If you’ve followed this blog for very long, you’ve seen lots of photos and stories from the Niobrara Valley Preserve. It’s a spectacular place, located on the northern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills – the largest contiguous prairie landscape in North America. Would you like to work there? Of course you would! 

Well…

The Nature Conservancy is hiring a stewardship manager at the Niobrara Valley Preserve (NVP) in north-central Nebraska (near the towns of Johnstown, Ainsworth, and Valentine).  This position will supervise two other full-time land stewardship positions and oversee all land management operations across the site’s 56,000 acres.  We are looking for an experienced person who can bring a creative approach to this role and build/manage a cohesive and energetic stewardship team.

This role encompasses a wide range of land stewardship, including grazing by leased cattle and two resident bison herds, invasive species management, prescribed fire, and more.  The majority of the Preserve is Sandhills prairie, but it also includes tall and mixed-grass prairie, bur oak and ponderosa pine savannas, deciduous woodland, streams and wetlands, and more.  Our land management has two primary goals: 1) to sustain biological diversity and ecological resilience; and 2) to develop and test innovative stewardship approaches that can inspire land management elsewhere.

We envision that the NVP stewardship manager will be working in the field about 75% of the time.  In addition, they will be responsible for employee supervision, management planning, grazing and hunting leases, bison herd management, and infrastructure related to land stewardship (fence, livestock water facilities, equipment, and buildings. 

If you’re interested, visit nature.org/careers, click on ‘join our team’, and search for job #54636 to see the full job announcement. Applications are due February 16.

IN ADDITION, there are a few days left to apply for a Prescribed Fire Specialist position (job #54585) that will also be based at the Niobrara Valley Preserve. This position will help train and provide technical assistance to private landowners and others in the Nebraska Sandhills. They’ll also help conduct burns on private land in the Sandhills, as well as at the Niobrara Valley Preserve. Applications for this job are due Feb 2.

Here are some more photos of the Niobrara Valley Preserve…

So far, our local January has been very cold and full of snow, frost, and ice. Schools have been canceled and travel has been difficult, but prairie photography (when I’ve been able to get out) has been pretty great! 

This first set of photos was taken on New Year’s Day at the Platte River Prairies. I visited my favorite wetland restoration (one I spent many years working on) and – as always – it didn’t disappoint. Between frosty and plants, fog, and ice bubbles, there was more than enough to keep me happy on the first morning of 2024.

A week later, I returned to the same wetland and played around with frost and ice again, this time with a sunrise thrown in for color. I’m really enjoying my new Canon 15-30mm RF lens that allows me to focus right up to the glass on the front of the lens. The first two photos below are examples of that – the front of the lens was less than inch from the frost in the foreground, providing an amazing perspective.

Of course, a good macro lens will always be my mainstay, and frost photography is a lot of fun with that lens. In this case, I used a Canon 180mm macro lens. Some of these were tricky because the ice was thin enough that I was lying on the bank and resting my elbows and the camera (very lightly) on the ice to get the photos. If I’d have put any more weight on the ice, it would have cracked and I’d probably have been shopping for a new camera and lens. What can I say? The adrenaline keeps me warm.

We’ve had two big snowfall events this month, each accompanied by lots of wind that made roads difficult to travel. When road conditions prevented me from traveling far, I just went across town to Lincoln Creek Prairie. After road crews had time to work on the highways, I made it up to Gjerloff Prairie to stomp around in the hills. Both were good in their own way and I’ve visited each site multiple times in the last couple weeks. 

One of the best parts of prairie hiking in the snow is the chance to see what animals have been up to. This month, I’ve seen a ton of dark-eyed juncos feeding on prairie plants. They’ve focused heavily on the seeds of Indiangrass and sunflowers. I haven’t yet photographed the birds, but I’ve taken lots of photos of their tracks and of the remnants of their feeding activity.

Typically, ragweeds get a lot of attention from birds too, but I haven’t seen as much of that at those two sites so far. I’m writing this from the Niobrara Valley Preserve, though, and I saw a big patch of ragweed here that was covered in songbird tracks.

Wild rose hips (Rosa arkansana) are great fodder for winter photography because they provide a splash of scarlet at a time of year when color is generally muted. Because I pay attention to them, I often see evidence of them being eaten by animals. They’re apparently a high quality source of food and I frequently see pheasant and grouse tracks around them. 

This week, though, I saw clipped rose hips lying on the snow at Lincoln Creek Prairie and the tracks nearby were from rabbits, not birds. When I got home, I looked online and found lots of references of wild rose hips as food sources for rabbits – both wild and domestic. It makes sense, I just hadn’t seen it before.

It’s nice that temperatures are moderating a little this week. Photography is possible in sub zero temperatures (Fahrenheit) but there are a lot of issues to deal with. I have to keep a couple extra camera batteries in my pocket because cold batteries don’t last long. If I breathe on my camera, it fogs up the screen and view finder and the fog turns to frost, which is hard to remove. When I get home and bring my camera in the house, I have to leave it in the bag until it warms up to prevent condensation from forming on it. 

Plus, of course, my fingers get cold…

Totally worth it, though.