Are you looking for even more excuses to get out birding, especially from March 15 through April 30th? Dr. Town Peterson (<townpeterson...>) and Mark Robbins are looking for help with repeating historical surveys of previously known Greater Prairie-Chicken lek areas, which will give a more thorough picture of the current status of the species across Kansas. They are looking for volunteers to take on a county. They have created county maps, each with 1-5 hexagons of known lek locations from past surveys. Some of the areas have had prairie-chickens detected in 2024 or 2025, but others have not been surveyed in a longer time. Surveys are only needed in areas that have not had any detections in the past 2 years (maps are color coded so you know which ones need surveyed).
Volunteers will need to drive all the county roads within the survey areas, on low-wind, no-rain mornings, stopping every half-mile and listening/looking for 5 minutes. Surveys should be conducted from ½ hour before sunrise to 0830 hours. Volunteers will need to keep an eBird list in each of the stops in each of the survey areas. Once you've finished a morning survey you'll complete a quick Google form on the web (it took me 3 minutes to complete the form on a trial run), and you'll include the links of the eBird lists that correspond to that survey area. If you have a positive detection for Greater Prairie-Chickens then you don't need to go back to that area. However, if you don't have a detection they would like you (or someone else) to try a second time on a different day. There are 52 counties that need volunteers (now 51, as I've already claimed Geary County!); those counties are listed below.
Town and Mark are looking for volunteers or teams of volunteers to sign up for one or more counties. Counties will be first come first served, so if you want to participate, send an email to Town at the address above. If you have questions I can try to answer them or you can just contact Town directly (probably preferable!). Volunteers making concrete contributions to the survey effort will be acknowledged in the resulting reports.
Allen Anderson Butler Chase Chautauqua Cheyenne Clay Cloud Coffey Cowley Decatur Dickinson Elk Ellis Ellsworth Gove Graham Greenwood Jackson Jewell Lincoln Linn Logan Lyon Marion McPherson Meade Mitchell Montgomery Morris Nemaha Ness Norton Osage Osborne Ottawa Phillips Pottawatomie Rawlins Rice Rooks Russell Saline Scott Sheridan Smith Trego Wabaunsee Washington Wilson Woodson
