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Between now and September 30, 2019, we are accepting applications for the next class of Hubbard Fellows. The year-long Claire M. Hubbard Young Leaders in Conservation Fellowship Program is designed to help recent college graduates gain comprehensive experience. That includes a healthy dose of land management and restoration work, as well as data collection, outreach, marketing, fundraising, conservation planning, and more. In addition, each Fellow designs and carries out an independent project to dive deeper into a subject they are interested in. The Fellows are based at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, just south of Wood River, Nebraska, and housing is provided at that site. The position runs from February 2020 through January 2021.

The Fellowship is set up differently than most internships and other short-term positions, which tend to focus on a fairly narrow set of responsibilities and opportunities. Fellows fix fence, conduct prescribed fires, control invasive plants, harvest seeds, and help with all other land stewardship responsibilities. In addition, however, they attend conferences, planning and strategy sessions, budget meetings, and chapter board meetings, and are encouraged to participate actively as full time staff members of The Nature Conservancy during their year with us.

You can read more about this opportunity in this PDF brochure and apply at nature.org/careers. Search for “Hubbard” or job #47950 to find the job description and application instructions. Come join us in Nebraska, get involved in innovative and important conservation work, and build your future!

The Fellows and I traveled to Wisconsin this week for the annual Grassland Restoration Network workshop, which – this year – was being hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. I’ll write more about the workshop in a future post, but for now, I’ll share a few photos from our last evening in Madison.

Despite looking forward to the workshop itself, my top priority for the trip was to revisit Greene Prairie, a site that has mesmerized me since I first saw it in 2004. Henry Greene began work on his prairie in 1943 and ended up hand-planting 130 species over the next couple of decades. It was painstaking work, laid out in great detail and brought to life by a man who, by all accounts, had a very prickly personality. We couldn’t find a window of time to visit his site during the workshop, but as soon as our last field trips ended on the last evening of the workshop, the Fellows and I headed to Greene Prairie, accompanied by Sarah Bailey and Gerry Steinauer.

We saw a lot of great restoration work during our few days in Madison, but there is something about the aesthetic at Greene Prairie that makes it stand out. During my previous visits, I’ve tried to puzzle out what draws me so strongly to it. It’s not the presence or abundance of any particular species, including some rare species, as well as lots of charismatic wildflowers. I think it’s the overall structure and look of the site that I find so attractive. Many of the restored prairies we walked through during this (and other) trips are tall and nearly impenetrable to pedestrian traffic. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely different from the prairie structure I’ve become used to here in Nebraska. The Greene Prairie, while it has plenty of tall plants, also has large areas dominated by a matrix of shorter plants like prairie dropseed. Even where many of the plants are tall, the spacing between them makes the prairie easy to walk and see through.

There’s a lot more I could say about the Greene Prairie, but honestly, it’s been a long week and my communication energy is pretty depleted. I never feel like my photos represent the site well, but they’ll have to be sufficient for now. I’ll try to come up with a good synthesis of this week’s workshop to share next week. In the meantime, enjoy these photos!