Ahead of the Game

Posted on by
14

Do you suppose we’ll run out of wildflowers before the summer’s over?

I’m only half kidding.  With the extraordinarily warm winter and spring we’ve had, it seems like everything is way ahead of schedule this year, and I really do wonder what will happen as the season progresses.  Most wildflowers are blooming between two and four weeks earlier than average this year.  A few individual plants are even further ahead than that, including the switchgrass plant I saw blooming last week and the patch of flowering Missouri goldenrod I saw yesterday.  Dan Carter at Kansas State University wrote last week to say that in Kansas he’s seen big bluestem blooming – and even heath aster.  Now that’s just crazy.

I photographed this prairie larkspur flower on June 18, 2009. This year, larkspur has already been blooming for a couple of weeks, and looks like it will be done before the 1st of June.

Continue reading →

Photo of the Week – May 25, 2012

Posted on by
3

This little prairie skink was a little too slow getting under cover as I walked past him in the prairie yesterday.  As a result, he suffered the indignity of being transported back to our field headquarters where he was placed in a cardboard box for a short period while I photographed him.  (I let him go again as soon as I got a couple good shots.) 

From the looks of things, it wasn’t the first time he’d been a little slow.  He was missing his tail – a sign that he’d run into trouble recently.  (Skinks can abandon their tail to avoid predation, and then grow another one.  A nifty little trick!)

A prairie skink. The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

.

From this angle you can really see the orange coloring of the jaw. Male skinks get this coloration during the breeding season. You can also see the external ear – one of the characteristics that helps distinguish lizards from snakes (legs, of course, are another pretty good clue, though not all lizards have them.)