Hubbard Fellowship Blog – Olivia Finds a Fancy Moth

Posted on by
4

This post is by Olivia Schouten, one of this year’s Hubbard Fellows.  In this post, she shares a quick story about a moth she stumbled upon while doing invasive species control work.

Searching for musk thistles has given me a great way to explore every last corner of our properties here on the Platte, finding some cool things along the way! While we need to remove them, there’s no question that musk thistle flowers attract a wide assortment of pollinators, and it was on one such musk thistle that I found one of the coolest moths I’ve ever seen.

Look at this neat little moth!  (Photo by Olivia Schouten)

This little guy caught my eye as I approached this thistle, and I just had to stop and inspect it. It was about the size of one of my fingernails, and one of the fanciest insects I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. Its wings looked like a bright red dress fringed with lace, with a golden furry cape thrown over its shoulders. I’ve always thought moth faces are cute, and this one was no exception, with its big green eye watching me warily as I stuck my phone in its face to get a few pictures.

A little online searching later and I identified it as the Indian blanket moth (Schinia volupia), a southern plains species that lays its eggs exclusively on Indian Blanket (Gaillardia pulchella), a prairie wildflower that is just as brilliantly yellow and red as this moth. I’m not entirely sure if this coloring of the moth is meant to act as camouflage while it sits on the host flowers, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that its fancy coloring probably doesn’t hurt (though it certainly made it more obvious when sitting on a different flower). The larva are just as striking, with red and white stripes running vertically down the caterpillar’s body. They feed exclusively on Indian blanket, though the adults will likely visit different species of Asteraceae for nectar.

Overall, it was great to get a chance to see this cute little specialist moth, and I’ll definitely be looking closer when I pass a patch of Indian Blanket in the future!

Photo of the Week – July 27, 2018

Posted on by
3

When I was up at the Niobrara Valley Preserve last week, I flew our drone a few times when the light was nice.  It’s really hard to show the scale of this landscape by taking photos from the ground, and I’m having a great time experimenting with aerial photography in order to better illustrate that scale.  Here are a few images from last week, taken right around the headquarters of NVP.  I’m also amassing still and video footage of bison, but I’ll share some of that at another time.

This photo was taken in the evening, with late day light accenting the texture of the landscape. This photo looks east (downriver) and you can see both some piles of recently-cleared eastern red cedars in the foreground and our headquarters buildings on the right side of the image.

This image was taken right above the headquarters, looking to the east as the sun was breaking above the horizon. The skiff of fog didn’t last long once the sun came up, but made for some nice highlights while it lasted.

This image looks south. It shows where the northern portion of the Nebraska Sandhills (a 12 million acre grassland landscape) terminates at the wooded breaks of the Niobrara River. The woodland shown here went through the big 2012 wildfire, but many of the trees were protected from fire by the cool, moist north-facing slopes. Those same factors help support tree species (including paper birch) that don’t otherwise seem like they have any right to be in the hot and arid west.  Many of the trees in the upper reaches of the draws are bur oaks, along with a few ponderosa pine and eastern red cedar trees that survived the big fire.

This image was taken just a few minutes after the foggy sunrise photo above, but is facing the opposite direction (upstream) and shows the day’s first light hitting the river bank.