Prairie Dog Interlude

iPhone photo by Debby Kaspari

I've gone on at length on this blog about prairie dogs. About what we've done to their populations--brought them to the brink of extinction--and about what we continue to do--poison, shoot, trap and even vacuum them into oblivion. I can't talk about that now; my heart is heavy enough. That's what the links are for, if you'd like to learn more. No, I'm going to celebrate them here, just roll around with them for a little while, if that's all right with you.

Being a heavily persecuted animal, prairie dogs are normally unapproachable. The only way to see them well is in a protected situation, as at Oklahoma's Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. These dogs are extremely well-acclimated to humans, perhaps too well-acclimated! They looove humans and their junk food fixes, oh yes they do.

Zick knows a photo op when she sees one. Plopping myself down at the side of the prairie dog viewing parking lot must've said, "She's got FOOD!" to the boss prairie dogs with the prime territories in the Cheeto zone. They galloped over to investigate.

Oh, God. Here they come. I may keel over from cuteness.


The first order of business when mobbed by wild rodents is to keep your fingers up and out of the way. Rodents would just as soon bite you as look at you. That's how they discover if your finger is made of flesh or corn syrup solids.

All the photos below of me mobbed by prairie dogs by Timothy Ryan. Thank you, Timmers!

I dunno. You think this woman is getting good mileage out of her rabies vaccinations? Yeah, me too.

Well, hello, little guy. You are some cute.

I'm sorry. The sign says I shouldn't feed you.

It says that people food makes your hair fall out, among other things. I can add that it makes you really fat.

Phooey! Just hand over the almonds and nobody gets hurt.

The dogs showed their disdain for my stance with a deposit. Murr, this pair's for you.

Vireo Quest

Black-capped vireo, Vireo atricapilla. The vireo is the only bird whose name is a sentence. In Latin, Vireo means "I am green." This photo lifted in desperation from Wikipedia. I didn't get a photo of my own, despite grandiose dreams. For truly spectacular photos, see Greg Lasley's web site at the hotlink below.

Debby, Tim and I had come to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge for many reasons, but chief among them was a small vireo, the black-capped vireo. This Federally endangered bird now occurs on a small patch of the planet from Oklahoma, south through Texas and just into northern Mexico. Its range keeps shrinking, for it suffers greatly from twin threats. Black-capped vireos, like endangered Kirtland's warblers, prefer vegetation that is at a certain stage of early succession. Smoky Bear's extravagantly successful campaign to eradicate forest fires also nearly eradicated a bunch of species that depend on fire to replenish the new growth they need. Brown-headed cowbirds like that early successional stuff, too, and they plague black-capped vireos and Kirtland's warblers alike by laying their eggs in the endangered birds' nests, usurping food and care from baby vireos and warblers. Drat those cowbirds, how they target the vanishing ones.

Debby Kaspari led us through rock and pine, cactus and wildflowers to a riparian zone beneath a glowering canyon wall that surprise! rang with the chattering, noodly song of black-capped vireos. It was a stretch to believe that song emanated from a vireo. Hearing them was one thing, seeing them was quite another. The oaks were thick; the habitat was dense, and the vireos were cagey. The "shinnery," a tangle of oaks and sumac where the vegetation reaches to ground level, that the birds prefer is nearly impenetrable.
No wonder these little birds make themselves known with constant song, only vaguely vireolike. It has so many syllables it sounds more like a whispery purple finch to me.

This has to be wild verbena. It looks just like what I plant in my hanging baskets every spring.

Blue star (Amsonia hubrichtii) bloomed among the rocks of our trail.
Deb identified it, and sent me this iPhone photo she took:

At one point in our quest we heard cracking sticks and heavy, stentorian breathing, which could have been either a bison or a longhorn. It is a spine-tingling feeling to hear a very large something breathing, and not be able to see so much as a hair of it. We freshened our pace and moved along.

There was a lot of wildlife here. A wild turkey hen pecks cagily about. I imagine she had a nest hidden nearby.
There were beautiful rootscapes. I could see Debby just sitting down with a pencil and sketchpad and getting lost in these roots for a day or two. We pulled her along.


We listened and watched, listened and watched.


There were mosscapes in the tumbling stream.

There was a small grasshopper nymph who perfectly matched the granite he sat on.


Finally, several hundred yards distant, we caught the motion of a singing black-capped vireo as he rocketed amongst the branches of small oaks. We all got on it, all saw its ebony cap and white spectacles, and it was gone. Ahh, birding with birders--it was so nice not to have to painstakingly point out where the thing was, as I've been doing all spring!

But it had been enough, really, to be in its home, to hear it and six other singing males, to know it was here.

And so were we, on a perfect day in April.

Julie and Debby Kaspari, April 19, 2010, Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. Photo by Tim Ryan

Texas Longhorns in Oklahoma

Having eaten them, we wanted very much to see the "wild" Texas longhorns that roam Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. Like the wild horses on the Theodore Roosevelt NWR in North Dakota, these cattle are introduced, and they're being maintained there to "save the breed." Cattle resembling longhorns were probably introduced to North America from Spain in 1493. By the 1600's, domestic breeds from the British Isles and Europe supplanted the longhorn. In 1927, as the Texas longhorn faced extinction as a breed, cattle enthusiasts from the U.S. Forest Service brought a herd to the Wichita Mountains NWR, where the animals thrived. Longhorns have a number of desirable traits, primary among them being intelligence, adaptability, great beauty, and low birth weight, which means they are easy calvers. Whether having a bunch of domestic cattle using rangeland that once belonged to the now-extinct Merriam's elk and the once-extirpated but now-replaced American bison is the thing to do is a bit of a question.
The Merriam's elk has been replaced on the 59,000-acre refuge by introduced Rocky Mountain elk, and the bison have been reintroduced as well.

Note the fenceline behind the bison. It was hard to get a photo without fencing here. A surpassingly beautiful place, but what's with all the fencing?

So all the hoofed stock here has the hand of man in its presence and its management. Maybe the whitetails have always been here. Or maybe they were reintroduced, too.



What to say about it all? That nothing's as it once was, that nothing's pristine? That cattle aren't wildlife and don't belong on a wildlife refuge? That all our wildlife refuges have been twiddled with and tweaked and manipulated in some way?

Yes, that's a fenceline behind the doe.

I was filled with conflicting feelings as I gazed on these undeniably beautiful cattle. Looking at them, I see something ancient, something that goes back to drawings on cave walls. This is a superbly adapted bovid, probably three times smarter than your average Angus: a survival machine. Tim Ryan told me they're even more dangerous than the bison. We stayed in the car.

Gorgeous things. Their colors and patterns enchanted me.

However you feel about longhorns as wildlife, however you split the hairs of what belongs and what doesn't on public land, the longhorns don't care. They're breeding and sparring and bossing each other around and they are beautiful.

This old blue bull saw us pull up next to one of his many wives and her calf, and decided to do something about it.



What are you doing so close to those tourists?


Move along, and take your little girl with you.



Mama, Daddy, and Baby makes pee.

What's wild? What's native? How long do you have to be here to be a native? Is nearly six centuries long enough?

Or should a wildlife refuge belong to wildlife?