Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

Bringing back the boom – “I love them prairie hens!”
January 3, 2007

“Three little boys, dressed in their spring dance finery, blew up their big pink air cheek sacs. Five year old humans are cute, but when dressed in costume kids are even cuter. The three children ran in place, then feinted and bluffed, then collided like miniature tackles and guards doing drills. One left, intimidated by the others. The others manipulated the balloons that mimicked the cheek patches of prairie chickens. After strutting about, puffing up their chests, one of the prairie chicken people jumped high in the air. Boom!boom!boom! The sound system of the auditorium blasted out the sound of the drumming birds recorded in New Mexico on the Llano Estacado, just over the state line from Plains.”

I woke up.

I like prairie chickens – specifically the Lesser Prairie Chickens of the Llano Estacado. As a small child of an ornithologist I heard the “chorus of the lek” several memorable times. I had been trained to sit quiet. I could sit still longer than any other little kid in the world – and was very proud of the fact! I remember the trips, shivering in the dark after the warmth of the heater faded. We had to sit for thirty minutes and could talk in quiet voices, because we had to be there when the prairie chickens arrived. The sun would be putting the first tinge of pink on the clouds when the lek began to form.

A lek is “a gathering of individuals of one species of organisms to procreate in ritualistic performance.” (Social ethology has cumbersome definitions.) In other words, the boy chickens showed off to their girl friends in a lek. Some leks turn into riotous parties, with sixty to eighty birds parading about on an acre or two of land. When they are letting go at their most passionate, the combined booming, clucking, and whirring of the prairie chickens can be heard a great distance on the rolling landscapes of the sandfields of the region.

My dream was a bizarre download of images I had seen and events I had participated in within 2006. Preceding the initial scene, my dreamtime had also included the following:

“ ‘Mr. Williams, I know you collect roadrunner images, so I know you understand.’ Mrs. Golightly teetered backwards as she let me into her ancient caliche rockhouse in Andrews. My first view of the living room was quickly focused on a huge painting of a booming prairie chicken. Below it was a superb Jack Drake woodcarving (just like the one at the Sibley Nature Center.) On a perpendicular wall was a flat screen television with prairie chickens booming and dancing. On a display table along a third wall were porcelain, metal, and wooden depictions of prairie chickens.” The dream then switched to the spectacle of the children dancing in a school auditorium.

I have written several stories about prairie chickens in 2006. To refresh your memory of those stories put “prairie chickens” in the website search engine, and then visit the links. Check out the photoessay about a location that is leased entirely to prairie chicken study and management. If you have time, come out and see our Jack Drake carving, as well as a painting featuring the birds, done by natural history artist Michael Nickell and local art students.

In July of 2006 the Sibley Nature Center initiated a four-year plan to create teaching materials about each of the eight major habitats of the Llano Estacado. Our first focus became the sandhills. The sandhills are the 2nd most favorite outdoor playgrounds for resident Llaneros. (Lakes, 100 miles distant, are 1st.) Sandhills are a closer playground.

Michael Nickell and I gathered up every scrap of information the Sibley Nature Center had collected about the regional sanddunes over the years. We read the material for hours and did substantial Internet search for more information. We then produced 13 posters about the sanddunes, posted 16 essays and 8 photoessays here. We also created several questionnaires to test students knowledge of the habitat, as well as a number of hands-on activities for the Sanddunes section of the Llano Estacado room. Volunteers collected specimens of specific plants for some of the hands-on activities. Michael and I visited the dunes on the old Golladay ranch southeast of Midland. I took several daytrips to several other dunefields as part of the research for the essays and photoessays. Two volunteers also supplied dozens of wonderful photographs for the website, as well.

We have decided to retain our focus on the sanddunes longer than originally planned. We plan on taking people to watch the chickens boom. Board member David Crum and contract Development Director Richard Galle are developing the program.

This spring we will continue to gather more material for our sandhills education program. We plan to seek out specific information sources – historical associations of towns near dunefields, any local museums with displays about the dunes. We also plan to visit the historical collections from College of the Southwest in Hobbs, the Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon, the Museum of the Llano Estacado in Plainview, the Southwest Collections at Texas Tech, and Eastern New Mexico University in Portales to identify resources not only for the dune region, but for the further development of the other habitat displays. All along the way, we will photograph the dunes. We hope to learn of photographers in the dunefield towns, and to learn new personal stories of the dunes to celebrate and share. We will also learn how to locate video of wildlife in the dunes, and attempt to purchase the right to utilize it in the future.

As part of our Master Site Development project ($125,000 out of 600,000+ already donated) we plan on creating a dune garden name “Los Medanos” so visitors to the Sibley Nature Center itself can learn about the plants of the dunes. Metal cutouts and other forms of sculptures featuring the native sanddune critters will be part of the garden. A guide booklet for the garden will also be produced.

Related photo essay: Lesser Prairie Chicken