Perhaps South Dakota isn’t one of the first places you think of as a birding hotspot (or even in the top 100) but we had great experience there recently that I wanted to share with you. It started with a family get-together in Custer State Park, a very beautiful expanse of hills and prairies dotted with Bison, Pronghorn Antelope, Big-horn Sheep, and White-tailed Deer. More on Custer later – today we start on the road to Custer.
We broke the drive from Chicago to Custer into two days, first stopping at the National Grasslands just south of South Dakota’s capital (quick – what’s the capital?). The Ft. Pierre (hint) National Grasslands extend over 116,000 acres; some are farmed, much is just wild grasses. Miles and miles of gravel roads run through the grasslands.
As soon as we turned off of the main highway going to Pierre and onto one of those gravel roads we began to see lots of grassland birds. Both sides of all those miles of gravel roads are lined with barbed wire fences with a fence post every 10-12 feet (in other words, tens of thousands of fenceposts) and there seemed to be a bird perched on a fence post every 100 feet! By far, the Western Meadowlarks were the most numerous species and they like to perch on a fence post and sing away.
In many cases we were able to use the car as a blind and slowly drive right next to them and get some shots.
The second species we regularly saw there was the Upland Sandpiper. I’ve seen glimpses of them before, but there in the Ft. Pierre National Grasslands we saw so many of them we started to drive right by them! They’re kind of a goony-looking bird and were not shy about having a camera pointed at them.
For some reason I was surprised to see this Marbled Godwit there. We didn’t see many of them, but this one enjoyed foraging in the middle of the gravel road for a long time, then it flew up and around us for a minute or two, and then landed in a field nearby.
More about the grassland birds and then some seen in Custer State Park coming up.
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