One of the most gratifying parts of my career has been the opportunity to design and carry out restoration work – especially taking cropfields, adding wetlands to them, and then planting them with diverse seed mixes. It’s really hard to encapsulate the joy, energy and pride that comes from that work.

I could make squiggly lines across a site with flags and big equipment would come in and turn those into wetland sloughs. I could walk around with buckets strapped to my waist and grab seeds from plants and at least some of those seeds would germinate and establish diverse plant communities. Most importantly, I could then spot the same bees, grasshoppers, small mammals, ants, and birds in those restored sites as could see in the adjacent unplowed prairies, helping me feel like I’d accomplished the primary goal: stitching fragmented grasslands back together.

Since I’ve moved out of the role of land steward for the Platte River Prairies, I’ve gotten to watch and help other people experience those same emotions. This time around, it’s Cody Miller, our Preserve Manager, who is directing the latest restoration project. My jobs are to give ‘old man advice’, when asked, and to cheer everyone on from the sidelines. …And to take photos, which is why today’s post is another one (two in a week!!) full of people photos, instead of insects, flowers, or other small things. Don’t worry, I’ve got a couple of old standards coming soon.

This 50 acre site will be very weedy for a few years, but by year 3, 4, or 5 it should be dominated by the plants we harvested and seeded. Once everything is established, Cody will start using fire and grazing to manage for habitat structure and help encourage as many animals as possible to colonize the restoration from adjacent prairies. He’ll also get to experience the wonder of walking around a site he turned from bare ground into prairie and wetlands. I can’t wait to watch him do it.

Many thanks to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ducks Unlimited, and Nebraska Game and Parks for helping to fund this project.

Hi. I’m a toad in a hole and I’d like to talk to you for a minute about the incredible and complex relationships that exist between organisms in nature.

You’ll be familiar, of course, with obvious examples of interactions like pollination. Bees, butterflies, and many other species go looking for food, and as they do, they drag pollen from flower to flower in a way that often results in fertilization. Many plants wouldn’t be able to create fruits or seeds without the relationship between themselves and hungry insects (or sometimes other animals). Very nice.

Predation is another easy example, right? Predators want to eat and their potential prey would like not to be eaten. From that basic premise has come an amazing array of evolutionary adaptations. Species on both sides of the equation have developed camouflage and other ways to conceal themselves from the opposition. Some potential prey species have evolved methods of tasting bad or grow shells and/or spines that make them less attractive to hungry predators. There are countless other strategies and counter strategies that come into play as some animals stalk or wait in ambush for others.

Let us ruminate for a moment on the relationships between herbivores and plants. Grasses have spent millions of years making themselves increasingly difficult to digest, to the point that many animals that rely upon them for food have stomachs that act as multi-chamber fermentation vessels. That’s right – bison make kombucha out of grass. Or something like that. …What do I know? I’m a toad.

Most interactions in nature are not simply two-sided, but are fascinating and convoluted cascades or webs of impacts. The way predators influence the activities of their potential prey, for example, can dramatically change the ways those hunted animals move around the landscape and select their diet. That, in turn, affects plant communities, as well as the resources they provide for pollinators, birds, and lots of others. As a result, the presence mountain lions in an ecosystem might significantly impact butterfly populations and coyote abundance can increase forage availability for bison and cattle. It’s crazy.

However, interactions between organisms don’t have to be complex to be meaningful. In fact, I’d like to focus on one particular interaction between white-tailed deer and Woodhouse’s toads. More particularly, I want to highlight the interplay between one specific deer and one specific toad. And by ‘one specific toad’, of course, I mean me.

That deer walked across the Platte River, wading through shallow water and across multiple sand bars along the way. I don’t know why it crossed the river. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but I don’t know the punch line. Because I’m a toad.

Anyway, as the deer crossed those sand bars, its feet made small rounded depressions in the wet sand. Those depressions happened to be just the right size for a toad to nestle into on a hot summer day to stay cool and comfortable. So I did. Thanks, pal.