This week, I’ve found two different brief opportunities to poke around some local prairies with my camera. Both prairies were nice remnant (unplowed) grasslands with a good diversity of early season wildflowers, native sedges, and other little treasures.

My first stop was at Gjerloff Prairie, a terrific loess hills prairie owned and managed by Prairie Plains Resource Institute. It’s only about 20 minutes north of my house here in Aurora, so it’s a site I know pretty well. I usually try to visit at least once or twice each spring because it has some wildflower species I don’t see often in other prairies near home.

Later in the week, I took a break from other projects and wandered around one of our sedge meadow/prairie sites (Caveny Tract) at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies. It’s a site with sandy alluvial (river deposited) soils, but still has a fair amount of overlap with Gjerloff Prairie in terms of plant species blooming right now. Prairie ragwort, pussytoes, and fringed puccoon are just a few examples. (For some reason a lot of the current wildflowers are yellow.) However, there are lots of different plants as well.

The Caveny Tract includes more than 350 acres of prairie that is adjacent to hundreds of acres more. There are lots of little sedge meadow habitats embedded in the prairie, mostly in old swales formed by the meandering Platte River hundreds or thousands of years ago. Those swales are now close enough to groundwater to host a mixture of wetland and mesic prairie plants. Those sedge meadows, not surprisingly, contain both an abundance and diversity of sedges. In many places, you can stand still and see half a dozen sedge species within a few yards of your feet.

That’s assuming you’ve spent enough time with a dichotomous plant key to learn to identify some of the different sedge species. If you’ve never used a dichotomous key to identify plants, you’re missing a terrific opportunity to be overwhelmed by botanical terminology. I know enough to recognize differences between most sedge species and can identify the more common ones on sight. Every once in a while, I’ll grab a sample of one and run it through the key to stay in practice (and try to confirm my identification guess). It can take a while, mostly because I have to keep referring to the glossary to remember what a lot of the words mean.

If I did it more often, of course, I’d be better at keying plants. On the other hand, there are other things I’d rather be good at, so it’s all a matter of perspective and prioritization. I’m an ecologist, not a botanist, entomologist, or ornithologist. I don’t have to know all the species within any particular taxonomic group. I just need to know enough of them that I can recognize interactions between them. Or, at least, this is what I tell myself when I don’t feel like keying out plants.

Here’s an example of what I mean about the terminology needed to quickly run through a plant key. The sedge pictured above is probably Carex tetanica. I think that because its lower pistillate spikelets appear to be loosely flowered, as compared to those on Carex meadii. Both species have perigynia with 2 strong marginal ribs and are glaucous at maturity. Their pistillate scales are also usually purplish brown on each side of the midrib.

If you’re a botanist, all the words in that paragraph probably make perfect sense (though you may also tell me that the pictured plant is Carex meadii rather than C. tetanica and I won’t argue with you). If you’re an ecologist like me, you’re content to live with a little uncertainty and keep some brain space reserved for other words and ideas.

The photographic highlight of my Caveny Tract exploration was a big patch of pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) going to seed. I spotted the pale patch of fuzzy plants from 50 yards away or so. Growing right in the middle of it was a lone prairie ragwort plant. I found the combination of the two species really attractive and spent a lot of time photographing the ragwort flowers surrounded by the pale fluff.

These are just a few of the many photos I liked from the myriad composition options I played with. I used three different lenses to photograph the flowers, including a wide angle, a macro telephoto (180mm) and a longer telephoto (400mm). After I’d been shooting for a while, a little sweat bee arrived on the scene and kept me captivated for a few more minutes.

Later in the season, both of these prairies will have much bigger, more abundant, and showier flowers. Right now, the short stature and scattered nature makes most of the blooms are hard to see from the road. From that perspective, it doesn’t look like much is happening in the grasslands. Once you start walking, though, wildflowers are dotted around throughout and each one is a joy to come across. That’s especially true if you’re just appreciating their beauty and not worrying about whether their achenes are tuberculate or not.