The Prairie Ecologist

As I wrap up my square meter photography project (May 4 will be the last day of the 2024-2025 edition), I’ve been thinking about what I want to do next. The other day, I came up with an idea and I’m jumping in with both feet. I think it’ll be fun and informative, but I’m telling you about it now because that will help me stick with it. (I can’t very well back out now, can I? I just committed to it in front of thousands of people.)

I spend a lot of my time thinking up ways to create a shifting mosaic of habitats in prairies. It’s an approach that has been shown to sustain biodiversity and ecological resilience and, if you’re not familiar with it, you can read more about it here.

One of the key components of our particular shifting mosaic approaches is that individual patches of prairie often get a prolonged period of pretty intense grazing (usual a full season, give or take) and then an even longer rest period. To me, the most fascinating portion of that cycle is the first growing season following a long grazing period.

Following a full season of grazing, most of the perennial vegetation has reduced vigor because it was repeatedly cropped by cattle throughout the previous season. That opens up space for other plants who normally can’t compete well with those perennials. The result is a wild party of annuals, biennials, and other opportunistic plants until those perennials regain their full strength. It’s a fun, unpredictable, messy mix of plant species and habitat conditions.

Messiness and unpredictability can make a lot of grassland managers uncomfortable. This is true for prairie managers working for conservation organizations as well as for private landowners. I understand the discomfort, but I also feel like a lot of that comes from a distrust of the resilience of prairies. Especially in larger prairies (those bigger than, say, 80-100 acres or so), I think there’s value in putting prairies through their paces a little. Our grazing/rest cycles provide a wide variety of habitat for animals, but also help ensure all the members of the plant community get a chance to thrive and express themselves periodically.

Anyway, to draw attention to the fun, unpredictable, messiness of post-grazing prairies, I’m starting a new photography project this year. I’ll be observing and photographing portions of three prairies managed with a shifting mosaic approach that includes long periods of intense grazing and long periods of rest. In particular, I’m going to illustrate what happens during the first growing season after that grazing ends. I’ll spend most of my time within an 80×80 foot square marked out at each of those three sites.

The West Derr Prairie at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, showing three different habitat patch types from the air.

Here’s my photo plot on April 30, 2025, looking northeast from the southwest corner. The plot is part of a large prairie patch that was hayed early last summer, causing cattle to focus their grazing in it for the remainder of the season.

I’m going to introduce two of the three project sites today. The third site is laid out, but I haven’t had time to photograph there yet.

The first site is within a restored prairie at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies that I planted in 2000 with 202 plant species. It’s been managed with various shifting mosaic grazing approaches since about 2009, including patch-burn grazing and others. Plant diversity has remained very steady over that time period.

Last summer, Preserve Manager Cody Miller had the center of the prairie hayed in mid-June. The cattle in the prairie then spent the majority of their time in that hayed patch, keeping it cropped short to the ground through the end of the growing season. It’s very similar to patch-burn grazing, but the focal grazing was driven by haying instead of fire.

When I set up my photo plot earlier this week, the vegetation was very short and there was a lot of dried manure scattered across the prairie. To many people, it probably looks like an ecological disaster, but I’m excited to see what happens this year. There are already some hints (see photos below) of some of the wildflowers that will thrive in the absence of strong competition from typically-dominant grasses and other plants.

Shell-leaf penstemon (*Penstemon grandiflorus*) will have a good year.

Yarrow (*Achillea millefolium*) will also be abundant this season. You can also see false gromwell, aka marbleseed (*Onosmodium molle*) to the right of the yarrow.

The second of my three focal sites this year is my family prairie. The prairie is a combination of scattered small parcels of unplowed prairie surrounded by former cropland that was planted to grass in the early 1960’s. I’ve located my photo plot in what I’m pretty sure is an unplowed portion of the site. I’m using both old aerial photos and current vegetation composition to make that educated guess.

The yellow square shows the location of my photo plot at my family prairie. The prairie is split into four main pastures and a small exclosure around and upstream of the (usually) dry pond. Pasture #3 had cows in it for all of last growing season and was grazed hard. In mid-summer Pasture #2 was also opened to the cattle so they could spread out a little, but #3 kept getting the majority of the grazing. Pastures 1 and 4 got hardly any grazing last year and have tall, rank vegetation.

My 80×80 photo plot sits on a gentle northwest-facing slope within a pasture (#3) that was heavily grazed all last year. It’s part of an open-gate rotational system, so a gate was opened to a second pasture in the mid-summer, but cattle still focused most of their attention on pasture #3. That is evident in the very short vegetation structure and abundant bare ground in the photos I took yesterday (May 1). It is poised for a very interesting growing season.

A May 1, 2025 photo, showing very short vegetation. There has been no grazing yet this year.

