approach | The Prairie Ecologist

This is one of my favorite times of year. It’s not the cool temperatures, the fall colors, or even the fall migrations of birds and insects coming through. Instead, I like this time of year because it’s time to figure out how this year’s prairie management worked and start planning for next year. Closing that adaptive management loop (gleaning lessons from one field season and applying them to the next) is really fulfilling for me. I get to learn something and then put it right to use. The only downside is waiting another year to see how things turn out again!

Northern bobwhite on fence post. Helzer family prairie near Stockham, Nebraska.

This northern bobwhite was calling from a fence post along the edge of our prairie earlier this summer. Bobwhite are abundant in our prairie, probably because of the wide variety of habitat types available.

Earlier this week, I walked through our family prairie and tried to capture the results of 2015. I wasn’t collecting data. Instead, I took a few photos, wrote a few notes, and looked back at some photos and notes from earlier in the season. I mainly tried to measure what I saw against the basic habitat objectives we have for our prairie.

Helzer Prairie Habitat Objectives

1) HABITAT HETEROGENEITY. Provide patches of habitat that cover the spectrum from short/sparse to tall/dense vegetation, with areas of mixed-height structure in between.

2) PLANT DIVERSITY. Increase plant diversity over time by allowing all plant species a chance to bloom and reproduce every few years, and periodically suppressing grass dominance to allow wildflowers a chance to maintain or expand their “territories”.

In general, I was pretty happy with what I saw this week. There was definitely a wide range of habitat structure across the prairie. We began the season by grazing most of the prairie pretty hard to knock back the vigor of smooth brome. After that, we put the cattle into about 1/4 of the prairie for the month of June and then gradually gave them access to more of the prairie as the season progressed until they were grazing about 3/4 of the site by September.

Helzer prairie grazing. Pasture #2 se of water tank

This photo from earlier this week shows the contrast between the area in the foreground that hasn’t been grazed since May and the background where cattle have been grazing since late July.

Helzer prairie grazing. Pasture #1 nw of water tank

Some of the areas opened up to grazing late in the season weren’t grazed very hard because the grass was pretty mature by the time cattle came in. However, the cattle did graze in patches, and also knocked down the vegetation as they walked around – altering the habitat and making it easier for both wildlife and people to walk through.

The grasses in the 1/4 of the prairie we grazed in June stayed short all season, and many of the wildflowers were also cropped off. However, some of those wildflowers had a chance to grow back as we spread the cattle out across a larger area and they became more selective about what they ate. Other plants went ungrazed, or only lightly grazed, all season. As a result, the habitat structure was a mixture of short grasses and medium to tall forbs. In July, I found a family of upland sandpipers feeding in that part of the prairie – their still-flightless chick searched for insects in the short grass while staying near the protective cover of the taller forbs.

Young upland sandpiper. Helzer family prairie. Stockham, Nebraska. USA

This young upland sandpiper and its parents were enjoying a part of the prairie where cattle had been grazing most of the season, keeping grasses short but allowing some forbs to grow tall. The chick could feed in the open but remain close to protective cover.

Elsewhere in the prairie, the height and density of the vegetation varied by how much grazing pressure it received. Areas that were rested much of the year were dominated by tall warm-season grasses, while areas grazed from July through September had much shorter vegetation. Despite the fact that we’re still trying to boost plant diversity across the site (which consists of small prairie remnants surrounded by former cropland planted to grasses by my grandfather in the early 1960’s) there were good numbers of wildflowers blooming through the whole season. In the more intensively-grazed portions, only a few species such as hoary vervain (Verbena stricta), ironweed (Vernonia baldwinii), goldenrods (Solidago sp.), native thistles (Cirsium sp.), and other species panned by cattle were flowering. However, there were many other wildflowers blooming across the rest of the site, including purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea), leadplant (Amorpha canescens), stiff sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus), several milkweed species (Asclepias sp.), and many others. The most abundant wildflowers were found in the portions of the prairie the cattle had grazed intensively in 2014 – grass vigor was still suppressed in those areas, allowing both “weedy” and “non-weedy” forbs to flourish.

Regal fritillary butterfly on milkweed at Helzer prairie, south of Aurora, Nebraska.

Regal fritillaries and other butterflies are common in our prairie. I photographed this one a few years ago as it was feeding on common milkweed in part of the prairie was only lightly grazed that year.

During 2015, just about any animal species should have been able to find what they needed in our 100 acre prairie. Regal fritillaries had violets for their caterpillars and monarch butterflies had milkweed for theirs – and both found abundant nectar plants, including in the most intensively-grazed areas. The varied vegetation structure supported a wide range of grassland nesting birds, including grasshopper sparrows, upland sandpipers, western meadowlarks, northern bobwhites, dickcissels, sedge wrens, and others. Small mammal trails were abundant, as were burrows of the badgers and coyotes that hunt those mice, voles, and ground squirrels. Best of all, there were myriad bees, grasshoppers, katydids, prairie cicadas, spiders, and countless other invertebrates doing their jobs to support and nourish the plant and wildlife communities.

