Recommended Area Daytrips
On the Trail of Lesser Prairie Chickens
Lesser prairie chickens are found in Andrews, Gaines, Terry, Yoakum, Cochran, Bailey, Wheeler, Hemphill, Gray, Donley and Lipscomb Counties in the panhandle of Texas. A person can visit the Muleshoe Federal Wildlife Refuge and have a chance of seeing one … or be very lucky and see one fly across the road whenever their car is passing through very sandy soil. The birds seem to always be found with Artemisia filifolia or sandsage, and shinnery (shinoak).
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When the first sunray swept across the prairie, this male was puffing out his airsacs to make his “booming sound.” He was facing towards the open country, where the females were.
As the air sac shrank in size, the prairie chicken stood up to see if a female was responding.
Three males, each in their own little territory, roamed back and forth, alternately calling and fussing with their neighbor.
When two males come face to face they rarely actually fight, but somehow with subtle signals tell each other not to intrude on their stomping grounds any further. Sometimes they stand in this sort of posture for several minutes – and then break away in different directions.
In between the dunes are open grasslands. In the foreground is Western Wallflower, a spring mustard that grows in the sanddunes of the Llano Estacado, and in the outwash plains of the Guadalupe and Hueco Mountains.
On the Wallflower was what seems to be a sleepy duskywing butterfly. Hundreds of these black butterflies were in the dunes that day (April 9th), but they flittered away when closely approached. At times 25 or more were visible in the air at once.
Mule deer love the sand dunes – some of the biggest Boone and Crockett racks in Texas come out of similar habitat.
The mule deer lie up in the shade of the sheer walls of blowouts in the dunes. The Shinoak holds the dune together to make sheer walls.
These are the tips of branches of one shinoak – and they are poking up out of a 30 foot tall dune on the lee side of a blowout. Just imagine a 30 foot tall tree covered with a sanddune – and the tree still living!
Was this one of the waterholes of the dune areas that an early day rancher enlarged with a fresno – or is it a playa in the dunes? Scores of arrowheads have been found here, so water must have been near the surface for centuries.
Loco weed (Astragulus) grew in the more compact soils of the depression.
The reddish upright grass is little bluestem --- the green leaves have a bluish cast when first growing, but all winter the grass is red.
At the edge of the depression was this fallen windmill – which gives more evidence to the idea that the depression was a place where water was near the surface for centuries – many windmills are dug at the most logical place for finding a shallow water table.
In several places in the dunes were circular groups of taller shinoaks that surrounded a crater. The shinoaks were 15 feet tall – could this be the remains of a once much taller dune? How old were the trees? What’s the story? Nobody knows…
Near another low area in the dunes, where water from a solar energy powered well trickles, feral hogs have rubbed on this old log so much it has become shiny.
Somehow a solar panel just does not have the aesthetic beauty of a windmill… but a rancher does not have to rely on wind to provide water for livestock.