Category: Wildlife

Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge

20160409_072201The sun is rising over the Katy prairie, and a slightly chilly breeze greets the couple of dozen nature enthusiasts huddled in a group at the front of the parking lot for the visitor’s center.  The group is waiting for vans to come pick them up, vans that are driven by wildlife biologists who know where to take the groups to have the best chance of seeing the Attwater’s prairie chickens.

This time of the year is exciting because it is when the prairie chickens are engaging in their ritual courtship behaviors.  From February to May, the males try to attract a mate by “booming”, which is a process in which they inflate their air sacs and then deflate them (making the sound) while doing a little dance, sometimes charging at other males.  This courtship peaks in April, which is why the NWR hosts their “BoomingNBloomin” Festival annually around this time.

We were in attendance this year, getting up early on a Saturday morning to get out there within the one-to-two hour time period that the birds are the most active.  At the booming grounds, a viewing platform is temporarily placed to allow the groups to get up 20160409_080938higher to see.  Many birders have brought their long lens to shoot the birds with, while the biologists and other “guides” have set up scopes for p20160409_080932eople to get a better view.  There are two trucks with antennas on top that are picking up signals from the radio collars that the female birds are wearing.  This helps biologists track their breeding habits to help guide decisions on how to best help these birds.

Jason tried his hand at “digiscoping” in this picture below.  Digiscoping means to combine a scope with a digital camera/phone camera to enhance the digital image.  It takes a little bit of practice to make it work best.

WeIMG_20160409_080955 did get to see about a dozen of these endangered birds in the group that could be observed from the viewing platform, and then one lone chicken later, perched on a McCartney Rosebush, that was being quite the ham as we rode back in the van to the visitor center.  He seemed to be showing off for our group.  It was quite exciting to see so many birds considering that there are only about 90 or so of the birds left in the wild.  It is one of the most endangered bird species in North America.

Just around a hundred years ago, the Attwater’s prairie chicken census was around a million birds in a habitat that ranged from Louisiana to all of coastal 20160409_072216Texas.  Their habitat shrank significantly due to land use changes, such as development and urban sprawl, conversion of fields to rice and bermuda grass productions instead of grassland, overgrazing by cattle, and invasion of non-native species of plants.  From what I read on a poster at the festival, the population then further declined as a result of the movement of fire ants into their habitat.  Fire ants eat insects that the prairie chicken’s chicks need for subsistence.

During our van tour, we saw several wire enclosures with dark netting across the top.  These were acclimation pens to house captive-bred prairie chickens in before releasing them into the wild.  Several zoos are participating in conservation efforts through breeding programs to help bring these birds back, including the Houston Zoo.  We actually had one of the keepers in the van with us, who wanted to come out and see the end outcome.  The biologists have done some experimenting to find out the ideal amount of time to house the captive bred birds in these acclimation pens to let them get used to the prairie before releasing them, and the time period that results in the lowest mortality turns out to be fourteen days.  At the refuge, they also help the birds out by growing a rotation of crops that are helpful to the birds and allowing limited cattle grazing to help the land.  They also do controlled burns to get rid of invasive plants.

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The Katy Prairie

As part of the annual festival’s activities, we also participated in a bir20160409_092458d walk after viewing these birds.  We had seen some huge white tailed hawks and little Northern Bobwhites from the van as we drove back, and during the walk we also saw Lincoln’s Sparrows, Barn Swallows, Purple Martins, and Upland Sandpipers (in addition to common birds that I don’t even record, like cardinals and mockingbirds).  One interesting fact that the biologist who conducted our walk pointed out is that the Upland Sandpiper is also an endangered bird.  He pointed out that more people go to a Texans football game than there are Upland Sandpipers20160409_092244 left in the wild.  Most of the population was wiped out by hunters after the passenger pigeons were disappearing, and the species has never been able to recover.We also saw some Black Necked Stilts and Scissor Tailed Flycatchers on the drive back.  This brings our species count for the year up to 92.

The walk was not all that “birdy”, but it was really nice to be outside walking about the prairie.  Many flowers were in bloom (which probably explains the “Bloomin” part of the festival name) and one of the men in our 20160409_092235group kept pointing out the names of them as we went.  It was interesting but my mind did not keep track of the information enough to recall it now.

