Category Archives: Prairie Animals

Photo of the Week – November 1, 2012

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On Wednesday, our staff was out enjoying some beautiful fall weather and harvesting the last of our prairie seeds for the season.  Walking along a gravel lane, we found a small snake basking in the sun.  I didn’t recognize it, so I stopped to photograph it in case it was a species we hadn’t seen in our prairies before.  Thanks to Mardell Jasnowski and Nelson Winkel for helping me get the photo.  (And for being patient while I shot it from many different angles…)

A juvenile eastern racer (Coluber constrictor) – The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.  As always, you can click on the image to see a larger and sharper version of it.

Juvenile eastern racers look very different from the adults of that species.  Adult racers don’t have any patterned markings on their backs, and are a uniform blue or green color on top and yellow on the belly.  In fact, they’re often called green racers or blue racers because of that coloration (also yellowbelly racers).  When I saw this juvenile, I didn’t even think about the possibility it might be a racer.  I was running through the names of all the snake species I could think of with brown and black patterned backs, and none of them fit what I was seeing.

Eastern racers aren’t the only snake species in which the juvenile has a different, more camouflaged appearance than the adult (black rat snakes are another example).  It’s also a phenomenon seen in other kinds of animals, including white-tailed deer and red-winged blackbirds – among many others.  I guess a little extra camouflage when you’re young and inexperienced in the world is probably a good idea!

Thanks to Dan Fogell for writing his excellent field guide, which helped me identify this snake.

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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