Quick update – thanks to all of you who joined the webinar I gave this week on the topic of building resilience in prairies through restoration and management. I’m sorry again about the short notice I gave in my last post. If you missed the webinar, I have good news. It was recorded and you have two options for watching it. If you have a Zoom account, you should be able to just click HERE and watch it via that app. If you don’t have a Zoom account, you should be able to click HERE and get a downloadable MP4 file (it’s big…).

If you’re interested in a short tutorial on photography techniques, I’ll be giving a talk on that subject at 12:30 PM Central Time on June 3 and you can learn more/register for that HERE. The presentation is designed to be helpful no matter what camera you use. Quite a few people commented that they’d enjoy other webinars if I can put them together. If you have thoughts on that, including potential subject matter, please add your comments to this post or the previous one. Thanks!

Early this week, I drove up and back to the Niobrara Valley Preserve in an effort to collect data for an important collaborative research project. It was a really long day, made longer by the fact that the weather forecast greatly underestimated how long it was going to rain. I had planned to arrive after the rain had ended, do some vegetation clipping/collecting, and bring those samples home to dry and weigh. When I actually arrived, however, rain was still steadily falling. That was bad news since I needed to wait until the vegetation was dry to do my work.

Making lemonade, as they say, I took the opportunity to go look at my favorite pasqueflower hillside, curious to see if any flowers were still blooming. They weren’t, but the seed heads of pasqueflower are also very attractive, so as the clouds started to finally thin and break a little, I spent a little time photographing pasqueflower seedheads.

As I laid down on the steep rocky slopes to get close to the plants, I noticed two things. First, rocks are sharp. Second, there were a lot of crab spiders hanging out in the seedheads. The second overruled the first and I sacrificed bodily comfort to capture some images of spiders amongst the fuzzy seeds.

Here are some of those photos.

Eventually, the sun came out, the grass dried out, and I was able to do my work and start the long trip back home. It was a much longer day than I’d anticipated, but the unexpected delay turned out ok after all.