Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest
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Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest
The Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest is a United States National Forest in the north-central Sandhills region of the U.S. state of Nebraska. The area of the national forest is . The forest is managed as part of the U.S. Forest Service's Nebraska National Forests and Grasslands, from ranger district offices in Halsey, Nebraska. The national forest is entirely within Cherry County, Nebraska. History In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation establishing the Niobrara Forest Reserve, later the Niobrara Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest. On October 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon designated the Niobrara Division the Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest after former Governor Samuel R. McKelvie. Flora and fauna The forest is a combination of prairie grasslands and pine forest "islands". Most of the existing forested sections were manmade, planted by hand over the past 75 years. The protein content of the native grasses is among the highest found anyw ...
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Cherry County, Nebraska
Cherry County is a county located in the U.S. state of Nebraska. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population was 5,713. Its county seat is Valentine. The county was named for Lt. Samuel A. Cherry, an Army officer who was stationed at Fort Niobrara and who had been killed in South Dakota in 1881. Cherry County is in the Nebraska Sandhills. It is the largest county in the state at nearly 6,000 square miles (15,500 sq km), larger than the state of Connecticut. In the Nebraska license plate system, Cherry County is represented by the prefix 66 (it had the 66th-largest number of vehicles registered in the state when the license plate system was established in 1922). Geography Cherry County lies on the north side of Nebraska. Its north boundary line abuts the south boundary line of the state of South Dakota. According to the US Census Bureau, the county has an area of , of which is land and (0.8%) is water. It is by far Nebraska's largest county in land area and larger ...
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Juniperus Virginiana
''Juniperus virginiana'', also known as red cedar, eastern red cedar, Virginian juniper, eastern juniper, red juniper, and other local names, is a species of juniper native to eastern North America from southeastern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and east of the Great Plains. Further west it is replaced by the related ''Juniperus scopulorum'' (Rocky Mountain juniper) and to the southwest by ''Juniperus ashei'' (Ashe juniper).Farjon, A. (2005). ''Monograph of Cupressaceae and Sciadopitys''. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Adams, R. P. (2004). ''Junipers of the World''. Trafford. Description ''Juniperus virginiana'' is a dense slow-growing coniferous evergreen tree that may never become more than a bush on poor soil, but is ordinarily from tall, with a short trunk in diameter, rarely to in height and in diameter. The oldest tree reported, from West Virginia, was 940 years old. The bark is reddish-brown, fibrous, and peels off in narrow strips. The leaves are of two types; sharp, ...
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Snake River (Nebraska)
The Snake River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed March 30, 2011 tributary of the Niobrara River. Entirely located within the Sandhills of north-central Nebraska, the Snake River rises near the eastern edge of Sheridan County. It flows eastward into Cherry County and passes along the southern edge of Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest. On the southeast edge of the national forest, the river is dammed to form Merritt Reservoir. At this point, the river makes a sharp turn to the north. At Burge, the river has a mean annual discharge of . Snake River Falls is immediately to the north of Merritt Reservoir; it is the largest waterfall, as measured by volume, in the state. (Nebraska's highest waterfall is Smith Falls.) The Snake River joins the Niobrara River about southwest of Valentine, Nebraska. See also *List of Nebraska rivers This is a partial list of rivers in Nebraska (U.S. state). ...
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Merritt Reservoir
Merritt Dam is a dam in Cherry County, Nebraska, southwest of Valentine, in the north-central part of the state. The earthen dam impounds the Snake River as it flows along the southern edge of the Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest in the Sandhills. It created Merritt Reservoir in 1964 as a project of the United States Bureau of Reclamation The Bureau of Reclamation, and formerly the United States Reclamation Service, is a federal agency under the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees water resource management, specifically as it applies to the oversight and opera .... The reservoir holds almost , with about of sandy shoreline and 3,000 surface acres () of water. Merritt Reservoir State Recreation Area is adjacent to the eastern side of the reservoir and offers boating, fishing, camping, and hunting activities. References External links Merritt Reservoir State Recreation Area - Nebraska Game & Parks Commission Dams in Nebraska State parks ...
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Wild Turkey
The wild turkey (''Meleagris gallopavo'') is an Upland game bird, upland ground bird native to North America, one of two extant species of Turkey (bird), turkey and the heaviest member of the order Galliformes. It is the ancestor to the domestic turkey, which was originally derived from a southern Mexican subspecies of wild turkey (not the related ocellated turkey). Description Adult wild turkeys have long reddish-yellow to grayish-green legs. The body feathers are generally blackish and dark, sometimes grey brown overall with a coppery sheen that becomes more complex in adult males. Adult males, called toms or gobblers, have a large, featherless, reddish head, red throat, and red Wattle (anatomy), wattles on the throat and neck. The head has fleshy growths called Caruncle (bird anatomy) , caruncles. Juvenile males are called jakes; the difference between an adult male and a juvenile is that the jake has a very short beard and his tail fan has longer feathers in the middle. Th ...
