Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
support forty to eighty bird species, including many of my favorites, such as
the anhinga, little blue heron, and brown thrasher. Waterbirds thrive on the
many ponds that challenge golfers; in Florida more than ten thousand indi-
viduals of forty-two species live on a typical course.
Though golf courses of er some mitigation for the global loss of natural
lands, they foster mostly common urban exploiters and adapters. Few birds of
conservation concern thrive on the typical course. Local rarities, such as the
brown-headed nuthatch, cerulean warbler, blue grosbeak, alder l ycatcher,
winter wren, and blue-winged warbler, are lost from most courses. But where
native vegetation is maintained, forests are conserved, and natural buf ers
around courses are developed, rare species coexist with golfers. Red-headed
woodpeckers exist where large, decadent, and native nut trees are retained.
Natural grass and shrublands support loggerhead shrikes, American kestrels,
upland sandpipers, and burrowing owls. Ponds and streams connected to
functional watersheds and surrounded by shallows rich in native aquatic and
emergent plants provide foraging, loai ng, and nesting habitat for native moor-
hens, ducks, waders, and kingi shers. In arid regions courses of er an excep-
tional ability to provide diverse riparian areas. In New Mexico, for example,
courses rich in streamside vegetation attracted sixty-i ve species of birds not
found in the surrounding desert scrub, while excluding only seven dry-land
species.
In contrast to the diversifying ef ects of golf courses built in already devel-
oped areas, the opposite often occurs where rich native lands are cleared.
When a few hundred acres of native coastal “Strandveld” in South Africa were
converted to a golf course, for example, an estimated eighty-i ve hundred indi-
vidual birds were displaced, and four species—the grey-winged francolin,
black-shouldered kite, Cape grassbird, and pied crow—were driven locally
extinct. Though the combination of converted land and remnant patches
of Strandveld, roughly in a mix of three to one, actually held a higher number of
