To ensure your safety and to protect the park’s natural and historical resources, several regulations have been established by the National Park Service. Collecting of fossils, rocks, plants, or other objects is not permitted. Please be sure to leave everything as you find it along the trails and throughout the park for others to enjoy. If you have any questions about park regulations and policies, please ask the staff. The rangers are here to help you and to enforce the regulations.
Safety Tips
Though snakes are not prevalent, be sure to watch for rattlesnakes as you walk about through the park, along the trails, and near the exhibits at Carnegie and University Hills. Avoid them if you see them, but do not harm them. As a general rule it is best to keep a good distance from any wildlife you see, not only to protect yourself and your children, but to avoid frightening or hurting the animal. It is best to observe wildlife at a safe distance with field glasses. While walking about the park, do not take chances by climbing on loose rock, or going into unauthorized areas, and do not let your children go beyond your control. Park your vehicle in authorized places and observe the normal rules of road safety and courtesy while you are in the park, and when entering and leaving it.
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