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Hawk
Hawks are bird of prey, birds of prey of the family Accipitridae. They are widely distributed and are found on all continents except Antarctica. * The subfamily Accipitrinae includes goshawks, sparrowhawks, sharp-shinned hawks and others. This subfamily are mainly woodland birds with long tails and high visual acuity. They hunt by dashing suddenly from a concealed perch. * In America, members of the ''Buteo'' group are also called hawks; this group is called buzzards in other parts of the world. Generally, buteos have broad wings and sturdy builds. They are relatively larger-winged, shorter-tailed and fly further distances in open areas than accipiters. Buteos descend or pounce on their prey rather than hunting in a fast horizontal pursuit. The terms ''accipitrine hawk'' and ''buteonine hawk'' are used to distinguish between the types in regions where ''hawk'' applies to both. The term ''"true hawk"'' is sometimes used for the accipitrine hawks in regions where ''buzzard'' i ...
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Grouse
Grouse are a group of birds from the order Galliformes, in the family Phasianidae. Grouse are presently assigned to the tribe Tetraonini (formerly the subfamily Tetraoninae and the family Tetraonidae), a classification supported by mitochondrial DNA sequence studies, and applied by the American Ornithologists' Union, ITIS, International Ornithological Congress, and others. Grouse inhabit temperate and subarctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere, from pine forests to moorland and mountainside, from 83°N (rock ptarmigan in northern Greenland) to 28°N (Attwater's prairie chicken in Texas). Turkeys are closely related to grouse and are also classified in the tribe Tetraonini. The koklass pheasant is also closely allied with them. Description Grouse are heavily built like other Galliformes, such as chickens. They range in length from , and in weight from . Males are larger than females—twice as heavy in the western capercaillie, the largest member of the family. Grouse ha ...
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Pheasant
Pheasants ( ) are birds of several genera within the family (biology), family Phasianidae in the order (biology), order Galliformes. Although they can be found all over the world in introduced (and captive) populations, the pheasant genera native range is restricted to Eurasia. The classification "pheasant" is Paraphyly, paraphyletic, as birds referred to as pheasants are included within both the subfamilies Phasianinae and Peafowl, Pavoninae, and in many cases are more closely related to smaller phasianids, grouse, and turkey (formerly classified in Perdicinae, Grouse, Tetraoninae, and Meleagridinae) than to other pheasants. Pheasants are characterised by strong sexual dimorphism, males being highly decorated with bright colours and adornments such as wattle (anatomy), wattles. Males are usually larger than females and have longer tails. Males play no part in rearing the young. A pheasant's call or cry can be recognised due to the fact it sounds like a rusty sink or valve b ...
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Coyote
The coyote (''Canis latrans'') is a species of canis, canine native to North America. It is smaller than its close relative, the wolf, and slightly smaller than the closely related eastern wolf and red wolf. It fills much of the same ecological niche as the golden jackal does in Eurasia. The coyote is larger and more predatory and was once referred to as the American jackal by a behavioral ecologist. Other historical names for the species include the prairie wolf and the brush wolf. The coyote is listed as Least Concern, least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, due to its wide distribution and abundance throughout North America. The species is versatile, able to adapt to and expand into environments modified by humans. It is enlarging its range by moving into urban areas in the eastern U.S. and Canada. The coyote was sighted in eastern Panama (across the Panama Canal from their home range) for the first time in 2013. The coyote has 19 recognized sub ...
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Mule Deer
The mule deer (''Odocoileus hemionus'') is a deer indigenous to western North America; it is named for its ears, which are large like those of the mule. Two subspecies of mule deer are grouped into the black-tailed deer. Unlike the related white-tailed deer (''Odocoileus virginianus''), which is found throughout most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains and in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains from Idaho and Wyoming northward, mule deer are only found on the western Great Plains, in the Rocky Mountains, in the southwest United States, and on the west coast of North America. Mule deer have also been introduced to Argentina and Kauai, Kauai, Hawaii. Taxonomy Mule deer can be divided into two main groups: the mule deer (''sensu stricto'') and the black-tailed deer. The first group includes all subspecies, except ''O. h. columbianus'' and ''Sitka deer, O. h. sitkensis'', which are in the black-tailed deer group. The two main groups have been treated as separate species, but ...
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White-tailed Deer
The white-tailed deer (''Odocoileus virginianus''), also known as the whitetail or Virginia deer, is a medium-sized deer native to North America, Central America, and South America as far south as Peru and Bolivia. It has also been introduced to New Zealand, all the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean (Cuba, Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ..., Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico), and some countries in Europe, such as the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Romania and Serbia. In the Americas, it is the most widely distributed wild ungulate. In North America, the species is widely distributed east of the Rocky Mountains as well as in southwestern Arizona and most of Mexico, except Baja California peninsula, Lower California. It is mostly displaced by the black ...
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Pronghorn
The pronghorn (, ) (''Antilocapra americana'') is a species of artiodactyl (even-toed, hoofed) mammal indigenous to interior western and central North America. Though not an antelope, it is known colloquially in North America as the American antelope, prong buck, pronghorn antelope and prairie antelope, because it closely resembles the antelopes of the Old World and fills a similar ecological niche due to parallel evolution. It is the only surviving member of the family Antilocapridae. During the Pleistocene epoch, about 11 other antilocaprid species existed in North America.Smithsonian Institution. North American MammalsPronghorn ''Antilocapra americana''/ref> Three other genera (''Capromeryx'', '' Stockoceros'' and ''Tetrameryx'') existed when humans entered North America but are now extinct. As a member of the superfamily Giraffoidea, the pronghorn's closest living relatives are the giraffe and okapi. See Fig. S10 in Supplementary Information. The Giraffoidea are in tu ...
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