signed up, you are welcome to sign-up that same day, since having an
extra person at the Visitor’s Center while the mentor is doing training
is helpful. Be sure to coordinate with the mentor that day to find out
what is needed.
As the interns sign-up for training, they will be placed in a blue bar of
the form S1 (name, name, ...)
denoting
their first day of on-site training, or S2 (name,
name, ...)
denoting their second day of on-site training. As the
name list goes beyond the edge of the day the rest of the list is not
visible, though if you click on the blue bar it will all be visible in a
pop-up showing the full contents.
If you check-out the March calendar, you will see that more than 20 days have mentor days for training scheduled. We are so pleased to have this new class of interns and it should cause a significant improvement in our Visitor’s Center coverage this year.
Once again it is time for some outdoor spring cleaning at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. All Docents, prospective Docents, and friends are invited to take in some warm breezes and spring wildflowers while beautifying the prairie landscape.
Please assemble at the Visitor’s Center for equipment and instructions for removing a winter’s worth of litter along the gravel roads on the Preserve. Bring your lunch for the noon break on the Bunkhouse porch.
Please assemble at the ranch gate 100 yards south of the cattle-guard at the south entrance to the Preserve on the road from Pawhuska. The drive in to the cabin will be on dirt roads, possibly muddy, so we should car-pool from the gate in high-clearance preferably four-wheel-drive vehicles. Bring work gloves, old clothes, water, and a lunch to eat in Mathews’ yard — lawn chairs would be useful. The wooded site lacks running water and restroom facilities.
John Joseph Mathews was an Osage historian, novelist, biographer, memoirist, and diplomat who lived and wrote in solitude at his stone cabin in the blackjacks on the prairie’s edge from the mid-1930s to mid-1940s. His naturalist’s perspective on the prairie seasons and wildlife is published as Talking To the Moon (1945, reprint available from University of Oklahoma Press). The cabin site is on the Mathews family’s Osage allotment, recently purchased from the family by The Nature Conservancy to become part of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.
Some people have had trouble entering destination coordinates into their GPS devices. We have verified that the coordinates listed in every newsletter are accurate, but we replaced them with another set of coordinates that position users in front of the Visitor’s Center instead of the gate to the restrooms. We also entered the new coordinates into Google Maps and generated a link that overlays the position onto a satellite image. See the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Visitor’s Center Latitude & Longitude section of the newsletter and try the link for yourself.
This month I would like to share some observations and thoughts on the geology of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, beginning with four prairie facts relating to its geologic and recent history:
These historical facts indicate that even though the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve area has not had intense geologic activity, it has not been always the same throughout its geologic history. It is continuing to change in response to human and geologic forces even today. The photographs above show some of the Pennsylvanian Limestone outcrops on the Preserve. I have included a Geologic Time Scale to help place the Pennsylvanian in history.
Thinking about this prompted me to wonder what has happened to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve area throughout its Geologic history. Considering that the surface rocks today are Pennsylvanian, I wonder whether the surface has been the same since the Pennsylvanian Period, which ended about 290 million years ago. It is possible that the land has been very stable and constant since that time, but It is more likely that many changes occurred during the last 290 million years. For example, it is likely that more sedimentary deposits were laid down on top of the Pennsylvanian rocks that we see today; this is a reasonable supposition because nearby areas to the West received massive sedimentary deposits during the Permian Period. And we know that as the Pleistocene and Recent Epoch glaciers were melting; Oklahoma, which did not have any glacial ice, suffered from excessive runoff of the melt-water and from greatly increased rainfall. This increase in water on the surface would have significantly increased the amount of erosion: hills and valleys were carved. Surface materials were carried away with the water — destroying the historical information. Without those surface materials, we just don’t know what the Preserve area has been through since the Pennsylvanian times.