As with the West Derr restoration, the plot at my family prairie has some early indications of the plants that will have a good year in this post-grazing season. It also has a stronger community of early season wildflowers than the restored prairie. I photographed some of those when I was at the site yesterday. They were easy to see because of the short habitat structure, and many were either more abundant, bloomed earlier, or both, than their peers in the ungrazed areas of the same prairie.

Short vegetation and pussytoes (*Antennaria neglecta*).

An abundance of sun sedge (*Carex heliophila*) is one reason I’m pretty sure this is remnant prairie.

Fringed puccoon was blooming happily here.

A tiny annual called western rock jasmine (*Androsace occidentalis*) always does well in post-grazing years, both at my family prairie and at the Platte River Prairies.

Another photo of the grazed photo plot. If you look closely, you can see a nice patch of ground plum, aka buffalo pea (*Astragalus crassicarpus*).

Some “plums” (seed pods) of ground plum that have already started to form – proof of successful pollination earlier this spring.

I’ll share photos of the third site soon. It’s part of a 1995 prairie restoration at the Platte River Prairies that’s managed a very similar open-gate rotational grazing as I use at my family prairie.

My hope is that this project will help others see what I like about the wild and crazy post-grazing period in prairies. I don’t know what will happen in these plots – that’s part of the fun! I hope you’ll enjoy tagging along with me as I watch them.

Life is funny sometimes. Last week, I spent a morning setting up some research plots aimed at helping us learn how to suppress the growth and spread of deciduous shrubs in grasslands. When I finished, I walked about 50 yards to a patch of wild plum (a deciduous shrub) and spent a half hour photographing an incredible abundance of pollinators using the patch as a source of food. Really makes you think, huh?

Wild plum, aka American plum (*Prunus americana*) at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies.

Deciduous shrubs, of course, are great. Wild plum, for example, is one of several early-blooming native shrubs that play a vital role for pollinators in April. There aren’t a lot of blossoms among the herbaceous prairie plants in our area at this time of year. As a result, blooming shrubs draw insects in like big, showy, nice-smelling magnets. Aside from their pretty, nutritious flowers, shrubs also create nice little pockets of habitat for a lot of animals that need a little woody cover with their prairie vegetation.

On the other hand, deciduous shrubs have been spreading into and through grasslands at an increased rate. That rate of spread is caused by a lot of factors, including changes in native browser populations and a style of landscape fragmentation that has broken grasslands into pieces and introduced woody plants along the edges of those pieces. Most importantly, higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are fueling the growth and spread of deciduous woody plants in a way that is very different than even a couple decades ago.

Adding all that up, it can be hard to know how to feel about and act around deciduous shrubs in prairies. Shrubs yay? Shrubs boo? Yes.

Probably the same species of sweat bee as shown above, but a different individual.

This photo give you some idea of how many little pollinators were using the plum blossoms. All those little specks are flies, bees, and/or wasps.

I was only able to photograph a tiny fraction of the pollinator species frenetically bouncing between the plum blossoms. Many were so tiny, it was hard to photograph them at all, and most were moving so quickly, I couldn’t focus my lens before they skipped off to the next flower. Even so, I managed to capture a decent sample of the kind of diversity I was seeing. You’ll just have to imagine the others.

A drone fly with kaleidoscope eyes. I assume her name is Lucy.

Managing the size and spread of deciduous shrub patches is already a major focus of many prairie managers. The challenge of dealing with that issue is growing like – well, like a patch of carbon dioxide-fueled deciduous shrubs. Most of the shrub species we’re facing, though, aren’t enemies. As with the wild plum I was photographing, the majority are native species that happen to be gaining a competitive edge because of a number of enabling conditions we can’t do much about.

As land stewards, we need to find ways to manage shrubbier grasslands for biodiversity and productivity because shrubbier grasslands are our future across much of the Midwest and Great Plains regions of North America. In fact, the future is already here in many places. We’re all free to think what we want of that future, but ignoring or denying it won’t do us much good.

But they’re also pretty! And they provide a lot of pollen, nectar, fruit, shelter, and other resources for prairie species.

A long-bodied, long-antennaed beetle with short wing coverings.

Really, the dual experiences I had with shrubs last week were a great illustration of how we should all be thinking about them. We have a lot to learn, and quickly, about how to manage the competition between shrubs and other prairie species. As we experiment with various approaches to the issue, we need to share our experiences with each other. At the same time, we should all recognize and celebrate the positive traits of those shrubs. That’ll help us make better decisions, but it’ll also give us a helpful perspective on the changes we see around us.

Happy Earth Day.

The Prairie Ecologist

Essays, photos, and discussion about prairie ecology, restoration, and management

Introducing a New Photo/Storytelling Project – The Post-Grazing Party: Part 1

Photos of the Week – April 22, 2025