Birding Along the Niobrara
Taking the Annual Count
One of the joys of visiting the national parks, author Freeman Tilden once said, is having an unexpected, provocative experience. You go to a park to see or do one thing, and you come across something else that strikes your fancy as well. Tilden called it serendipity. At Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, one such experience might be birdwatching. In this piece, Doris B. Gates writes of her annual bird surveys in this area.
In western Nebraska the northern part of the Great Plains ends at the Pine Ridge, an escarpment circling from Wyoming across Nebraska’s north edge and winding into South Dakota. A major grass of this mixed prairie is little bluestem, Nebraska’s state grass, whose rusty-red hue in fall and winter gives much of the state its characteristic color.
These plains are rarely broken by cultivation and only a few houses with their few trees break the landscape. The land’s major change comes where the Niobrara River, here little more than a narrow creek, cuts a valley whose rock outcroppings provide homes for rock wrens, chipmunks, and bushy-tailed wood rats better known as pack or trade rats.
Swainson’s hawk
Here, since 1967, near Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, my partner and I have taken part in the annual Breeding Bird Survey for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Part of one of our survey routes, Highway 29, crosses the monument’s west end. We know the area—in June at least—quite intimately, when there is nothing quite so beautiful as a sunrise over these flower-dotted, green-grassed rolling hills along the Niobrara.
We go many kilometers and make many bird counting stops, then we drop into the little valley where the Niobrara flows and suddenly we hear and see birds in such rapid succession that we have difficulty getting them all named in the three minutes allowed us under the survey rules. Actually, three stops are influenced by the river: on the south edge we have found a common nighthawk, a lark sparrow, and a Say’s phoebe; on the north end the rock wren sings its un-wrenlike song. Near the bridge, where a narrow belt of shrubs and trees—mostly willows—hugs the river, we have logged the following: common flicker, a red-headed woodpecker, eastern and western kingbirds, western wood peewees, a blue jay, black-capped chickadees, house wrens, a brown thrasher, robins, yellow warblers, black-billed magpies, common grackles, black-headed grosbeaks, American goldfinches, and the non-native house sparrow and starling. Only once did we see or hear a black-billed cuckoo.
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Red-winged blackbird chick
Long-billed curlew chick
Long-billed marsh wren
Canada geese
Long-billed curlew male
House wren
Nighthawk
Marsh hawk chicks
Killdeer
Great horned owl
Western meadowlark
American bittern
Pocket gopher
Jackrabbit
Hognose snake
Fence lizard
Coyote
Pronghorn
If we stop and peer into a large culvert under the highway we may scare out a cloud of cliff swallows whose mud nests are stuck on culvert walls. Barn and rough-winged swallows are more rarely seen—usually near the Agate buildings.
Near scattered farmhouses we may see logger-head shrikes; by one water tank we usually find a few killdeer. These and such birds as the long-billed curlew, upland sandpipers, and sharp-tailed grouse break the near monotony of such prairie birds as western meadowlarks (Nebraska’s state bird), lark buntings, horned larks, and chestnut-collared longspurs. Lark buntings line the utility wires, taking off to sing their territorial songs, and descending with butterfly-like motions.
Hawks are here—red-tails, Swainson’s, ferruginous, marsh, and the little American kestrel—but in small numbers. We search long rows of fence posts for a burrowing owl and occasionally see one. Great-horned owls frequent tall cottonwood trees around the Agate ranch buildings. This is also the country of turkey vultures, golden eagles, and prairie falcons, but we have not been lucky enough to see them yet.
Mammals are more elusive. Cattle pasture conspicuously on land formerly claimed by the buffalo (bison). We see pronghorns each year. A lone coyote is the only other relatively large mammal we have logged. Check a good mammal book and you will appreciate what lives here largely invisible to the untrained eye: shrews, moles, bats, cottontails and two kinds of jackrabbits, pocket gophers, prairie dogs, kangaroo rats, voles, several kinds of mice, two kinds of ground squirrel, muskrats, beaver, raccoons, minks, badgers, longtailed weasels, two kinds of skunks, occasional porcupines and bobcats, white-tailed deer, and mule deer. Consider yourself lucky if you see the swift fox, mountain lion, and the rare black-footed ferret.
Life abounds here in other forms less noticeable to eyes trained on the Breeding Bird Survey: various species of amphibians, reptiles, fish, and the numerous insects associated with grasslands. We hear perhaps too much about rattlesnakes—western Nebraska has only the prairie rattler, whose numbers are now much reduced. Other snakes include western hognosed, blue racer, bullsnake, and the plains, wandering, and red-sided garter snakes.