Texas Partners In Flight Flyway NEWSLETTER Spring 2001 – Spring 2002 Volume 9 Newsletter Editor – Clifford E. Shackelford <
[email protected]> Partners in Flight was formed to address the conservation needs of declining bird species. Federal and state government agencies, non-governmental conservation organizations, communities and conservation-minded corporations, landowners, and other businesses, have joined together in an international effort to address these declines. Together, we are working to understand the ecology and natural history of all birds in the Western Hemisphere, while also discovering the causes of their vulnerability. Our main goal is to implement actions needed to assure that these valuable species continue to occur in healthy and productive populations into the future. PWD BR W7000-233 (3/02) Mountain Plover: A Texas Perspective By Tim Fennell, The Science Academy of Austin at the LBJ High School <
[email protected]> According to the Texas Ornithological Society’s Checklist of The Mountain Plover breeds almost exclusively in the Great the Birds of Texas, the Mountain Plover is a “rare summer Plains of North America. It’s one of a few true grassland resident in the high grasslands of the Trans-Pecos and the obligates and is strongly associated with short-grass and northwest Panhandle.” Even though there are recent mixed-grass prairies. Currently, the primary breeding range breeding records for Jeff Davis and Presidio counties, and it includes portions of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New occurs as a rare migrant as far east as Delta County, most Mexico, Kansas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle. The primary Texans are probably more familiar with what the aforemen- wintering range appears to be the central valleys of tioned checklist continues to say about the species as a “rare California and they are known to occur as far south as to uncommon local winter resident on the coastal plains Sonora, Zacatecas, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas in Mexico.