Just a quick note at the top: We are still working to fill our team at the Niobrara Valley Preserve in north-central Nebraska. The latest position we’ve posted will be focused on communication and outreach. The NVP Community Outreach Specialist will organize and host events and work with visitors. Much of their role will be focused on sharing what we’ve learned from our fire and grazing work, but they’ll help connect people to nature in other ways as well. To learn more, please go to nature.org/careers and search for job # 54793 (Community Outreach Specialist).

The 3rd of March in central Nebraska is not usually a great time to look for insects in the prairie. Even this year, following a pretty mild winter and lots of warm weather during the last few weeks, I wasn’t sure what I’d see when I headed to our family prairie this weekend. At first, when I arrived, I figured I’d have a pleasant wandering hike, but didn’t expect to take many photos. It was 60 degrees and mostly sunny, but it was only March 3, after all. There were a few little patches of green around, but most of the vegetation was very dry and brown.

Once I headed to some of the more heavily-grazed areas from last season, though, and sat down to focus more closely, I started to find movement. I saw a couple little flies first. Then, I noticed something hop. I wasn’t sure it had been a hop, actually, because the stiff breeze kept picking up little bits of dried plant and tossing them in front of me as I walked. Several times, I thought I’d seen an insect move but, upon closer inspection, it was just a seed, part of a leaf, or something else. This time, though, the hop had been legitimate, and it had been performed, appropriately, by a tiny grasshopper.

In fact, there were two or three little grasshopper nymphs within a foot or so of each other. I can’t tell you for sure whether there were two or three because they were incredibly hard to see – a combination of their diminutive size and their amazing camouflage. If I glanced away from one for just a second, I couldn’t find it again. Each nymph was about a half inch long and colored almost exactly like the dead grass around it, complete with dark mottling that helped blend with the shadows.

The only reason I could find the little nymphs at all was that the grass was short and there were enough patches of bare ground that I could see the movement. Even then, if one hopped more than an inch or two (which they did – repeatedly) I’d lose it. Then I had to start sweeping my hand back and forth above the grass, hoping to flush one up and then follow it through the air with my eyes until it landed. It was a poor strategy because I usually lost them once they landed, but it did work a couple times.

Apart from a couple early-season invasive grasses (smooth brome and Kentucky bluegrass), the prairie plant community was visually dominated by drab-looking dried plants. In some places, sun sedge provided little flashes of green and there were a few tiny annual plant seedlings popping up here and there – especially in patches of bare soil. Stiff goldenrod’s basal leaves still had a little green left in them, and I saw a little yarrow and a few other plants that looked like they were starting to grow. I also visited my favorite patch of buffalo pea (Astragalus crassicarpus) and was pleased to see it starting to put on leaves.

Once I started concentrating on the little patches of bare soil between plants, I began seeing more furtive movements. There were lots of really tiny juvenile wolf spiders scurrying around, for example. They’d zip forward half an inch and then pause for a few seconds or minutes, and then scoot forward again. As with the grasshoppers, their camouflage was so effective, I could only see them when they moved, and if I took my eyes off them at all I was unlikely to find them again. I lost several of them when I tried to put my camera up to my eye and focus. I don’t think the spiders moved. I think they just merged into the background and blinked out of sight.

No matter how slowly I walked around the prairie, I almost never found any insects (or spiders) unless I got down on my hands and knees. While walking, I noticed a flying tan-colored lacewing because the sun backlit its translucent wings, and sometimes I’d see a tiny fly scooting through the air between plants. Otherwise, my discoveries always came when my face was less than a foot from the ground.

I assume most invertebrate activity was concentrated where bare soil was exposed – especially on south-facing slopes which caught the sun and provided a little shelter from the stiff breeze. That would make sense based on the thermoregulation preferences of the little critters. On the other than, those were also the places where I spent my time because I had half a chance to find the buggers, so my sampling was pretty biased.

I ended up walking a loop that took me through all four pastures at the prairie, including some that had tall, dense vegetation and others with much shorter structure. I walked faster through the dense stuff because I knew I had less chance of finding inverts. As I got back toward my truck, I went prone again to see if I could find a few more grasshopper nymphs before I quit for the day. Sure enough, there were a couple there. That made me wonder if there was a grasshopper on every square foot of ground, but hidden so well that I hadn’t seen them. I doubt that, but I don’t dismiss the idea completely.

Spring hasn’t sprung yet, but it felt like it was coiled and ready. It was fun finding insects, but I also wondered what an extra early start to the growing season would mean in the context of continued drought conditions. Warm weather at this time of the year often just gives invasive grasses time to pull the little moisture we get over the winter out of the soil before late spring wildflowers are able to access it. By summer, there might not be much water for plants unless we get better rains than we have for the last couple years.

The prairie will be fine either way, of course. As a photographer, my preference would be for lush growth of wildflowers and an abundance of invertebrates and other animals to chase with my camera. As an ecologist, I’ll enjoy watching the grassland exhibit its resilience, no matter what happens.