Articles

Jan 22 2021

New South Dakota “Hotspots” Page – Good Earth State Park

Author: DakotaBirder • Discussion: No Comments

One of my New Year’s Resolution…less time sulking about the state of the world, more time being productive. Now when I say “productive”, I don’t necessarily mean work! No, I’m thinking more about my free time, and instead of wasting it, spending it doing things I love. Of course that includes birding, but it also includes working on my massive, out of control website, which I’ve neglected lately.

One element of my website are “Hotspots” pages, detailed information on specific birding hotspots in South Dakota. It’s been a work in progress, as it takes quite a long time to make each one of the hotspot pages! Over the last week I have completed a new one, one that was LONG overdue…for Good Earth State Park just outside of Sioux Falls.

We live across the street from the Big Sioux Recreation Area, a state park of comparable size, that also borders the Big Sioux River and has extensive, forested riparian habitat. While I do bird there, in recent years it just can’t hold a candle compared to Good Earth State Park. Much of it for me is how the parks are managed. The Big Sioux Recreation Area has a BIG focus on camping and other heavy recreational use. As a result, they’ve really disappointed me in recent years by ripping out a lot of good bird habitat to make way for camping, frisbee golf, etc. I get it…you have to manage the parks for multiple uses, but overall in South Dakota, birders and birding are the LAST priorities for park management.

That’s what’s so great about Good Earth. It’s not managed for birding, but there’s no camping. That alone makes a huge difference, as it’s less busy and there’s much more natural vegetation. The big draw of the park for me is the variety of habitats, from upland forest, to gorgeous, well-vegetated grasslands with plenty of native plants, to riparian floodplain. The trail system is incredible as well, with several miles of very well maintained trails.

I’ll save the rest for the new “Birding Hotspot” page itself! I hope you find this useful as you consider Good Earth State Park for your next birding trip. Click below to access the page:

Good Earth State Park – Birding “Hotspot”

Jan 09 2016

New and improved “Hotspot” pages for South Dakota

Author: DakotaBirder • Discussion: No Comments

Screen Capture - LaCreek National Wildlife Refuge - Hotspot Page

Here’s a screen capture of part of the new “hostpot” page for LaCreek National Wildlife Refuge. The Google Map is clickable, allowing a user to see information and ground photos for actual locations within LaCreek. At the bottom of the hotspot page (not shown here) are also actual bird photos taken from the hotspot. All hotspot pages have been updated, and new pages are coming!

While I am continually adding new bird photos to my website, I admit I do often neglect to update the other pages on my website.  One set of pages that has long cried for updates are the “Hotspot” pages.  These are pages devoted to describing some of my favorite birding locations within South Dakota.  The pages I had contained a lot of information, but for a guy whose JOB it is to spatially map things, I was pretty far behind the technology curve on my hotspots pages.  The location maps and other maps were static screen grabs from maps I’d constructed in photoshop.

Time for an upgrade!  What I want to do with my hotspot pages is not only highlight a location on a map, but allow a viewer to “drill in” to actually look at ground photos for specific locations in and around a hotspot.  Using Google Map tools directly on the hotspot pages certainly allows for a much more dynamic and interactive environment than my old hotspot pages.  I’ve updated all my existing hotspot pages to include interactive Google Map tools. The main hotspot page provides an overview map of South Dakota, with little owl icons marking some of my favorite birding locations.  Clicking on an icon will bring you to a page devoted to birding information for that hotspot.

On each individual hotspot page is another interactive Google Map, showing specific areas of interest in and around the hotspot.  For example, for the hotspot pages for the Big Sioux Recreation Area, the map provides 8 more little owl icons, each of which depicts an actual ground photo from that spot.  The new pages thus allow a user to not only find the location of some of my favorite birding locations, but also allows a user to actually see ground photos of the area.  Each individual hotspot page also highlights a number of bird photos that were actually taken at that hotspot.

I only had 9 “hotspot” locations listed in my old pages, and I want to start adding many more of my favorite birding locations.  One new one that I’ve just added is a hotspot page for LaCreek National Wildlife Refuge.  It’s a long drive from my hometown of Brandon (about 300 miles!), so I don’t get there all that often, but I do just love birding at LaCreek.  Nothing beats curing the winter blues than going to LaCreek and seeing a number of massive Trumpeter Swans.

Hopefully this is just the start!  I plan on doing more augmenting of the hotspot pages in the coming days and weeks, with a specific focus in the short term of now adding additional hotspot locations.  I hope you find them useful!

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