Category Archives: General

Photo of the Week – September 20, 2012

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Last week, I managed to find about half an hour’s time to wander with my camera, so I decided to try to get some more photos of this year’s drought impacts.  I headed down toward one of our crispy brown lowland prairies, with every intention of photographing dormant grasses and wildflowers.  However, there’s a wetland swale in that prairie that has stayed wet enough during this summer that the vegetation is still vibrant, green, and blooming.  Despite my best efforts, I found myself edging toward the swale…

There were several wildflower species blooming in the swale, with lots of bees and soldier beetles crawling around on them.  But the visual standouts were the lobelias.  Both cardinal flower and blue lobelia were tall and in full flower, so I spent a few minutes taking their portraits.  It’s hard to imagine a more striking flower than a bright red cardinal flower, but the counterpoint of the blue lobelias was every bit as pleasant to look at. 

Cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis). Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

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Blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica).

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I didn’t end up with a camera full brown grass images, but in a way, these lobelia photos are equally representative of this year’s drought.  Although the majority of the landscape is dead and brown, there are bright spots of green scattered around in places where the soil organic matter is high enough to hold moisture, or where groundwater is still close enough to the surface to support life.  Those scattered oases of green are keeping a number of insects and other species alive at the moment, as demonstrated by the loud buzzing sound that surrounded me as I walked through the wetland swale.  Besides being a good “glass half full” thing to do, focusing on those oases in times of drought is probably a critical conservation strategy.  Those little patches of life are making huge contributions to the ecological resilience of our larger prairie/wetland ecosystem, and we should be studying the conditions that create them and thinking about how to ensure those conditions are sustained. 

Plus, the flowers are really pretty.

Introducing the Platte River Sandhill Prairie

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This week, one of our prairies gets a new name, thanks to some generous donors, including the J.A. Woollam Foundation, the Claire Hubbard Foundation, the Howard and Rhonda Hawks Foundation, and many others.  The new name, more descriptive than celebratory, is simply this: The Platte River Sandhill Prairie.

The site is actually the combination of a 60 remnant (unplowed) prairie and 110 acres of adjacent cropfield that we seeded with 162 species of prairie plants in 2002.  The Platte River Sandhill Prairie sits on a range of sandy hills along the south edge of the Platte River Valley.  Most of the historic prairie in those hills has been converted into center pivot-irrigated cropland now, so our 170 acres of floristically-diverse grassland is especially valuable.

Because of this year’s drought, the prairie is not wearing its most showy colors right now.  Most of the grasses have been dormant since July, and very few fall wildflowers are blooming.  However, as with all prairies, what you see today is not what you’ll see tomorrow, nor what was there yesterday or last year.  As a celebration of the Platte River Sandhill Prairie, its beauty and diversity, and the generous donors who continue to support our conservation work, I’ve put together a series of photographs that show this prairie in all its glory.  Long-time readers of this blog will recognize most, if not all, of these photos from previous posts, but might not have realized that they were all from the same prairie.

Click on any of the below photos to see it larger, and then use the arrows to scroll through the rest of the photos.  I apologize for the quality of a few of them – some are poor quality scans of slides, but were useful for showing different stages of growth in the prairie.

A landscape view of the sandhills in December
A young mouse coming out of its nest.
Sun sedge (Carex heliophilus) is one of the first flowers of the spring.
Showy evening primroses in the restored sandhill prairie.
Parasitic dodder on Canada goldenrod.
A prescribed burn in 2011.
A pocket gopher trail through burned prairie.
Wind flower (Anemone carolinense) in the spring after a summer fire.
Showy evening primrose the year after summer fire and grazing.
The restored prairie in its fifth growing season.
Prickly pear after a fire.
Jumping spider on shell leaf penstemon.
A class trip from Creighton University in Omaha.
Gerry Steinauer teaching plant identification to a Master Naturalist class.
Pussy toes blooming in the early spring.
Rose hips in winter prairie.
Frost and snow on prairie and fence.
Hairy puccoon in the remnant portion of the sandhill prairie.
Bilobed looper moth in the spring of 2012.
Annual sunflowers are one of the few flowers blooming during the drought of 2012.

Thank you to everyone who supports the work of The Nature Conservancy along the Central Platte River in Nebraska.  Please don’t be strangers – we’d love to have you come hike our trails and see the results of your support firsthand.

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