Tag Archives: animals

Prairie Blizzard Survival

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Last week’s blizzard dumped about a foot of snow here in town, and about 18 inches out at our Platte River Prairies.  Combined with wind gusts of 40-50 miles per hour, it was quite a weather event.  Our school was closed for three days while everyone dug themselves out and road crews cleared off streets and country roads.

Knee-deep snow and even deeper drifts buried these sunflowers and many other tall prairie plants. The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

Knee-deep snow and even deeper drifts buried these sunflowers and many other tall prairie plants. The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

Blizzards are a part of life out on the prairie.  School closings and sore shoveling muscles are pretty minor inconveniences compared to what grassland creatures without central heat and insulated windows have to deal with.  On the other hand, prairie species have been doing this for thousands of years, so they’ve got it pretty well figured out.  Prairie plants are mostly dormant this time of year, so snow and wind don’t really affect them at all.  Many prairie animals are pretty dormant as well – lots of them spend the winter either below ground (or water) or nestled into deep thatch.  Quite a few mammals, amphibians, insects, and others can slow their metabolisms enough that they can survive the winter without having to search for food or shelter once they’re settled in.

Other animals, however, stay much more active during the winter months, and a blizzard can cause them more problems than it does their more dormant peers.  It’s really hard to gauge how this blizzard might have affected those animals, but during a couple short outings, I’ve tried to see what I can.  It’s not hard to find tracks of deer, coyotes, and various kinds of birds, but that doesn’t say much about what percentage of those animals did or didn’t make it through the storm.  My guess is that most of them did just fine, and the warmer temperatures this week are melting the snow pretty quickly, reducing stress on animals that have a hard time moving through or finding food in deep snow.

Songbird tracks around an indiangrass seed head at Lincoln Creek Prairie in Aurora, Nebraska.

Songbird tracks around an indiangrass seed head at Lincoln Creek Prairie in Aurora, Nebraska.

I walked through some of our Platte River Prairies on Saturday morning, and can empathize with the deer and coyotes whose tracks I saw around me.  I probably only walked a half mile, but even that distance was exhausting.  Warm temperatures on Friday had begun to melt the snow and then that soft top froze overnight.  Every step I took on Saturday morning sounded like, “Crinch, Foomp!” as my boot would very briefly rest on the frozen crust and then pop through as I put more weight on it.  Repeating that process in knee-deep snow for a half a mile was more than enough for me.  It looked like most of the deer I saw were having the same issues.

Based on their track patterns, I bet it would have been funny to watch the coyotes walk through the snow.  I would see a few sets of tracks up on top of the snow, followed by deeper tracks where they’d fallen through the thin crust.  I imagined a poor coyote walking as gingerly as possible on the crust, only to fall to its chest on the next step and have to flounder back up again.  And for what?  There weren’t many tracks of prey species, apart from birds, which probably just laughed at the coyotes as they flew away from them.

Ring-necked pheasant tracks.

Ring-necked pheasant tracks in our Platte River Prairies.

Tracks from a covey of quail (Northern bobwhite) running around on the snow in our Platte River Prairies.

Tracks from a covey of quail (Northern bobwhite) running around on the snow in our Platte River Prairies.

Speaking of birds, I saw some songbird-sized tracks where tree sparrows (I assume) and others were feeding on seeds from prairie plants.  I also saw numerous tracks of pheasants and northern bobwhites (quail).  The quail seemed to have no trouble staying up on the snow’s crust, but the pheasants’ feet were punching through more often, so they probably had much less fun running around.  Regardless, both species must have found abundant shelter on our properties – probably hunkering down within or behind thick clumps of vegetation to escape the driving snow and wind.  Canada geese were noisily flying over the river Saturday morning, so they apparently weathered the storm.  There were a few sandhill cranes in the river valley (early migrants) before the blizzard, but I don’t know if they stuck around or headed back south to escape the weather.

This Eurasian collared-dove

This Eurasian collared-dove died shortly after the blizzard.  Based on the tracks leading to its final resting place, it wasn’t a peaceful passing.

Collard-doves, of course, are not native prairie species, but it's hard to say whether that had anything to do with this one's death. I've seen quite a few others knocking around town over the last few days, so it looks like most of them survived.

Collared-doves, of course, are not native prairie species, but it’s hard to say whether that had anything to do with this one’s death. I’ve seen quite a few others knocking around town over the last few days, so it looks like most of them survived.

It’s rare to find evidence of the animals that didn’t make it through storms like this.  Animals that die in a blizzard either get buried by snow or eaten by others – or both.  I did find one collared-dove here in town that died soon after the storm, but that was the only obvious death.  Because life on the prairie has always been difficult, prairie species have developed strategies to survive just about any event, including droughts, floods, fires, and blizzards (including blizzards much worse than ours last week).  We humans living in prairie country might think we’re pretty tough, but we have it pretty cushy compared to those creatures who actually live in the prairie itself.

Speaking of which, it looks kind of cold and windy out today.  I think maybe I’ll just stay indoors and cook myself a warm meal for lunch…

Some Things I’ve Learned Since I Wrote My Book

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It took me a long time to decide to write a book on prairie management.  One of my worries was that I was learning a tremendous amount each year, and a book captures a moment in time.  One of the reasons I like writing this blog is that it allows me to share lessons as I learn them, modify my ideas over time, and – best of all – get instant feedback from readers.  I learn a lot from watching prairies, but I learn even more from discussions with other people who watch prairies.