I haven’t yet worked out all the details of next year’s management plans, but I know a few things. The portions of the prairie that were grazed hardest this year will be rested for most or all of next season. We’ll likely bump the cattle stocking rate up a little because of this year’s abundant rainfall and strong grass growth. I’ll try to make sure cattle have early summer access to the areas where I saw lots of first-year sweet clover plants this year – grazing those areas will greatly reduce flowering and seed production. Finally, I’m thinking about letting the cattle stomp around for a week or two in one of the wet areas they’re normally excluded from because the vegetation is getting excessively thick there.

I’ll meet with my grazing lessee (the guy who owns the cattle) in late fall or early winter. Between now and then, I’ll likely change my mind several times about some of my plans and come up with some new ones. Next season we’ll make adjustments on the fly as we see what happens with rainfall, grazing behavior, invasive species, and all the other factors that influence management decisions. Then, about this time next year, I’ll be walking around the prairie, trying to interpret the results of all those ideas and adjustments.

…and I’ll be having just as much fun as I am now.

The following post was written by Evan Barrientos, of our two Hubbard Fellows for this year. Evan is a talented writer and photographer, and while you’ll get the chance to see some of his work here during the next year, I also encourage you to check out his personal blog.

Although I’ve been participating in land management since high school, I still find myself learning so much from it, although perhaps not in the way you’d expect. Yes, I’ve learned several management techniques and strategies since starting the fellowship, but the lessons I consider most valuable are the ones that teach me how to think about land stewardship. Let me explain.

If you were a Hubbard Fellow during the second week of June, you would probably find yourself riding an ATV back and forward across one of our restored prairies, searching for the fluffy purple flowers of Musk Thistle. Upon spotting a thistle, you would pluck off all the flowers, thrust your spade through the base of the thistle with a satisfying crunch, pull out the plant, and then knock the dirt off of any uprooted roots. Over the next three weeks you would repeat this process thousands of times until you had covered every inch of all 14 of our Platte River properties and their 4,000+ acres. Then you would check them all again.

We celebrated the end of thistle season by burning the flowerheads in a bonfire.

When we finally finished musk thistles we celebrated by burning the seed heads that we had collected in a bonfire.

This may sound like exhausting and repetitive work, and it can be, but that wasn’t the hard part for me. The hard part was staying positive when it felt like I wasn’t doing enough. I felt this way when I returned to a prairie for its second thistle check and found piles of thistle seed below “zombie thistles” (thistles that flowered and produced seed after I chopped them because I left too much dirt on the roots). Or when I walked through a prairie that I had already checked twice and still found thistle stalks that had already released their seed to the prairie. Most of all, deciding to spend July 2nd chopping thistles before they released more seed instead of spending time with my family forced me to think hard about my role as a land steward.

As a land steward you develop a strong connection to the land you are working on. Seeing a healthy community of native species flourish on your property is extremely gratifying, but it also pains you to see invasive species spreading. Land stewards almost always have more tasks than they can complete and it’s very easy to let this make them feel overwhelmed and stressed, but it doesn’t have to be this way. After reflecting upon the first month of my fellowship, here are three lessons I’ve learned so far about being a happy steward:

I cannot control nature. I am a steward, not a god. Expecting myself to control exactly which species grow on a property will only bring me frustration. The role of a land steward is not to dominate the forces of nature, but to regulate its extremes. Translation: my job isn’t to exterminate musk thistles, but to prevent them from outcompeting other species and lowering overall biodiversity.

A Regal Fritilary (Speyeria idalia) on Musk Thistle (Carduus nutans). Like it or not, Musk Thistles have become part of the local ecosystem. Being a steward doesn’t mean exterminating thistles, but keeping them under control.

There is no endpoint. A land steward’s work is never “done.” My job isn’t to “fix” a property; it’s to guide the property toward a range of conditions that meet our management goals. Removing thistles from the same property year after year does not mean that we are failing at our job of “restoring” the prairie. On the contrary, it means we are doing our job of actively fostering biodiversity.

Common Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is non-native, but also non-invasive. We don’t remove it because it doesn’t lower plant diversity.

Stewardship should be viewed as a positive action, not negative. There are two very different ways to look at land management. From one angle, a day spent chopping thistles could be considered a violent battle against an evil enemy; a task to evict an unworthy invader. From another angle, it could be considered a process of creating beautiful and biodiverse prairies. In my experience, viewing invasives as enemies just leads to exhaustion and bitterness. Only by viewing stewardship as a process of care and creation, in my opinion, can one generate the tremendous amount of energy needed to take on its many tasks.

Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) in the Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

Land stewardship is an essential component of conservation and it’s imperative that we do it well. Unfortunately, it also is a very demanding job that can burn you out if you’re not careful. I’m happy to say that the first month of this fellowship taught me some very important lessons about setting realistic expectations and viewing my work as a positive contribution to prairie biodiversity. It’s important to be a happy steward!

The Prairie Ecologist

Essays, photos, and discussion about prairie ecology, restoration, and management

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Hubbard Fellowship Blog – Stewardship Positivity