Photographer's book chronicles vanishing prairie birds - KansasCity ...

By EDWARD M. EVELD

The Kansas City Star

By EDWARD M. EVELD The Kansas City Star

Wildlife photographer Noppadol Paothong arrived at 2 a.m. to set up his photo blind. About an hour later, the birds made their entrance.

?My heart was pumping,? Paothong said.Of course it was. It had taken five years of back-and-forth to secure permission to be there to photograph one of the 10 most endangered bird species in the world.?I had my lens trained on one bird,? Paothong said. ?He was very close.?Paothong crouched inside the camouflage blind and waited for the light. After several numbing hours, the temperature persistent at minus-6, the sun slowly rose, first illuminating the Colorado peaks nearby.His Gunnison sage-grouse, akin to prairie chickens, had not yet begun that fancy dance so alluring to females: fanning his tail feathers and strutting about, puffing up his yellow eye combs, throwing out his white chest and filling two plump air sacs to make its pop-pop percolator call.The sun was up. The timing just right. And ??A golden eagle came in,? said Paothong, the vexation still in his voice about the predatory interloper, ?and my bird left.?A vicious spring snowstorm then blew in, and it would be three days before he had another chance.?These images are very precious to me,? said Paothong about his hard-fought chronicle of grassland prairie chickens and grouse begun back in 2001.And so are the birds, six species and subspecies that in varying degrees have been exiting an American landscape that once featured them in huge numbers, as prominent as its great herds of bison. Paothong?s project spanned 11 years, 14 states and 80,000 miles. He came away with tens of thousands of images and chose 200 of the most telling photographs for his new book, ?Save the Last Dance.??We?re losing these birds, and most people don?t even know about them,? Paothong said. Greater prairie chickens are native to Missouri, but currently fewer than 300 are found statewide. Paothong got acquainted with the birds in southwest Missouri near Golden City on assignment for the Joplin Globe.?I was used to photographing elk and wolf,? Paothong said, bigger animals considered more majestic and sexy. But there was something very sexy about the prairie chicken, particularly the ritual courtship in which the males dress up and perform, and the females ogle and choose.?It?s silent, and all of a sudden you hear the booming, which sounds so lonely and sad,? said Paothong about the male?s mating call. ?I just never realized. And they?ve been here so long, and now they are disappearing.?The dance styles and booming calls vary by species. The greater prairie chicken?s call is a low moan, ?whoo-doo-doo,? and it stomps its feet lightning fast, like a toddler tantrum.?He put in hours and hours,? said Lowell Pugh, a Golden City business owner who sometimes accompanied Paothong in the Missouri blind, telling him to listen for the last hoots of the owls in the timberline a mile away. That?s the early morning time when the prairie chickens swoop in.The number of prairie chickens on the acreage near Golden City started to drop precipitously in the 1970s, Pugh said, and there were few birds remaining when Paothong visited in 2001. Now, they may be gone for good. Pugh sold land to the Missouri Prairie Foundation for preservation, and it?s the core of a tract known as Golden Prairie. ?I heard one bird last year,? Pugh said. ?I didn?t see any this year.?Paothong, 39, came to the United States at 19 from Bangkok to attend college in Idaho, then transferred to Missouri Southern University in Joplin. He lives in Columbia now.That first brush with prairie chickens helped define his post-college life here while working as a photographer for the Globe, the Springfield News-Leader and, since 2006, for the Missouri Department of Conservation.But 11 years in the making? He decided on a book-length treatment of the subject and felt strongly that he should depict all North American species of grassland grouse and prairie chickens that gather on display grounds ? also called strutting, booming grounds or ?leks? ? for mating.?The more I thought about it, I couldn?t follow one species,? he said. ?I had to do all of them because they all may have the same fate.?So he headed to Texas to study and photograph the Attwater?s prairie chicken. With only 50 birds remaining, it?s a species on the very edge of extinction.And to observe the Columbian sharp-tailed grouse in Wyoming, where the snow had drifted so deeply that even a snowmobile had to be abandoned. Yet 20 birds arrived to dance atop the fresh powder, a stunning white backdrop for Paothong?s photos.He outlasted those snowstorms in Colorado to get shots of the Gunnison sage-grouse ? only about 3,000 remain ? and even traveled to Martha?s Vineyard to visit a site that witnessed the extinction of a species, the heath hen.The last of those birds died on the Massachusetts island in 1932. A tombstone there is dedicated to the very last bird, famous enough to have a name, Booming Ben.?Just imagine,? Paothong said. ?You would think from that we would learn a lesson.? The grassland birds are best observed, and photographed, from about March to May during the mating season. That?s when, at very much their peril as prey, they meet and greet on open fields with short grass. Nesting and brood-rearing occur in the cover of taller grass. It?s a short window for photography, which is why Paothong could chronicle just one species a year at most. Plus there were difficult logistics and the vicissitudes of wildlife photography, not to mention holding a full-time job, getting married and having a daughter.Not that he didn?t feel the urgency. Missouri?s prairie chicken population is close to extirpation, the word used when a species vanishes from part of its native area. ?Local extinction? is another way to put it.Max Alleger, grassland bird coordinator at the Missouri Conservation Department, said the agency began a recovery effort about six years ago that brought several hundred greater prairie chickens to Wah?Kon-Tah Prairie near El Dorado Springs, Mo., about two hours south of Kansas City.The prairie is managed for many native species, particularly these birds, but they are very picky, Alleger said. It?s the lack of large areas of suitable habitat that prevents them from thriving. Such ground-nesting birds and their eggs and young are easy prey. And their feeding, mating and nesting needs require short grass, tall grass and even bare ground.Tree encroachment is a big problem, with burns required to keep trees and woody plants at bay. Such vegetation wrecks the birds? vista and encourages predators, from hawks to coyotes.?It?s been said they are as much a creature of the sky as the land,? Alleger said. ?Right now they?re teaching us how to better manage the prairie.?Kansas, meanwhile, remains a relative stronghold for two species. About 30,000 lesser prairie chickens inhabit the southwest part of the state, with 75,000 to 100,000 greater prairie chickens elsewhere in Kansas, said Jim Pitman, small game coordinator at the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.A recent aerial survey confirmed the number of lesser prairie chickens, he said, but the number of greaters is mostly a guess. The greaters are faring poorly in the eastern third of the state, including in the Flint Hills. Again, the reason is habitat.Conservation reserve programs, in which landowners convert cropland to grasses, have improved prairie chicken numbers in central and northwest Kansas. But in the Flint Hills there is both tree encroachment from lack of natural burning and too much controlled burning, which landowners sometimes perform annually, reducing the taller grass cover needed for nesting.?We still have the bulk of these birds compared with the rest of the country,? Pitman said. ?But we need to restore habitat and improve management in the eastern part of the state.?Besides his book, Paothong is telling the story of his project and the story of grassland grouse in presentations at colleges and nature and community centers. A Kansas City presentation is scheduled for Dec. 4.?Every picture in the book, I put my heart and soul into it,? said Paothong, but added that it?s about more than photography.?I don?t want this book to be a record of extinct species.?

Source: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/11/04/3900560/photographer-chronicles-vanishing.html

NFL scores week 3 kat dennings Steve Sabol Yom Kippur 2012 detroit lions Aaron Paul mumford and sons