Nebraska Bird Partnership

THANK YOU VOLUNTEERS!  All routes are now filled, and surveys are in progress.

If you're from eastern Nebraska, consider running a Greater Prairie-Chicken lek survey route or two this April.  No prior bird or other survey experience is necessary; you only need reliable transportation, average or better hearing, willingness to get up early in the morning (the early bird gets the worm, you know), and an interest in wildlife.

We will conduct these surveys only in April 2010, so you would not be making a long-term commitment.

Each route is twenty miles long and will be surveyed only once.  You'll stop about every one mile (20 total stops) and get out of your car for two minutes to listen and scan for prairie-chicken lek activity.  If you've never been to a lek, we'll teach you what you need to know.  A route will take about an hour to complete, not including your travel time to and from your home.  If you sign on, we will provide you with more detailed instructions.

See the map below for locations of the survey routes.  If you want to sign up for a route, send me an email ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) with the route number or county, or give me a call for more information (308-382-6468 x24).

Click on map or here to enlarge

The Nebraska Bird Partnership cooperated with the Great Plains GIS Partnership, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, and Northern Prairies Land Trust to develop a model to predict where Greater Prairie-Chickens occur in eastern Nebraska.  We are conducting these surveys so that we can evaluate how accurate the model's predictions are. 

If these route locations look familiar to some of you, it's because we are using portions of the North American Breeding Bird Survey routes so we make sure we collect data systematically across the landscape (and not just go to where we know the chickens are).  We would love it if the volunteers that typically run those BBS routes in June would consider volunteering for an April prairie-chicken run, since BBS volunteers know where the usual stops are.  If this is your BBS route and you want to volunteer, let me know ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).