The middle of our walk brought us to a horseshoe lake, and it was very peaceful out there.  The breeze was gentle and it was quiet.  I sat for a bit inside the bird blind, watching coots and grebes out on the water.  For a short time, I visited with my friend Allison that I know from geocaching, who was also at the festival and participating in the same timeline of activities as we were.  I got her phone number in hopes that we can plan an activity together, now that I know she also enjoys things like this.

20160409_094935Sebastian mostly slept in the stroller during this part, although he had been active earlier in the trip (practicing walking up and down the observation platform incline, and mooing at the cows in the nearby fields with me).  He woke up when the walk ended, as we reached the open bay of a maintenance building where the Friends of Attwater Prairie Chickens group had information displays and fund raising sales set up, as well as free refreshments.  We enjoyed talking to some older men that were a part of the group, after asking them about how to get to the Texas-Monthly famous Austin’s BBQ joint in Eagle Lake.

We stopped there on the way home and got enough BBQ for lunch and to have for dinner, and also found a geocache on the way home.  It was a very enjoyable morning out at the preserve, located about a 45 minute drive west of Katy.

Normally, the van tours to see the prairie chickens run once a month, and people can do a car tour route to look themselves.  The best time to view the chickens is around sunrise or in the hour after, like we did on our trip out there.  I would recommend planning to stay for a half-day and taking a walk out there as well, or planning trip around the festival, which is usually the second weekend in April.

Here is more information on the National Wildlife Refuge:

http://www.fws.gov/refuge/Attwater_Prairie_Chicken/about.html

Wild Montana

July 21, 2014

Two horses nudge each other nervously, looking over each other’s withers across the fence, towards the treeline.  Two dark figures move slowly across the field, cautiously stepping out of the cover of the forest.  Jason’s eagle eye had stopped these slow movements, and we had turned the truck around and parked to watch what came out of the forest: two moose cows, one of the animals we had been watching for during this vacation and had yet to see.

We were parked near a pasture on a side road just off the highway headed from Browning to Cut Bank.  The horses were standing along the outside of the pasture, staring at these foreign occupants of what appeared to be their home.  I thought perhaps these horses had gotten out somehow, but we had seen others, and sign of more, roaming loose.  To this day, I can’t explain what the all the horses of Browning were doing outside the fencelines.  Jason’s theory is that they are wild, but mine is that they belong to the Blackfeet whose reservation land includes or borders Browning.

There is a story I read about a farmer in Browning who came across unknown visitors who got their vehicle stuck on his land.  As he helped them out, he asked them what they were doing there, and they told him they were scouts from Hollywood, looking for a place to film a movie.  They asked him if he knew where they could find some horses to film in a stampede, and he replied he knew exactly how to find those.  Turns out the movie they were filming was “Hidalgo”, and not only did the man manage to find them some horses to stampede, it turned out to be the largest free horse stampede ever filmed  with some 570 reservation horses taken part.  This 21 days of filming employed 100 of the Blackfeet and pumped a quarter of a million dollars into the local economy.

We drove further south.  We had the world to ourselves, green and amber colored hills rolling to each side of the horizon.  Outside Choteau, Montana, another dark shape moved on a hillside.  Again we stopped the truck, and again we reached for our binoculars.  A lone wolf trotted slowly down a hill, moving towards a pasture, crossing under fences, making his way over a small stream.  His movements seemed a little off, and we realized that he was lame in one leg.  Later, as we crossed into Wyoming, we saw a coyote dart into the road for roadkill.  His coat was coming off in patches, most likely due to mange, and he looked pathetically thin.  The struggle for survival is real for the wild animals.

We left the wild that afternoon, heading out of the backroads and on to 90, which took us through Billings and on to Sheridan, where we stayed the night at a hotel.  From here, we were headed back, into towns like Fort Collins to visit with my good friend Matt, to Claremore OKto visit Jason’s family, through the outskirts of Dallas and on home.  We didn’t take any more pictures or find any more interesting animals.

My journal lists that the birds we saw from this point included lots of hawks, robins, and ospreys.  The hawks were unidentified, except a Coopers Hawk.  In Oklahoma, we saw House Wrens making a home in his mother’s yard, and saw Greater Roadrunners, Common Ravens, and a large, beautiful immature Blue Jay with a trilling voice in a park in Claremore.  From here on out, we resort back to local adventures, finding local wildlife, birds, trails and wilderness areas until we can afford to get back out on the road again.