Part 1

Produced by Chris Curnow, Tom Cosmas, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS PUBLICATIONS MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Volume 12, No. 14, Pp. 575-655, 10 figs.

May 18, 1964

The Breeding Birds of Kansas

RICHARD F. JOHNSTON

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS LAWRENCE 1964

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS PUBLICATIONS, MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Editors: E. Raymond Hall, Chairman, Henry S. Fitch, Theodore H. Eaton, Jr.

Volume 12, No. 14, Pp. 575-655, 10 figs. Published May 18, 1964

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS Lawrence, Kansas

PRINTED BY HARRY (BUD) TIMBERLAKE, STATE PRINTER TOPEKA, KANSAS 1964

30-1476

The Breeding Birds of Kansas

RICHARD F. JOHNSTON

CONTENTS

PAGE INTRODUCTION 577

DISTRIBUTION OF BIRDS IN KANSAS 579 Avian habitats in Kansas 581 Species reaching distributional limits in Kansas 584

BREEDING SEASONS 588 Introduction 588 Variation in breeding seasons 589 Zoogeographic categories 593 Significance of phylogeny to breeding schedules 595 Regulation of breeding schedules 598

ACCOUNTS OF SPECIES 601

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 652

LITERATURE CITED 652

INTRODUCTION

The breeding avifauna of Kansas has received intermittent attention from zoologists for about 75 years. Summary statements, usually concerning all birds of the state, have been published by Goss (1891), Long (1940), Goodrich (1941), Tordoff (1956) and Johnston (1960). All but the first dealt with the breeding birds chiefly in passing, and none was concerned primarily with habitat distributions and temporal characteristics of Kansan birds. The present work treats mainly certain temporal relationships of breeding birds in Kansas, but also geographic distribution, habitat preferences, and zoogeographic relationships to the extent necessary for a useful discussion of temporal breeding phenomena.

Information on breeding of some of the 176 species of birds known to breed in Kansas is relatively good, on a few is almost non-existent, and on most is variously incomplete. It is nevertheless possible to make meaningful statements about many aspects of the breeding biology and distribution of most species of Kansan birds; we can take stock, as it were, of available information and assess the outstanding avenues of profitable future work. In the accounts of species below, the information given is for the species as it occurs in Kansas, unless it is otherwise stated. For the various subsections analyzing biology and distribution, only information taken in Kansas is used, and for this reason the analyses are made on about half the species breeding in the state. An enormous amount of observational effort has been expended by several dozen people in order that suitable data about breeding birds of Kansas be available; all persons who have contributed in any way are listed in the section on acknowledgments, following the accounts of species.

Kansas has been described topographically, climatically, and otherwise ecologically many times in the recent past; the reader is referred to the excellent account by Cockrum (1952), which treats these matters from the viewpoint of a zoologist. For present purposes it will suffice to mention the following characteristics of Kansas as a place lived in by birds.

Topographically, Kansas is an inclined plane having an elevation of about 4100 feet in the northwest and about 700 feet in the southeast. West of approximately 97 deg. W longitude, the topography is gently rolling, low hills or flat plain; to the east the Flint Hills extend in a nearly north to south direction, and to the east of these heavily weathered, grassy hills is a lower-lying but more heavily dissected country, hills of which show no great differences in elevation from surrounding flatland.

The vegetation of eastern Kansas comingles with that of the western edge of the North American deciduous forest; a mosaic of true forest, woodland remnants, and tall-grass prairie occupies this area east of the Flint Hills. From these hills west the prairie grassland today has riparian woodland along water-courses; the prairie is composed of proportionally more and more short-grass elements to the west and tall-grass elements to the east.