Longtime readers of The Prairie Ecologist may remember The Plant Game, a creatively-named feature of this blog that has been dormant for a while. If you don’t remember it, you can go back and find examples here, here or here. I’m sure it will shock you to learn that The Plant Game was a great way for me to come up with a blog post when I didn’t really have anything to write about that week.

In unrelated news, I’m introducing a new game this week called The Dragonfly Game. It is completely different from The Plant Game in that it is about dragonflies, not plants.

Here’s how The Dragonfly Game works. I give you a list of four names. Three are official names (common names, not Latin names) of either dragonflies or damselflies. One is a name I made up. You just have to figure out which is the fake name. Click on your choice. That’s the whole game. I’ll wait a day or so and then put the correct answers in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

Dragonfly names are crazy, aren’t they? Do you think you got all of them right? Check back to see – the correct answers will be below in the comments section starting about 24 hours after this post comes out.

This week, we worked on the first of our two annual bison roundups at the Niobrara Valley Preserve. Our roundups allow us to manage herd size and also to vaccinate and put ID tags on the new calves we’re keeping in the herd. We were working the animals from our west herd this week, which live in a 12,000 acre pasture. Our staff had spent a month or so drawing them into a relatively small “trap pasture” and then we pushed them from there into the corral on Monday. During a break in the action, I took a few bison portraits while they milled around the corral, waiting for their turn to move through the alleys.

After the bison were released back into the trap pasture, I drove slowly out among them to get some more photos. I was amazed at how calmly they reacted to my presence so shortly after they had been in the corral.