A sonnet to a house sparrow

Oh, for a sparrow's dream to build a nest
When Spring comes forth to claim a feathered heart.
This take of space and hole and tree is test
Of purpose keen when speed is want ov'r art.

Sings loud the male to cheer his busy mate,
As tattered shreds of blades of old are teased
Into a bowl to rest and incubate,
Then feed and grow and fledge, last pause, well pleased.

But for the will of hands of mine, intent
To save said nest for birds of sheen more blue.
Our sparrow starts once ov'r to pay the rent

Of love besought, but not denied, so true.

A plain brown blur in bush and nest reminds

Love of blue birds may cause to miss Divine.

L. Powell, Lincoln, NE   

Watching house sparrows take over a nest box intended for bluebirds or chickadees.  After one attempt to clear the box, I decided to let birds do what birds do.  

Image courtesy of the Texas Bluebird Society, which captioned it "this non-native bird must not be allowed to nest." 

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A side note: my PhD co-advisor, Dr. David Krementz is well-known for his support of sparrows in bluebird boxes.  As the Omaha Audubon newsletter writes, regarding the practice of removing sparrows from nest boxs intended for bluebirds:   "Still, there are those--such as David Krementz, a wildlife biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in Athens, Ga.--who believe house sparrows have as much right to live as bluebirds. Bluebird enthusiasts are "playing God," says [D]r. Krementz, who studied house sparrows for his Ph.D. thesis and learned to "like everything about them." He adds that house sparrows have subtle but interesting coloration, animated mating behavior and feed on Japanese beetles, moths, wasps, crab grass and ragweed.

"[D]r. Krementz has infuriated bluebird lovers by setting out nesting boxes to attract house sparrows and starlings, which he uses in his field research. But he practices a live-and-let-live philosophy that he thinks bluebird devotees might well follow. "When I got bluebirds in my starling boxes, I let them be," he says. "I didn't pull their heads off or gas them." "

Betting conservation on corn futures?

Each spring semester I tell my students, toward the end of my Wildlife Ecology and Management course, that it is somewhat ironic that 100 senators can have more impact on conservation than 1,000 wildlife biologists.  It's because of the Farm Bill.

I still believe my statement.  The Farm Bill creates habitat and changes land use decisions very effectively.  Through the Farm Bill, land is placed back into quasi-native vegetation to reduce impacts of soil erosion and reduce the acreage in crop production (originally intended to reduce the over-supply of crops on the market and bolster corn, cotton, and wheat prices).  Along the way, wildlife habitat became an important impact of the Farm Bill.

My own research lab has shown that you can double production of pheasants in a landscape with properly managed CRP grasslands--an definite impact of the Farm Bill on wildlife.  We've also shown benefits for prairie-chickens--if you are worried about native species!

And so, wildlife biologists at the state and federal level have begun to see the Farm Bill as the Holy Grail.  Our saviour, come to bring cropland back to grassland!  We train cohorts of 'private lands biologists' and even nickname them "Farm Bill biologists".  They do very good things--and work tirelessly with landowners to develop management plans that can produce the results that our research predicts.

Today's Lincoln Journal-Star provides a hint to the complexities of putting all of our private land energy into the Farm Bill basket.  Higher grain prices are changing minds of farmers, and land is coming out of the Farm Bill programs--back into corn.  It's a trend that concerns those Farm Bill biologists who thought they had created landscapes that could support wildlife again.

I would argue that it is time to start thinking about other, or additional, models of private lands conservation.  Let's look at the relative risk of betting conservation on corn prices.  Farmers are well-aware of how much grain prices fluctuate, but I'm not sure conservation-minded wildlife biologists follow corn futures.  The figure below shows the history of corn prices in the US.  The Farm Bill, as such, was passed in 1985.  Look at the volatility of corn prices since that year!  We appear to have now entered a new plateau of prices, in which conservation will cost more--to compete with corn prices for the same parcel of land.

For further comparison, we always talk about the 'volatility of tech stocks'.  Well, here's the history of the NASDAQ during recent years.  Except for a couple of really risky periods, I think I might rather bet on the NASDAQ than corn, if push came to shove...


So, back to my message to my students.  Am I still convinced that 100 senators can impact wildlife conservation?  Yes, I think they can.  But, I'm more and more convinced that wildlife biologists are needed to find new ways to do conservation---that go beyond the Farm Bill.

The farmer interviewed for the Lincoln Journal-Star article sums his decision up nicely: "No doubt about it.  It's the crop prices that are a definite incentive to raising corn, rather than CRP."  His concern is his family's livelihood, as anyone would expect. 

Back to my research project--the one that showed that a landscape with many acres of well-managed CRP could produce the heck out of pheasants.  The follow-up to the story is this:  5 years after we concluded that research project, only 10% of the farmground, from our set of research site, remains in CRP.  Corn prices swayed the minds of 90% of the landowners to switch back to corn and beans.  Quite the legacy, eh?  It's my own fault--I bet on corn to save grassland birds.