To help me understand the area from a geologic point of view, I read or re-read, among other sources:
Judy and I visited the Preserve on January 17, 2015, to look for evidence of geologic history. On January 26, 2015, Harvey Payne took me to some back-country sites to look for additional fossils. I found that:
In the photo to the right, we see Pennsylvanian sedimentary rocks of sandstone and shale, found along County Road 4220 just West of the Eastern Entry to the Preserve. As I understand Suneson’s paper, this photo of rocks on the eastern side of the Preserve shows an example of the Elgin Sandstone Formation. It is one of the oldest exposed rock formations present on the Preserve. If we travel westward from this point, the rocks we see at the surface are younger all the way to the West side. A trip from the eastern side of the Preserve to the western side shows us at least part of the geologic history of the Preserve. On the far west side of the Preserve, the rocks mark the end of the Pennsylvanian Period and the beginning of the Permian Period. If we can interpret the rocks, we can learn what happened to the Preserve during the late Pennsylvanian, similar to the Wabaunsee Group stratigraphic column shown to the right, a geologic group in Nebraska that preserves fossils from the Carboniferous Period.
We can see from the sandstone photograph and from the stratigraphic column that the layers of rocks show some major differences. These differences in rocks tell us that the geologic environment of the Preserve area was different when each layer was deposited.
In general, shales were deposited in shallow water where there is a source of muddy water yet the body of water was still enough to allow the mud to settle. Also, shales were formed in swampy areas with lush vegetation, which also formed deposits of coal. Sandstones were deposited in somewhat shallow water where there is a source of sand washing into the water as in a river delta. Limestones were deposited where the water is deeper, and the main deposits were the calcareous remains of creatures living in the water. Petroleum was also formed from the oily remains of living creatures settling to the bottom of the water, to be absorbed into the rock sediments and modified by heat and pressure into petroleum. By studying rock layers, we can read the events of geologic history. Remember, the youngest layers are above the older layers unless some geologic event has overturned them, which has not happened in the area of the Preserve. The Ozark Uplift tilted slightly to the west, sedimentary beds that were laid down flat. This is the reason for the rocks at the surface being younger to the West. A sudden change from one rock type to another means that there was a break in the deposition — a break such as the water level dropping so the land was dry for a period.
If we were to drill a deep hole in the Preserve area, extract and preserve a core of the rocks that were drilled through, we could learn about the geologic history before the Pennsylvanian. In our hole, we would drill through the Pennsylvanian sedimentary rocks, through Mississippian sedimentary rocks, through earlier Paleozoic Era sedimentary rocks, and finally reach the Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rocks at about 2,000 feet in some places and as much as 5,000 feet in other places. The understructure is well known because of the cores from the many oil and gas wells that have been drilled in the area. These layers of sedimentary rocks illustrate many cycles of inundation by shallow seas followed by periods when the land was above the water level. If you don’t count continental drift, which did not affect the surface configuration of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve area, periodic inundations of the land with water and subsequent drying were the main geologic events for the Preserve area.
Fossils are another major key in interpreting geologic events. Fossils in shales are often fossils of plants and animals that lived on land, especially in swampy areas near the water. Sandstones do not usually contain fossils, but they may contain burrows of animals living in the sand deposits. They may also contain petroleum that formed from the remains of living marine organisms. Limestones have a wide variety of marine fossils. Most are microscopic, but many are visible and recognizable. Suneson lists and shows drawings of a number of fossils that can be found on the Preserve:
balanced distribution of duplicate body parts or shapes; see the link for detailed explanation.
On our exploration trip to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve of January 17, 2015, I tried to follow Suneson’s Field Trip Guide, but I could not always find the rocks he identified, or if I did, they did not contain many fossils. So, I looked for outcrops of limestone that were convenient to the road and examined them for fossils. I studied and photographed two locations of the several that I saw while driving. One was alongside County Road 4201 about a half mile west of the intersection with County Road 4220 where the land rises abruptly about 20 feet. From the Suneson paper, this appears to be the Little Hominy Limestone.
