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April 2009

In This Edition

Docent Spring Schedule

—Dennis Bires

Saturday, April 18: Docent Reorientation. Always illuminating, always enjoyable. This year new docents will have trained prior to Docent Reorientation, so this will be a good chance to meet and welcome our newcomers. 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Ecological Research Station. Bring a lunch, and be prepared for a possible nature walk.

Saturday, May 2: Docent Road Crew, Cookout, and Hike. A morning of light work from 10:00 to noon, then a barbeque cooked by Preserve staff. The afternoon hike will take us somewhere on the Preserve not open to the general public. Meet at the Visitor’s Center. Departure by 4:30 p.m. Don’t forget a hat, sunscreen, and walking shoes suitable for off-trail trekking.

See you in the Tallgrass!

Interactive Information Kiosk Project Deployment

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

During Docent Reorientation, on Saturday, April 18th, at 1 p.m., our student development team from Holland Hall School will give a presentation of their work creating the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Interactive Information Kiosk. Afterwards, they will install the kiosk at the Visitor’s Center.

How did this project start?

In February 2007 Tallgrass Prairie Preserve docents David and Betty Turner suggested implementing an interactive information kiosk. In September 2007, the sixth-grade class of Holland Hall School, Tulsa, OK, visited the Preserve as part of their annual School Out of Doors. Docent Andrew Donovan-Shead was able to interest teacher Karen Cochran-Moore in the kiosk as a special project for some of her eleven and twelve year old students.

What is the kiosk project?

The kiosk is an interactive information system designed to impart knowledge about the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve and The Nature Conservancy to interested visitors in a memorable and enjoyable way. It is an ongoing project. The students have moved into seventh-grade but have continued to dedicate many after-school hours to developing and adding content. The project is open ended and new content can be added to the kiosk easily. Eventually, the kiosk will be equipped with a touch-sensitive screen on a podium.

What are the project benefits?

The kiosk project has been of great benefit to the students and their teacher at Holland Hall School, enabling them to learn about the prairie and the work of The Nature Conservancy. The project asked eleven to thirteen year old students to be problem solvers, not just receivers of knowledge. They had to be researchers, writers, computer experts, and computer programmers in order to create the slides.

Who are the creators?

The team experienced a real-world project in which they had to learn to use several tools simultaneously, overcome bureaucratic frustrations, circumvent balky computer and information technology systems, and be vigilant for the inevitable typographic errors that plague any writing. They persevered and finished what they started two years previously. Overall an impressive achievement, considering all the other attractions vying for their attention.

Come to Docent Reorientation and Bring Your Camera

—Dennis Bires

All Tallgrass Prairie Docents, including the 32 brand new Docents from our April 4 New Docent Training, are invited to Docent Reorientation this Saturday, April 18, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., in the Ecological Research Station at the Preserve. We anticipate more media coverage than usual for this year’s Reorientation, on account of the public announcement of the student-designed interactive computer kiosk for the Visitor’s Center, which will occur just after lunch. Do bring your lunch — if weather permits, lunch will be at the picnic tables outside the Research Station.

This year’s featured Reorientation speaker is our own Jenk Jones, who seems to know more about Osage County history than most county residents. Jenk will be taking questions after his talk, so think ahead of any local history questions you have always wanted to ask.

And bring along your camera. Old camera, new camera, SLR, digital, or disposable, it doesn’t matter. On a group walk to close out the day, we shall try our hands at some nature photography, after receiving tips from experienced shutter bugs. We hope to make use of some of the best shots taken on Saturday, so a modicum of fame could be in the offing.

Come to Reorientation — a great chance for returning Docents to meet and get to know our stellar New Docent class, and a fun and informative day for everyone.

Megaconservation: Saving Wildernesses on a Giant Scale

—Jim Giles

IT ALL started with a wolf named Pluie. One rainy day in the summer of 1991, the 5-year-old female crossed paths with a team of researchers in the Peter Lougheed Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. They captured her and fitted a collar and satellite transmitter. For the next two years, they watched in amazement as Pluie went on an epic journey — one that would ultimately inspire a new kind of conservation.

Pluie wandered across two Canadian provinces and three US states, spending time with five different packs (see map). In 1993, the signals from her collar ceased, and the battery from the transmitter was eventually found with a bullet hole in it. Nevertheless, Pluie survived for another two years until, in December 1995, a hunter shot her dead, together with her mate and three pups. By then she had covered terrain spread over an area of 100,000 square kilometres.

Wildlife experts knew that wolves and other carnivores sometimes roam across enormous areas in search of food or mates. But Pluie's travels gave them pause for thought. Banff National Park in Alberta, one of Pluie’s haunts, is regarded as a vast wilderness. Yet she covered an area 15 times as large, and 10 times the size of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It was clear that preserving these wildernesses, large as they are, would still not be enough to ensure the survival of long-distance travellers like Pluie.

Pluie has been dead for 13 years, but her trek lives on in the minds of conservationists. From Alaska to Australia, they are thinking big. Over the past few years, they have unveiled plans for new conservation areas of mind-boggling scale. Some want wildlife to roam freely from the west coast of Spain to the Carpathian mountains of eastern Europe. Another group envisages a 5000-kilometre-long wildlife thoroughfare that would run from Alaska to Mexico. These big ideas are now starting to take shape on the ground….

{Read the full article, viewing the maps and other images by following this link to New Scientist magazine: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127011.700-megaconservation-saving-wildernesses-on-a-giant-scale.html?full=true. Also, try the link to the interactive graphic at the bottom of the article to explore conservation megacorridors. “The Nature Conservancy and The Trust for Public Land have entered into a $500 million deal to buy 1250 square kilometres of Montana forest linking the Mission mountain and Bob Marshall wilderness areas towards the southern end of [the Yukon-to-Yellowstone corridor].”}

Visitor Counts

—Iris McPherson

The number of visitors to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve from North America is shown below:

TGP Visitors from North America

Back Issues

Back issues of the Docent Newsletter, to February 2009, can be found in the two green and one blue-black zip-binders, stored in the Perspex rack by the file cabinet in the office of the Visitor’s Center.

Newsletter Publication

Deadline for submission of articles for inclusion in the newsletter is the 10th of each month. Publication date is on the 15th. All docents, Nature Conservancy staff, university scientists, philosophers, and historians are welcome to submit articles and pictures about the various preserves in Oklahoma, but of course the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in particular.