Spring West Texas Mountain Plovers

Back in 1933 George Sutton reported a colony of nesting Mountain Plovers in northern Brewster county.  I did not run across any other documentation until 1979 when rancher Pansy Espy reported a colony with a few nests on her ranch.  Her colony was reported as active off and on between 1979 and 1989.  A few years later the plovers were spotted again in the summer in the same region, but not the nest area.

There seems little in the literature of any systematic effort to identify more colonies in west Texas.  Unlike the Texas panhandle, west texas has by and large not been converted to cultivated fields so any Mountain Plovers nesting there should be in their ancestral short grass habitat.

I spent several months in fall 2004  collecting nestsite preferences from the literature and from the conditions of 26 known nestsites between Wyoming and Mexico.  From this, I selected the following five criteria to use in searching for the best areas to follow up on.

These criteria are:
Flat, usually less than 2 percent slope. (literature and nestsites)
Barren, usually a normalized vegetation index between -0.04 and +0.02 but ranging from -0.07 to +0.05 fits the nestsites pretty well. (literature and nestsites)
Preferred elevation around 4700' for west Texas but ranging from 2500' upwards. (literature and nestsites)
Very short grass grassland, preferrably Parks & Wildlife's Tobosa Black Grama Grassland. (literature and nestsites)
High clay soil, preferrably above25 percent but ranging from 15 to 44 percent. (literature and nestsites)

Applying these criteria simultaniously across all of west Texas, I found about 2600 square kilometers that looked pretty good out of 76000 square kilometers.  Figure 1 shows this area regionally and also the location of the two reported colonies.  One is misidentified as Bailey, should be Sutton, 1933.

For those wanting a more detailed look with roads, Figure 2 covers the optimum nesting habitat in the Jeff Davis, Presidio and Brewster county area. Figure 3 covers the other prospective area, from Fort Davis northwest to Dell City.

Note the proximity of Dell City with its cultivation to some decent looking habitat.  Cultivated fields were not included in the west Texas habitat search.  However the proximity of these fields could draw Mountain Plovers out of their traditional colony sites as has happened in the Texas panhandle, the Oklahoma panhandle and elsewhere.

Click here for an article on the nestsite prediction model.

The next step is to try to get out there in the spring and check out the red areas on the maps and the Dell City fields. Also the model can be improved by calibrating the NDVI values with barrenness at known locations.  The 12 year draught may have modified the vegetation type as well as the barrenness.  It might be advantageous to replace the 1984 Texas Parks & Wildlife Vegetation Cover layer of the model with a custom-made layer from many ground control points.  A good time to go out there would be late May through the first week of June for anyone wanting to look for nesting Mountain Plovers.

Printable maps with roads are here for those with Adobe Acrobat Reader;
Lower map and upper map

Please report any Mountain plovers you find in this area. wholliday@satx.rr.com

Primary data sources used in the maps are as follows:
State and county boundaries; ESRI data disc included in Arcview 3.2 software
Roads: originally from Texas Dept. of Transportation, through TNRIS
Elevation and slope: National Elevation Datasets through U.S.G.S. website
Vegetation: Texas Parks & Wildlife Texas Vegetation Cover (1984) on their website
NDVI images: calculated with Leica Image Analysis extension running on ESRI Arcview 3.3 software, using Landsat images available through Texas Synergy
West Texas Mountain Plover nestsites: Bailey, Biological Atlas of Texas; Espy, various Texbirds web postings.
Other Mountain Plover nestsites: Seyffert, Shakeford and others.
Soil data: STATSGO, available on the web.

A more thorough  discussion of methods, techniques, sources, and especially literature sources is contained in the following paper (PDF format) which preceeded this web posting; West Texas Potential Nesting Habitat.