A red-winged cracker crepitated for a hundred feet, zigzagging through the chilly breezes rustling the russet shinnery. The grasshopper lit on the white sand of a pocket gopher mound, turning sideways to the sun to warm its body again. The shining white plumes of cane bluestem grass embroidered a larger array of golden big bluestem grass stalks at the base of the vegetated dune. Above and beyond, a silvery male harrier hawk stalled out against the steady north wind, hovering over one of the many feral hog trails through the shinoak, where a flock of wintering white-crowned sparrows nervously fed on fallen bristlegrass seeds.
A bandwinged grasshopper perched on a glistening pile of hog scat, thankfully imbibing the fetid moisture. Two coneheaded grasshoppers danced in a mating ritual further down the hog trail, the smaller male flicking his wings at the larger female. She scampered away, then flew away when he approached again. A darkling beetle stood motionless in the linear shadows of a sandsage shrub. Except for the infrequent whir of the wings of the redwinged cracker, the landscape was silent.
A lone windmill graced the horizon in one direction, half-hidden by succeeding vegetated sanddunes. A 30-foot tall, 2-story hunting blind poked up on the horizon in a different direction. Between the blind and my position, two big mule deer bucks stared in my direction, trying to determine if the top of my torso and head was human or bovine. When I raised my arms to photograph them, they bolted, bouncing over the shinnery in the perfect mule deer way.
Silver rosettes of locoweed shimmered in a little flat area between the hillocks. Thousands of green winter rosettes of next year's wildflowers were dense on the north side of the vegetated dunes, promising a colorful spring. Kangaroo rat tracks led in every direction across the open sand at the base of the shinnery covered dunes, some ending in round entranced dens. A male cowkiller wasp (with wings) scurried like a wingless female, trying to locate the female by its scent trail as she searched for grasshopper egg deposits under the sand.
The guttural croaking of a Chihuahuan raven lifted my eyes away from the details of what lay underfoot. Two ravens were swirling around a red-tailed hawk perched on the solar panel array of the solar pump near the old windmill. One raven would swoop low, squawking, and then peal away from the hawk, and while the hawk watched the first raven, the second raven would strafe the hawk again. After a minute or two, the hawk launched into the sky, the ravens following. After the hawk got several hundred feet into the air, the ravens broke off and glided back to the ground near the solar panel. They landed at a trickle of water soaking into the ground for the invisible lesser prairie chickens of the Yoakum Dunes Preserve owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy of Texas (TNC).
It was time for me to get back to the Headquarters Gate, where I was to meet Dr. Jim Bergan from TNC and Dr. David Haukos, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and is based at Texas Tech. I hiked through tawny Lehmann's lovegrass along an oilfield pipeline, my shoes gathering hundreds of sandbur grass stickers on the soles. I had to stop to remove several burs from my socks before I returned to the road.
Several dainty sulfur butterflies and pygmy blue butterflies puddled at a wet spot in the sand where a deer had urinated. I scared up one lark sparrow and a small flock of just-arrived wintering lark buntings. A small flock of meadowlarks flew up from the barditch grass as I returned to the truck. They flicked their wings a few times as they flew, then sailed over the nearest hillock, descending into invisibility yet again. The landscape can seem so empty, so devoid of life. The lesser prairie chickens are the masters at stealth of the dunefield, however. I had seen what I believed were tracks, but I could have walked within spitting distance of them without the big birds panicking and giving up the game of "Freeze!"
Dr. Bergan is the director of conservation science and stewardship for TNC's Texas program. The Conservancy had acquired almost 7,000 acres in 2007, and has been adding additional parcels. The 50-mile long and 5-mile-across Yoakum dunefield extends into New Mexico past Milnesand, where The Nature Conservancy of New Mexico owns another preserve for lesser prairie chicken conservation. Less than 5,000 of the species remain in the state of Texas. The Conservancy is working with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) on managing the property. Bergan told me, "Water has been restored to the preserve's collection of windmills and additional stewardship improvements are soon to be implemented. There are hopes that it will eventually be opened to the public for birdwatching and conservation education."
We drove around on the ranch, checking the solar pumps, and inspecting a new fence one of the neighbors had just built. Haukos had done post graduate research in the dunefield. He reported that four Texas Tech students currently were researching the dunefield habitat focusing on the needs of prairie chickens (which we did not see.) At one of the wells, the feral hogs had dislodged the intake pipe, so the storage tank was not receiving water.
Seeing the damage, Bergan commented, "It is best to hunt them with dogs. Traps are the next best answer. On the Yoakum dunes, we have to be sure we don't impact the lesser prairie chicken population, so we may rely on trapping." The ground was pitted where they had wallowed in the mud. Feral hogs destroy quail nests. Feral hogs need to be controlled (if not eradicated) anywhere they occur.
They debated the idea of initiating a controlled burn on the preserve where the vegetation had become too thick for optimum prairie chicken habitat. Very little research has been done about the effects of fire in the habitat. Before we dispersed late in the afternoon, we discussed projects at the preserve, the preserve of invisible prairie chickens.
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