Well, if you’re reading this, you’ve made it to 2024. Great work, everyone. This is the year all our efforts to convince people that prairies are amazing will finally pay off.

Right?

Right.

Also, a new year is as good an excuse as any to test your ecological knowledge with a serious, no-frills nature quiz. Unfortunately, you’re reading The Prairie Ecologist blog and that’s not the kind of quizzes we have here. Instead, you get this weirdness… 

Good luck, and enjoy!

What is happening in this photo?

A. An insect larva is emerging from a seed pod after consuming all the seeds from within it.

B. A unicorn lost its horn and then an alien found it and decided to hide in it.

C. Um…?

D. Nah, it’s an aquatic caddisfly larva living in a case it made out of silk, grains of sand, and other materials. Among other things, the cases provide protection from the larva against threats such as dragonfly larvae.

E. Also, unicorns don’t lose their horns. If they did, they’d have to call them antlers.

F. And then we’d have to call unicorns uniantlers. Or unicantlers? Either way, it wouldn’t work.

G. Caddisflies are pretty amazing, though, huh?

What is happening between this crab spider and this cicada?

A. The cicada slipped and fell and the crab spider boldly and compassionately, at great personal risk, reached out and caught it, saving it from a perilous plunge toward the ground.

B. With its venomous fangs?

C. Well, yes.

D. So, another interpretation might be that the crab spider ambushed the cicada and paralyzed it with a venomous bite when it got within range? 

E. I’ve instructed my client not to answer any more questions.

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Why is this cancer root plant (Orobanche fasciculata) brown but actively flowering? 

A. It’s dying from the bottom up and the flower hasn’t yet gotten the news.

B. It’s undead and will thus have its own show on Netflix very soon.

C. Hang on, let’s look at this logically. It must be alive because it has a flower. And it doesn’t look dry, it just looks brown.

D. Good point. It must be one of those weird parasitic plants that isn’t green because it doesn’t have chlorophyll and just pulls nutrients from the nearby plants it taps into.

E. Nature is weird.

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Why does this sharp-tailed grouse look so angry?

A. One of his buddies told him his tail wasn’t very sharp and all his other ‘friends’ started calling him a blunt-tailed grouse.

B. You know what ‘grousing‘ means, right? It’s what they do.

B. He isn’t angry – it’s just that you’re seeing him from the front. From the side, he looks charmingly curious.

D. Hey, there are two B’s.

E. No there aren’t.

F. Two B’s or not two B’s? That is the question.

G. No, the real question is “Why does anyone read this blog?”

H. I thought the question was about a grouse that looked angry. Also, there’s no C.

I. No C?? Oh no – what will happen to all the whales?

J. Good grief.

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What are the little red things on this black bug?

A. Jelly beans

B. Parasitoid eggs

C. Little bits of plastic that are stuck to the bug by static electricity.

D. Mites

E. Mites? Like little parasites that are attached and drinking blood?

F. Yes

G. Creepy.

H. Yes, but also cool – as long as you’re not the one with big red mites sticking to your neck.

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What does this big-eyed toad bug eat?

A. Um, what bug are you talking about?

B. I don’t see any bugs in that picture.

C. Wait, is it hiding in the bottom right corner?

D. Oh, nope, that’s just a shadow.

E. Also, come on… ‘big-eyed toad bug’ is obviously a made-up name.

F. Little insects. The big-eyed toad bug eats little insects that it catches and holds with front legs that resemble those of a praying mantis. The toad bug has a sharp ‘beak’ that it uses to poke a hole in its prey, inject a digestive enzyme, and then suck out the pre-digested insides of its prey. 

G. Dang. Nature is weird!

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Well, that was a dumb quiz, huh? 

A. Yes

B. No

C. Happy New Year

I know I just posted some “photos of the week” a few days ago, but I spent a magical few hours on Thursday morning at Prairie Plains Resource Institute’s Gjerloff Prairie and couldn’t resist sharing some of the images from that trip. Though we’d just gotten a nice snowfall, I hadn’t planned to leave the house that morning because the forecast had called for overcast skies. I was awake well before sunrise, though, reading a book, when I noticed that the sky outside my window seemed a little brighter than seemed right for overcast skies. 

I peered out into a foggy morning and tried to decide whether there were clouds above the fog or not. Since I couldn’t tell, I decided it was better to head out and take a chance on the photo light being good. After all, the worst case scenario would be that I’d walk around in a snowy prairie for a while!

(Remember to click on the title of this post if you’re reading it in an email. That’ll open it online and allow you to click on images to see a bigger, more clear version of them.)

The light seemed to change by the minute all morning, though not linearly. It would brighten up for a little while, bringing warmer light, and then another bank of heavy fog would obscure the sun and turn everything blue again. The sun didn’t fully emerge through the fog until almost two hours after I arrived but I could always see the brighter patch of sky where it was hiding.

In some ways, photography was easy because I was surrounded by incredible beauty. At the same time, it was really challenging to capture the ethereal feel of my surroundings. Much of the time, tried to get low to the ground and find compositions that showed the landscape fading into the fog behind the frost-covered plants. I’d chosen Gjerloff over other local prairies because I knew its steep loess hill topography would be the right place for that kind of photo. 

When I wasn’t flat on my belly (enjoying the new waterproof snow pants and parka I bought last winter), I tried to get as close as possible to taller grasses and wildflowers and use them to frame the scene behind them. When I switched to a new camera system (Canon mirrorless) late in the fall, one of the lenses I was excited about was a 15-30mm lens that can focus right up to the glass lens. I got some good use of that function Thursday morning.

The prairie was nearly silent, except for the crunching of snow under my feet and the faint rustling of grass stems nudged by the wind. During periods of brighter skies, I switched my wide-angle lens for my macro lens and photographed frosty seed heads and stems. Then, I’d switch back again, attempting to shield the camera’s sensor from the light breeze and ice crystals falling from my coat as I did so. 

I really didn’t cover much of the prairie because as the light continually changed I kept circling back to spots I’d been before. Each time I passed by the same place, the changing light brought new opportunities and perspectives. I photographed some of the same individual plants a couple times – in different lighting conditions – and stood in my own foot prints on multiple occasions, framing up a photo while facing in a different direction than I had twenty or thirty minutes earlier.

Eventually, the fog dissipated completely, leaving me in full sunshine, intense enough that the bright snow and dark shadows made it nearly impossible to make good photos. It had been an amazing couple hours, but I was also glad for an excuse to stop tramping up and down those steep hills while wearing thick layers of clothing. Plus, I knew I had a long (but very pleasant) afternoon of sorting and working up images ahead of me and I was happy to get home to start on that task.

I still haven’t finished the book I was reading before deciding to head out to Gjerloff Thursday morning, but it’s not going anywhere. Neither is Gjerloff Prairie, of course, but the the fog, frost, and snow of Thursday morning was only there a few hours. I was incredibly grateful to have had the free day to take advantage of that opportunity. 

If I’d driven the twenty minutes up to the prairie only to find dark overcast skies, I still would have enjoyed a nice hike. Afterward, I would have returned home to my cozy blankets and book and been perfectly content. Instead, I was rewarded with the best possible combination of winter photography conditions and an absolutely unforgettable morning!