Today's newspaper article, to stay positive, does suggest that many landowners are signing up during the new Farm Bill sign-up period--to replace the ones who are opting out.  Time will tell whether it's an exact replacement of acreage.  But, even if the number of acres are replaced in a county, the landscape has shifted.  Acres here are replaced by acres there.  Will the pheasants and quail find the new acres?  Some probably will.  But, it's not a long-term, sustainable change.

My opinion---it's time for a new model for our approach to private lands conservation.  One that is a little less risky that betting on corn futures.  I'd be happy to hear your opinion!

Legacy along the Platte

I took students from my Wildlife Ecology and Management course on a field trip to the Rowe Sanctuary, near Gibbon, Nebraska on Friday.  The purpose of the trip was to learn about restoration projects that had been taking place near the Sanctuary, to re-create Platte River habitat that is needed by cranes, least terns, piping plovers, waterfowl, and other species.

It was a good lesson for us to see how the Platte had changed through time.  As you can see in the photos below, the Platte was so wide, in the early 20th century, it had to be spanned by a mile-long bridge, which crossed water and sand and grass.  By mid-century, the Platte had grown thick with trees.  Reduced flows from irrigation and reduced spring/summer flushes, because 14 dams were added to the system, had created perfect places for trees to grow.  The channel has now narrowed so that a bridge of only 1/4 of a mile, or less, can span it. 

But, restoration by USFWS, Audubon, and many partners (including private landowners) is bringing back the sloughs, the back-water habitats, and the tree-less sandbars and islands.  These projects are long-term (5-10 years) and require massive amounts of big, yellow equipment to remove large trees and reshape channels.

As I told the students, many of them probably did not think about habitat restoration when they entered our Fisheries and Wildlife program.  But, if a person wants to leave a legacy, you might consider working on habitat projects like this.  Here, our students talk with Kirk Schroeder (USFWS) and Bill Taddicken (Audubon, Rowe Sanctuary) as they view one of the restoration sites.  

 Platte River photos from here and here.

Bounty on the plains





I've been enjoying a bit of sleuthing around old collections of photos and news articles duirng the past week.  Today, I was going through the on-line collection of photos taken by Solomon Butcher, who worked tirelessly (it appears) during the late 1800s and early 1900s to document the pioneers in Nebraska. 

Many of Butcher's photos are similar to this photo--a family sitting in front of the sod house.  This particular photo is of the B. F. Cox family near Cliff Table, Nebraska (Custer County, near Broken Bow), and it was taken in 1886. 

There are a couple of things that impressed me as I looked at this collection.  First, every house photographed in rural Nebraska in the 1880s was a sod house. But, by 1905, only 25 years later, every photograph is of a two-story wood-frame farmhouse.  Amazing the difference of 25 years, just in terms of housing. I'm sure the conditions of sod houses (many photos, like this one, show a broom near the front door!) contributed to families wanting something better!

But, the other thing that interested me was that almost every photo of families in front of sod houses included antlers of deer or elk, or bison skulls.  Sometimes positioned on the roof, sometimes laid against the house.  But, obviously positioned for the camera.  It is clear that the family has prepared their homestead, and themselves, for the photo.  The only other common 'props' shown were domestic animals, windmills, and guns.  What were these early settlers trying to say with these props? 

I'm guessing they were sending a message back to their family members, back East:  "We are surviving!"  "We are harnessing the resources of this country [windmills, horses]."  And, in the case of the antlers and skulls, "Look at this amazing bounty of wildlife that is around us!"

Some of the antlers and skulls appear to be 'sheds' (antlers found on the ground), but records indicate game animals were important to the survival of early pioneers.  I was especially impressed with the size of these elk antlers shown in this particular photo.  There haven't been elk in Custer County for a long time--we do have elk in the Pine Ridge of western Nebraska.

See anything else in this photo?  It's fun to get a peek into their lives, through one, posed, moment in time.

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Photo is a public image from the works of Solomon Butcher, in collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, [Digital ID 10200].  

A little less serious

Things may have been too serious around the ALE blog recently.  Just to throw in a dose of (hopefully) fun, here's a little video I created using my son's Nintendo DS hand-held video game. It's like the old 'flipnote' books that created 'moving pictures'.  It is not really related to any wildlife theme, but there is a mountain goat involved. 

On  a quasi-serious note, my son informs me that his school has a much better version of this software that students have been using for the past 3-4 years to create fun video cartoons.  It makes me wonder...at what point do (1) students forget they can be creative, or (2) college teachers forget students can be creative.  Maybe there is a mutual loss of creative memory when students enter our courses at the University? 

I think I should expect more of my students on a regular basis if they've been doing this stuff since elementary school...  Anyway, enjoy!  As you can tell, I had a relaxing Spring Break.