Prairie Wanderings: Golf courses can be stepping stones for nature
By PAUL JANTZEN
Contributing writer
Max Terman is an avid golfer and a committed ecologist. It seems natural for him to wonder about the effects of golf course activity on local wildlife. This thought initiated a six-year investigation comparing bird populations at Prairie Dunes Country Club near Hutchinson with those at the nearby Sand Hills State Park.
The areas compared are about four miles apart in the sand dunes northeast of Hutchinson. The dunes are composed of sands eroded from the Rocky Mountains since their construction 63 million years ago, and washed eastward down the Arkansas River. Prevailing southwesterly winds then blew the sands to this area, providing a varied landscape of dunes, grassland, woodlands, and wetlands. Partially stabilizing the dunes are thickets of chickasaw plum and dogwood, colonies of buffalo current and coralberry, prairie rose and aromatic sumac, switchgrass and bluestem, white sage and yucca. Down along the creeks are cottonwoods, black willows, redbuds, black locusts, and buttonbushes.
Sand Hills State Park is 1,123 acres of sand dunes with associated grassland, woodlands, and wetlands. Periodic managed burnings control invasion of grasslands by woody plants. Public walking trails and limited horseback riding exert minimal human disturbance of wildlife habitats. The survey area covers about 140 acres.
Four miles south of the State Park, is Prairie Dunes , a 26-acre intensively managed golf course widely know for its patches of undeveloped natural habitat. The survey area covers 160 acres. About 74 percent of its area is natural cover, qualifying Prairie Dunes as a Cooperative Sanctuary by Audubon International since 1993. There is also a natural buffer zone separating the curse from nearby residential housing. Managed burning is practice on some of the grassland areas.
The similarity of topography and habitat of the State Park and the mosaic of smaller natural areas among the fairways, tees, greens, and club and maintenance buildings of the golf course provide the opportunity to investigate the effectiveness of including small wild habitat patches in a busy golf course. Counts were done on several pleasant days in each of the four seasons during the six-year study. Counts occurred on Mondays when the course was closed to golfers. In both circuits, all birds were counted by species. Results were converted into numbers of birds per kilometer of trail for each species in each area.
Data analysis led Max to several conclusions. The kinds of birds and the number per species differed in the two areas. Prairie Dunes has higher numbers of individuals of fewer kinds. The State Park has fewer individuals but they are distributed more evenly among more species. Even a casual stroll through both areas reveals that the species having higher numbers in the golf course than in the park included house sparrows, European starlings, barn swallows, tree sparrows, and American robins. Those seen more often in the park included dickcissels, red-bellied woodpeckers, turkey vultures, American crows, grasshopper sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, and rufous-sided towhees.
The two areas shared 48 bird species but the Sand Hills State Park had 15 species not observed at Prairie Dunes. And Prairie Dunes hosted nine species not seen in the park. Max's Tabor College students studying several other golf courses without natural habitat areas seldom observed more than 27 bird species. This golf course's ability to support almost as many species as does the State Park was attributed to its natural patches.
Adapted to somewhat smaller habitat areas and to human disturbances were American robin, common grackle, and eastern kingbird, more common in the golf course areas than in the State Park. Species that require larger, less fragmented habitat and less human disturbance were the least flycatcher and yellow-breasted chat in the State Park. But observed in larger, undisturbed patches of the golf course were wild turkeys, bobwhites, Henslow's sparrows, and yellow-billed cuckoos.
Some of the bird species finding habitat at Prairie Dunes with its wild patches are threatened and in need of conservation. They include Henslow's sparrow, Bell's vireo, dickcissel, grasshopper sparrow, yellow-billed cuckoo, and Mississippi kite. The patches of shrubs appear to provide especially good habitat for Bell's vireo.
So, in addition to large, unfragmented wildlife sanctuaries, it is possible to provide wildlife habitats in patches scattered among the fairways and greens of a golf course. Likewise, most of us have some control over human landscapes such as a backyard that could provide feeding grounds, nesting cover, winter stopover areas, and other necessities for our fellow creatures.
With all the adverse changes humankind has brought to Planet Earth, perhaps we need to take responsibility for restoring habitat patches as stepping stones for nature.
