Photo of the Week – July 25, 2019

Posted on by

For the second week in a row, I’m at the Niobrara Valley Preserve (that’s a good thing). This week, we have been collecting data on the effectiveness of our prescribed fires and also hosting a workshop for staff of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Tuesday morning, we awoke to a beautiful sunrise fog. Three of us headed up the hill to take pictures in the fog and we had a magical hour or so as the sun came up. Here are some photos from that morning.

This is an aerial photo (drone) of the fog as it dissipated – just as we were finishing up our hour of photography.
A spider sits on its dewy web, backlit by the sun.
Hoary vervain (Verbena stricta) and webs.
An olive-green grasshopper on hoary vervain.
A spider with its prey at sunrise.
Drops on a web.
Another spider on a dewy web. Because they are really pretty!
A crab spider lies in wait on hoary vervain.
And another spider and web…
This is one of about a billion dragonflies of this species that are hanging around right now. I don’t know what species it is because I didn’t bring my field guide, but maybe someone can tell me what it is before I get home (the next photo is the same species).
The same dragonfly as shown above, but from the sunny side.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized by Chris Helzer. Bookmark the permalink.

About Chris Helzer

Chris Helzer is the Director of Science for The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska. His main role is to evaluate and capture lessons from the Conservancy’s land management and restoration work and then share those lessons with other landowners – both private and public. In addition, Chris works to raise awareness about the importance of prairies and their conservation through his writing, photography, and presentations to various groups. Chris is also the author of "The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States", published by the University of Iowa Press. He lives in Aurora, Nebraska with his wife Kim and their children.

5 thoughts on “Photo of the Week – July 25, 2019”

  5. Pingback: Photos of the Week – August 9, 2019 | The Prairie Ecologist

PLEASE COMMENT ON THIS POST!

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.