North Texas Spring Mountain Plover

The following three images illustrate how the Texas sightings relate to the nesting Oklahoma birds studied in 1993 and 1994.
Figure 1 shows the locations of the study nests accurate to a mile sprinkled throught the east edge of the range throught Colorado, Kansas, and Texas.  Texas nest season sightings are in red, Oklahoma nests are yellow circles, and counties with Mountain Plovers during breeding season are posted with small green circles.  Each county with nesting Mountain Plovers has a number next to it which correlates to the table of Mountain plovers sighted during the Oklahoma study

Zooming in on the Oklahoma birds, a satellite image shows these nests are all in cultivated fields, as the study was conducted.  The appropriate fields show up as various shades of marroon through bright red through light pink which is the barren signiature on this type of satellite image.  At the this image was posted the nests were only posted accurate to a mile, they have since been posted to about 200 yards accuracy and all fall in the correct fields.  Because the satelite image was taken six years after the Oklahoma nests were used, the farmers may have been plowing a different field during the satellite year than the 1990s nesting years so an exact match with barren fields would not be expected.  If time permits I may later nudge the nest locations to attain better posting accuracy.

This image shows where Ken Seyffert has reported seeing Mountain Plovers in Texas between late May and mid June.  The Oklahoma nest sites are just bartely visible as small yellow dots in the upper right of the picture near the edge of the satellite image.  Ken's sightings are yellow triangles, most clustered on one of his breeding bird surveys (thin orange line).  Another sighting of his is hard to see but is just above the scale bar in the image.  All these sightings on this particular image Ken reported as being in areas of cultivation or mixed cultivation and rangeland.  You can see how his sightings cluster in the farmland and not in the rangeland and how they look similar on the satellite image to the nestsites in Oklahoma..

Ken does have a few sightings just south of this map which are were in the native grasslands.

A look at the satellite images in Kansas and Colorado show all nests reported from there in cultivated fields.  it appears that for the northern Texas panhandle, that the birds have entirely switched from their native grassland to a cultivated field preference.