Quickly, for those of you who might be proximate and/or interested, we will be hosting another public field day at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies this summer.  On July 13, 2024, we will have our staff and a number of guest presenters on hand to lead hikes and give presentations on a variety of topics.  At a minimum, we’ll have some live reptiles you can see up close, a demonstration of small mammal live trapping (for research), and opportunities to explore and learn about prairies, prairie restoration, land stewardship, and much more.  Mark your calendars and watch this space for more details!

Now, to business.

Thanks to Jared Barnes and Rebecca McMackin, this blog was briefly mentioned in a New York Times article last week.  As a result, a couple hundred new people have subscribed within the last several days, and others have stopped by to take a look.  Even apart from that recent flurry, I’m continually surprised and gratified by the number of new readers who find and subscribe to this odd little digital newsletter.

Since we’ve got a bunch of new people here, I thought it might be helpful to provide a brief explanation of what you’ve signed up for.  I say brief, but it’s a little difficult to summarize this blog in a few words.  I’ll try anyway. Perhaps some long-time subscribers can add their descriptions and thoughts about the blog in the comments section (which continues to be a startlingly and gratifyingly positive environment for discussion.)

At the end of this post, I’ve also included links to some earlier posts that provide examples of the kind of content you can find here. 

First, a quick introduction of myself.  I’m the Nebraska Director of Science and Stewardship for The Nature Conservancy.  I started with the Conservancy in 1997 as a land steward along the Central Platte River and in other sites in eastern and south-central Nebraska.  Over time, I’ve continued my involvement in (and passion for) land stewardship, but have become more active with science and communications work as well. 

I also own and manage 160 acres of land, including about 110 acres of prairie, that I’ve inherited/bought from other members of my extended family.  That land is about 12 miles south of my home in Aurora, Nebraska. The Helzer Family Prairie, in addition to land at The Nature Conservancy, makes up the backdrop for a lot of my photos and writing.  I have a long relationship with those grasslands and they continue to teach me amazing lessons.

These days, I supervise The Nature Conservancy’s stewardship staff at the Niobrara Valley Preserve and Platte River Prairies.  I also conduct and collaborate on research projects related to prairie stewardship and ecology and help evaluate the stewardship work done by our staff.  We try to take a very experimental approach to that stewardship work – developing and testing new ideas that push boundaries and help us learn.  Finally, I spend a lot of time sharing the lessons from those experiments, through field tours, presentations, writing, and photography.

I wrote a book on prairie ecology and management back in 2009.  By the time it was published, I already had a lot of new ideas and information, but no way to add them to the book.  I also found it frustrating that I wasn’t able to engage with readers of the book so we could trade thoughts and learn from each other.  As I talked to friends about that frustration, several people suggested I should start a blog.  I’d never read a blog and barely knew what one was.  In spite of that, I started this blog in September of 2010.

As I see it, the blog serves three purposes.  First, it is a way for me to advocate for the beauty and complexity of prairies.  Through writing and photography, I try to show people how fascinating grasslands are and why their conservation is important.  I don’t focus much on the utilitarian value of prairies (carbon sequestration, food production, and such) because I don’t think that’s the best way to inspire people to support conservation – at least not initially.  I’d rather introduce you to the incredible organisms and complex interactions within prairies so you’ll fall in love with them and the habitats they rely upon.

Second, the blog is an important vehicle for sharing the results of the prairie management and restoration projects and experiments we and others are working on.  A substantial percentage of readers are landowners, land managers, or others associated with prairie conservation.  I present research results, ruminations, and wild ideas related to stewardship and restoration of prairies and hope it inspires others to ask questions, try new approaches, and help us all work together to save grassland ecosystems.

Finally, I write blog posts to entertain myself.  Often, other people seem to be entertained by them, too, but that’s honestly just a fortunate by-product.  I like to insert humor into most articles, but I will occasionally write an entire post for no other reason than to make myself laugh.

That’s about the long and short of it.  Thank you to all you new subscribers.  Even more, thank you to those of you who have been here for many years.  This blog continues to exist because I’m able to convince my supervisors that it contributes something to conservation.  I hope it inspires people to love and support the conservation of prairies.  I also hope it is helpfully thought-provoking to all of you working on the land to keep prairies vibrant and resilient. 

Please help spread the word about this blog.  Notwithstanding periodic mentions in The New York Times and other media outlets, most new subscribers find the blog when readers forward a post to their friends.  Keep it up – I really, really appreciate it.

Now, here are some old posts you might enjoy, and that give you a flavor – by topical category – of what this blog contains:

Ecology and Natural History:

A Deep-Rooted Prairie Myth

Toxic Bee-Killing Hitchhiker Beetles (I Know, Right?)

12,000 Years of Bison Behavior in the Central U.S. – Interview with Dr. Chris Widga

Milkweed Pollination: A Series of Fortunate Events

My favorite insect further endears itself to me

Square Meter Photography Project

.

Land Stewardship and Science:

Is Prairie Stewardship Hampered By Our History Goggles?

Visualizing Plant Community Change

Portrait of a Summer Prairie Burn

.

Goofy Humor:

Finally, A Practical Guide for Roadside Wildflower Viewing

Quiz of Total World Distraction

Yet Another Quiz

I drove up to the Niobrara Valley Preserve last Thursday afternoon. I needed to be there to help with a prescribed fire on Friday, but I scheduled my trip so I’d have a little alone time to wander Thursday evening. My schedule has been pretty full lately and I needed some quiet time to explore.

On my last trip to NVP, I’d tried to photograph some pasqueflowers, but they were all either covered with snow or wilted from cold and frost. This time, as soon as I arrived, I headed that direction again to see if I’d have better luck. On the way, though, I saw the little prairie dog town nearby and decided to start there.

