Yesterday, I found myself at one of the two prairies where we conducted a summer prescribed fire back on July 20 of this year. The burn was nearly four weeks ago, and it was fun to look at the regrowth. Cattle have had access to the 45 acre burned patch (and the surrounding 450 acres), but grazing pressure has been surprisingly light, mostly because they are also focusing their grazing on a nearby burn conducted back in early May. I’ll admit I’m surprised they haven’t switched more to the recent burn. That’s one of the joys of working with grazers – they aren’t always completely predictable.

I didn’t have a lot of time to explore, but I managed to get a few photos. Some of you expressed an interest in seeing updates after my first post about these fires, so this will be a quick first update. We’re still in a drought here, and the week after the summer fires, we had a long week of temperatures close to 100 degrees F. Things got pretty crispy out in the grassland that week. Shortly after, though, we got some nice rains and those have helped perk up our prairies – both burned and unburned.

The site shown here is a remnant (unplowed) prairie, but it had lost a lot of its plant diversity by the time The Nature Conservancy acquired it in the early 2000s. In particular, it was missing a lot of summer wildflowers. Sedges, rushes, and some early-season wildflowers (including violets for regal fritillary butterflies) were in pretty good shape. Through time, we’ve added back some of the missing summer flower species by broadcasting seeds after prescribed burns within a patch-burn grazing context. Most of the flowers seen in the above photo are a result of that overseeding.

Most of the plants coming back after the fire are perennials and are growing from buds at their bases, or on rhizomes. We haven’t seen a lot of germination of seeds in the seed bank. That’s not unexpected, especially in a dry year, though I anticipate seeing at least some germination or ‘weedy’ broad-leaved plants later this fall and next spring.

Not all the re-growing plants are natives. Smooth brome and Kentucky bluegrass are also coming on, and will benefit from the fire’s suppression of big bluestem, switchgrass, and other warm-season grasses. That’s where grazing should come in handy. Cattle are normally drawn strongly to that fresh growth and, if so, will keep those invasive grasses from gaining a competitive edge.

Next year, cattle will probably focus significant grazing on this summer burn. They’ll have access to it all season, at least based on current plans. That’ll provide habitat for animals that require short habitat and/or bare ground. It will also favor opportunistic plants that are good at filling in space when normally-dominant plants are being suppressed. Following next year, those dominant plants (perennial grasses and wildflowers) will regain their status as grazers shift their attention elsewhere.

In other news, there were a lot of monarchs around this week, including at the prairie featured here. I saw at least a dozen of them while I was driving in and out of the site. I stopped and watched one lay eggs on some whorled milkweed. I even got out and checked a plant to make sure that’s what she’d been doing. Sure enough – there was an egg right where I saw her put it. Later in the day, I stopped at our family prairie on the way home and found a little caterpillar on a common milkweed plant. Those eggs and that caterpillar should end up in Mexico this fall if all goes well for them.

Well, the eggs and caterpillars won’t go to Mexico. It’ll be the adult butterflies they turn into. You know what I meant.

Anyway, that’s my quick update on one of our summer burns. The other one is also looking good but I haven’t stopped to photograph it yet. That burn is in a restored prairie (former crop field). After that week of hot temperatures, all the prairie outside the burn turned brown – the loss of organic matter during farming reduces water holding capacity in the soil. However, the burned area stayed vibrant and green. The rest of the prairie looks a little better after our recent rains, but the burned area is still starkly more verdant than its surroundings. Is that ecologically significant? I don’t know, but it’s pretty.

Another weekend, another long trail race for Kim.

This time, we were back at Wilson Lake in central Kansas for a 50K race. Kim was mainly using it as a training run for a 100K race later this fall, but still managed to finish 3rd among women. It didn’t look like a particularly enjoyable training run to me (hot and humid), but that’s probably why I take photos for fun and she runs crazy long distances. I think we were both satisfied with the results of the day as we drove home, though she seemed a little more fatigued for whatever reason.

The race started after sunrise, so by the time Kim and the other runners headed off into the humidity and hills, the light was already a little too bright for good photos. I hung out and watched World Cup soccer on my phone for a while. A few hours later, some thin clouds appeared and provided nice diffused light for close-up photos. It seemed silly not to take advantage of that.

The breeze was just a little stronger than I wanted for wildflower photography and not quite strong enough to make the runners happy. The runners had to live with it, but I had a mitigation strategy. I headed for some rock outcroppings, figuring that at least the rocks (and anything sitting on them) wouldn’t be waving around in the wind.

While walking toward the rocks, I came across flowers and insects that were a little tricky, but not impossible to photograph in a breeze. It was fun being enough south of my usual prairies to see some different species – as well as a lot of familiar ones in a different setting. The trick, of course, is to know which species are the same as the ones I know and which are just similar enough to fool me.

I’ve been to Wilson Lake often enough in recent years that I’m starting to get familiar with the species at the site. Of course, that also puts me in that realm of ‘knowing enough to be dangerous.” I won’t be offended by any corrections made to my tentative identifications in this post.

I didn’t wander too far from the aid station because I wanted to be sure I was on duty when Kim came by for ice, water, food, etc. The closest rock outcroppings were just off one of the roads around the lake. That was fine except that I could feel the eyes of drivers on me as I laid prone on the ground, trying to photograph ants, tiger beetles, and other friends. I tried to move enough to show passersby I wasn’t dead, just eccentric.

My biggest success of the day was that I finally found and photographed the collared lizards Kim sees regularly but I’d not yet found during our Wilson Lake trips. I’m not sure why this was the day, but once I saw the first one, I saw quite a few. Most of the time, of course, I’d spot them because they were scurrying away and diving under rocks. Fortunately, Kim was running for a long time and I had plenty of time to wait them out. There were several instances when I just set up my camera near where I’d seen a lizard dive into cover. Then I sat patiently until it emerged back into the light.

I took a lot of lizard photos. Who knows when I’ll see another collared lizard, after all? They’re sure not around my neighborhood at home.

As I walked through the prairie, grasshoppers flew like popping popcorn away from my feet and cicadas buzzed loudly from perches and while escaping my approach. As always, most didn’t stick around to be photographed, but because my heart is true and I have a friendly face, a few allowed me a few moments with them. Then they promptly fled for their lives.

By the time Kim finished running, I was hot, sweaty, and ready to go home. So was Kim, I guess. The cicadas, grasshoppers and sphinx moths seemed unfazed. We left them to carry on without us.