Attending workshops such as the annual get-together of the Patch-Burn Grazing Working Group has helped me continue to learn at a fast rate. (2013 Workshop in South Dakota)

Attending workshops such as the annual get-together of the Patch-Burn Grazing Working Group has helped me continue to learn at a fast rate. (2013 Workshop in South Dakota)

My prairie book came out in 2010, but I actually did most of the writing in 2008 – five years ago.  By the time the final manuscript passed through reviews and layout and made it to the publishing stage, there were already a few sections I would have liked to modify.  Now that five years have passed, there are even more changes I wish I could make.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very proud of the book, and satisfied with its contents.  But reading through it recently, I picked out some portions that I would handle differently if I was writing the book today.  Here are a few of those:

Page 12 – “Mycorrhizal fungi help plants fix nitrogen”.  Ok, I really flubbed this one.  As Inger Lamb kindly pointed out to me after the book came out, mycorrizhae help plants pull in food and water more effectively.  Bacteria are what help plants fix nitrogen.  I should have just skipped the whole topic in the book, given my very rudimentary knowledge of what happens belowground.  In my defense, the book went through several technical reviews, and none of the reviewers caught the error either.

…On the plus side, I did manage to spell “mycorrhizal” correctly.

Insects.  The insect section in the book was originally three times longer.  I was urged (coerced?) by the publisher and reviewers to chop it back drastically because it was so much longer than similar sections on mammals, birds, etc.  I wish I’d fought harder to keep it long.  As I’ve discussed numerous times on this blog, insects and other invertebrates are WAY more diverse and important to the way prairies functions than any other group of above-ground creatures.  The existing insect section in the book is a good primer on some of the insect communities of prairies and their impacts, but doesn’t go nearly far enough.  Maybe I’ll write a whole book on prairie invertebrates someday.  (But probably not – can you imagine how quickly THAT book would become out of date?  We still have a massive amount to learn about invertebrates.)

I didn't know much of anything about wasps a year ago, but I'm learning more now. This one is in the genus Sphex and feeds its larvae on grasshoppers. (Thanks to Mike Arduser for that information)

I didn’t know much of anything about wasps a year ago, but I’m learning more now. This one is in the genus Prionyx and feeds its larvae on grasshoppers. (Thanks to Mike Arduser for that information)

Page 79 – “Managing prairies really means managing the competition between plants.”  This is a nice statement, but it’s too narrow.  If I was writing that now I would replace “plants” with “species”.  In general, my biggest beef with my 2008 self is that I was too focused on plants, and not enough on habitat for other species.

In the prairies I know best, maintaining plant diversity appears to be dependent upon periodically suppressing dominant grasses and giving other plants a chance to thrive.  Our management strategies create a dynamic disturbance regime that helps keep any single group of plants from bullying others out of the prairie.  However, not all prairies work like the ones I manage.  Especially in some eastern tallgrass prairies, which have abundant rainfall and deep organic soils, many prairie plant communities seem to be pretty stable without any management that suppresses grasses.   For example, very frequent spring fires seem to do a fine job of maintaining populations of most plant species in some of those sites – maybe because there is less intense competition between plants when soil moisture is abundant?

While frequent fire is able to sustain diverse plant communities in some prairies, I still think the shifting mosaic of disturbances I advocated for in my book is very important.  Burning an entire prairie every year creates a single habitat structure across that prairie.  That’s great for the species that like that habitat structure.  However, a prairie with patches of short, tall, and mixed-height structure is going to provide for more animal species than one with uniform structure.  I’m convinced that creating heterogeneous habitat can be done without hurting the plant community, and I think it’s a critical component of good prairie management.  So – I think my management advice in the book is still sound, I just wish I’d explained the value of it differently.

Prairies that are annually burned or hayed (like this one) may be able to maintain their plant diversity, but provide only a limited range of habitat options for wildlife and invertebrates.

Some prairies that are annually burned or hayed (like this one) may be able to maintain plant diversity, but they provide only a limited range of habitat options for wildlife and invertebrates.

Small Prairies.  I spent a little time in the book talking about the challenges of managing small prairies, but I’ve spent more time thinking about this subject during the last few years.  I wrote a post that summarized much of that thinking back in March, 2012.  Many prairies are small enough that providing the kind of habitat patchiness I just discussed might not be feasible or even appropriate.  In the eastern tallgrass prairie, many grasslands are only a few acres in size, and much of what I talked about in the management portion of the book would be difficult to apply.  I wish I could go back and put in a whole chapter that fleshes out what I discussed in my blog post.

Too bad, so sad.  Those are a few of the things I’d change if I could alter my book today.  Unfortunately, because of layout challenges and other issues, I can’t just add a few paragraphs or re-write a chapter and then just reprint the book.  Even if I could, there’d still be a couple thousand books in people’s houses and offices preserving my out-of-date ideas forever.

I may write another book someday.  I might even go back and revise the one I’ve already written, though I dread that process.  In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the opportunity to write in this blog format, which allows me to constantly adapt my ideas as I learn from prairies and from you.  Thank you for helping me with that process.