The photo above was my favorite from the prairie dog town. Between my arrival at the prairie dog town and the moment I took that photo, I had about an hour’s worth of slow army crawling and lying on my belly, trying to look innocuous. I’m still finding sandbur spines in my legs and elbows and my neck. That’s not a complaint, mind you, just context.

When I first got to the prairie dog town, I used my typical strategy of looking around for any prairie dogs that didn’t immediately dive for cover upon seeing me. A grand total of one prairie dog fit that criterion, so I pulled my hood over my head to hide my shape a little and started a very slow belly crawl in its direction. Every time it twitched toward its hole, I’d stop until it relaxed. Then I’d continue to slither across the ground, trying to ignore the tiny stabs from sandburs and the occasional cactus (Opuntia fragilis – if you know, you know).

I eventually got into range and tried to stay as motionless as I could, hoping the prairie dog would get used to me and go back to its normal routine. It took a while, and it came in stages. For the first 15 minutes or so, the prairie dog mostly stared at me from various upright poses, periodically taking a few steps away from its hole and then quickly returning. Eventually, it got comfortable enough to move a few feet from the burrow entrance and do a little foraging. Even then, it frequently stopped and stared at me.

Finally, after about 30 minutes or so, the prairie dog seemed to settle in. It kept one eye on me most of the time, but also started moving around quite a bit. Interestingly, it kept digging in the ground and then eating something it found there. I’m pretty sure it was either a root or rhizome, but I couldn’t tell which. I was hoping I’d get a photo that I could enlarge enough to identify it, but the photo below was the best I got and it wasn’t very revealing. I’d never seen a prairie dog dig for its dinner before, but it certainly makes sense at this time of year when there’s not much for available green vegetation.

Toward the end of my time, I remembered to do a little video work. A clip of the prairie dog chewing on a dandelion leaf is embedded below. As always, if the video doesn’t work, click on the title of this post to open it online. Then you’ll see the video and also be able to click on individual photos to see better versions of them.

I also managed to get a few photos of the prairie dog making funny faces. Here’s one of them. I feel a little bad posting it because it seems unfair. After all, we all make funny faces, but usually don’t get caught by someone with a camera. Don’t tell the prairie dog, ok? We’ll just hope it’s not a follower of this blog.

After a while, I noticed the sun was getting lower and I figured I’d better go check the pasqueflowers while there was still decent light for photography. I knew the stiff breeze would be whipping them around a little, even as short as they are, so I needed a little extra light for fast shutter speeds. When I got to my favorite patch, most of the pasqueflowers had finished blooming for the season but a few were still going – though they appeared to be closing up for the night.

As seems to happen nearly every time I visit this flower patch, there were some oil beetles around. If you don’t know the story of oil beetles and their relationship (?) to bees, please stop right now and read this post.

Anyway, this is the only place on earth I’ve ever run into oil beetles, and I’ve never seen them doing anything other than eating pasqueflowers. As far as I can tell (from some quick Google searching), oil beetles have a pretty broad diet, but I’ve never seen evidence of that. In my world, oil beetles appear when pasqueflower blooms and then disappear for a year. My world is pretty limited, apparently.

The strong breeze added a few degrees of difficulty to my flower and beetle photography. I tried to wait patiently for brief dips in wind velocity and then pushed the shutter button lots of times, hoping at least a few images would turn out sharply focused. I guess it worked.

The next morning, we met early to get everything ready for the burn. We planned to burn about a square mile (645 acres, to be precise) of Sandhills prairie in our east bison pasture. The bison pasture is 10,000 acres in size and we were hoping the green vegetation coming in after this burn would be where the 500 or so bison (including this year’s calves) would focus most of their grazing this year – in addition to some other recently-burned patches. If they do that, they’ll leave the rest of the pasture mostly ungrazed and create a good mix of habitat conditions for plants and animals across the whole site.

I had a pretty easy job for most of the burn. I very slowly drove a truck carrying a couple hundred gallons of water along the mowed firebreak while someone else walked next to the truck and sprayed water on the ground to create a ‘wet line’ to help hold the fire. Periodically, I got to crawl out of the truck and take some photos while we waited for the ignition crew to catch up.

Because we were in the bison pasture and the bison are there year-round, we got to watch some of them react to the fire. There wasn’t much to see. For the most part, they seemed wholly unbothered by what we were doing. Most of them sidled out of the way as we came near – in that kind of “I’m too cool to care” way.

This was not a very intense fire, especially compared to many other prairie burns. The grass fueling the fire was relatively sparse, both because it’s the Sandhills and because patchy bison grazing made it that way. We probably ended up burning about 80% of the whole patch, but that was only because of some extra work at the end to light off areas that didn’t burn the first time. There were lots of lesser earless lizards, tiger beetles, grasshoppers, and other little creatures that probably sheltered in those unburned refuges – as well as in the thousands of unburned acres outside the burn unit.

It’ll be fun to watch the bison graze the new burned area this season. Some of them were already back inside the burned area as we left, checking it out. As soon as the vegetation starts to green up, they’ll be eagerly nipping it off, just as they’ve been doing for thousands of years.

The short, sparse habitat created by that grazing will be fantastic for animals like lesser earless lizards, kangaroo rats, band-winged grasshoppers, and horned larks, among many others. A lot of plant species will take advantage of reduced competition from grasses and other perennial plants being grazed by the bison. Many of those opportunistic plants will be wildflowers that will bring a bounty of nectar, pollen, and/or seeds and draw even more wildlife in to feed on them.

Maybe some oil beetles will fly in to feed on some of that plant diversity, too. If so, I probably won’t see them.