Photo of the Week – May 17, 2012

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It’s amazing what you can find when you’re crawling around on the ground…

A wolf spider stares at me as I take its (her?) photo. The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.  The leg span of this spider was only about 1.5 inches.  Certainly not the biggest I’ve seen, but plenty big to intimidate people who are already squeamish about arachnids!

As I was on my knees counting plants inside a square meter plot frame last week, this little (big?) wolf spider came crawling out of the litter.  I managed to corral it into the handy little ziplock bag I carry for just such emergencies, and a half hour later when I returned to my truck, I let it back out to see if it would pose for photos.  Not having my wheelbarrow photo studio handy, I had to make do with just blocking its repeated escape attempts with my hand until it got fed up and decided to sit still and consider its next move.  It gave me about 30 seconds to squeeze off a few shots. 

Then it dashed off again, and I let it go.  I had plants to count, and the spider had a meal to find.

Saving Nebraska’s Oak Woodlands… by Burning Them

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Last week, I helped arrange a tour of recently-burned oak woodlands at Indian Cave State Park, an eastern Nebraska site owned and managed by Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.  Indian Cave State Park is one of very few deciduous woodlands in Nebraska that is managed with prescribed fire.  The Nature Conservancy’s Rulo Bluffs Preserve is another, but while we started using fire back in the mid 1990’s, we’ve not been able to use it as consistently as we’d like.  Seeing the results of four years of annual burning at Indian Cave State Park was a good incentive to keep trying to find ways to increase our burn frequency down at Rulo.  You can read here about a fire we conducted at Rulo last year.

Kent Pfeiffer (center) stands in a portion of woodland that has been burned four years in a row and points out some of the changes that have occurred over that time.

The tour was led by Gerry Steinauer (state botanist for Nebraska Game and Parks) and Kent Pfeiffer (Northern Prairies Land Trust), who have been leading the charge for woodland burning in eastern Nebraska.  In addition to Kent and Gerry, and several other Game and Parks biologists, the tour group included staff from the Nebraska Forest Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

We started by talking about why Game and Parks is implementing prescribed fire at Indian Cave State Park.  Some of those reasons include:

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