This is capped by sandstone at the rise, which is why the rise or small cuesta exists because the sandstone is less susceptible to erosion than the underlying limestone. The large blocks and small limestone rocks that were present contained several kinds of fossils, many of which were badly weathered and not easily identifiable. The most abundant of the visible and recognizable fossils were clams and snails, or Pennsylvanian relatives of clams and snails, and crinoids as seen in the photo on the right above. There were also fossils of what I thought were Nautiloids as seen in the photo on the left above.
The second place I stopped and looked was along County Road 4201 about a half mile south of the Electrical Substation. Here were large blocks of outcropping limestone, generally still in place. In these rocks, I saw Fusalinids and Crinoids in abundance as is shown in the larger photo above.
Both of these places were at an elevation of about 990 feet above sea level. This suggests that these two sets of limestone that I examined may be part of the same continuous layer, but the fossils present say that they were different. These fossils tell us that the area of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve was under deeper cleaner water when these rocks were formed and that marine life with calcareous shells and parts was abundant.
On January 26, 2015, Harvey Payne and I visited two more fossil areas. Harvey knew where to find good limestone outcrops, had lots of stories to tell, and he had a keen eye for spotting the fossil-filled rocks. The first of these sites was on a private road that branched off County Road 4201 about five miles South of the intersection of County Road 4201 and County Road 4650. It was a limestone hill about one mile along that private road overlooking Sand Creek. This area had massive amounts of limestone spanning a visible 100 feet or so in elevation change. There was a cliff of limestone at the Sand Creek valley. At this site, there were rocks with Fusalinids and rocks with clam and snail relatives from the Pennsylvanian Period as shown in the photos above. Most of the rocks were a chalky, weathered material without visible fossils, but remember that limestone is primarily made of fossils, most of which are microscopic. The second of these sites was about two miles farther South on County Road 4201 and about a quarter-mile along another private road. There the rocks did not show many visible fossils, but that is where I found the small imprint of the Brachiopod.
Suneson’s paper describes several kinds of fossils than I didn’t find on the Preserve. This doesn’t mean that they are not there. It simply means that I didn’t find them or didn’t recognize them. If you know of places on the Preserve where more fossils can be found, let’s continue this exploration. Sand Creek with its limestone gravel beds, shown in the photo below, presents a good spot for finding fossils. I found the horn coral shown above in the gravel alongside the stream.
In summary, the area of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve has changed throughout geologic history, not drastically though some folding and faulting occurred, but there were no mountain-forming episodes. The primary change that shaped the land was the periodic inundation by shallow seas during which deposition of sediments occurred. These were followed by dry land episodes during which the land eroded. There are different kinds of rocks and fossils because the encroachment of water over the land varied in depth, duration, and proximity to materials for deposition. In addition, the continental mass on which the Preserve sits drifted about the Earth’s surface; this meant that the area passed through different climate zones. At times it was likely tropical; we know this because of the coal deposits, which were formed from lush vegetation that is most prevalent in the tropics. We can interpret the geologic history from the lay of the land, the types and positions of the rocks, and from the fossils that are present. But some of the interpretation has to be based on general principles of geology rather than on direct evidence because part of the geologic evidence is missing.
With so much of the prairies having been lost, the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, by being protected from further disturbance, presents a unique opportunity to preserve the geologic evidence and help us to learn about the geologic history of the prairies.
The month of December had 114 visitors with 108 from 15 states. Oklahoma was represented by 43 visitors followed by Kansas (11) and California (9). There were six visitors from two foreign countries.
Thank you all for trying to get people to sign the book, so we have some idea of how many have visited the preserve.
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.
These coordinates are a verified position on the parking lot in front of the Visitor’s Center. This link to Google maps shows the position superimposed on satellite imagery. https://goo.gl/maps/hBUIu.
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.
2015—January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December—2015
2014—January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December—2014
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
June
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.