eliza perry | The Prairie Ecologist

Guest Post by Eliza Perry, one of our 2013-14 Hubbard Fellows (all photos are by Eliza Perry).

The past month has been wild. Instead of writing up a succinct summary, I decided to share a few of my favorite photos I’ve managed to capture in the field (our work is rarely camera-friendly).

From afar, prairie is a striking landscape with dramatic skies and a vast, quaking floor; up close, however, is a far more interesting view. I had never seen a bird’s nest intentionally woven into grass before working in prairie. This particular nest held five dickcissel eggs. Usually these eggs are accompanied by one or two brown-speckled eggs from a crafty cow bird, who transfer their parental burden onto an unknowing other.

Invasive species control will always bring up concerns about inadvertent damage. I don’t know the name of this beautiful flower, but I noticed it while spot spraying sericea lespedeza at our property in Rulo. We recently purchased a new backpack sprayer that provides dense, targeted coverage over a plant, but even so, my worry is always in how many neighboring plants unintentionally receive a harmful or fatal dose of herbicide. We could see patches of dead vegetation from last year’s sericea treatment.

During my first few days of spot spraying this season, soaking invasives seemed like a bulletproof plan in light of the natural tendency toward “more is better.” Since then, I’ve learned that this method is not only harmful to the surrounding plant community, but more importantly, it is often counter-productive because it can “burn” the plant past its ability to absorb the chemical. The result is a damaged plant with an intact root system and ability to regrow and flower. This is an ongoing challenge, but I have learned to mitigate some of my impact through application technique. For example, one key is maintaining high pressure in the backpack sprayer pump to avoid drippage between sprays.

This photo was taken several weeks ago when most of our sensitive briar (Mimosa quadrivalvus) was at an early stage in blooming. The young flowers caught my attention immediately because to me they look like fireworks. I invent names for most of the forbs I don’t recognize until I can get a handle on their proper common names, and I called these “firework flowers” until relatively recently when I finally accepted them as sensitive briar.

This photo does not adequately capture the plant or structural diversity present in this area. I took it very early on before I understood the significance of either, but as I reviewed the photos I had snapped in the past two months, this one stood out in a different way than it was originally intended to: as an almost comical juxtaposition of cropland and prairie. Of course, agricultural monocultures serve their purpose, but the measures of success and functionality for the two “ecosystems” are so contrary that it makes for an interesting picture to see the two side-by-side. For one, the presence of a “weed” is considered to be the enemy of crop productivity, while prairies are essentially a collection of tenacious (native) weeds. Moreover, monocultures entail the least amount of variety in land management practices by design, while prairies thrive on highly variable land management and substantial disturbance.

Prairie management involves a lot of equipment and we need to know how to maintain it. Our trailers are particularly important because they allow us to transport heavier equipment like ATVs and skidloaders to properties further away. A few weeks ago, one of our trailers had a small part knocked off. This photo shows Nelson, our land manager, teaching me how to weld it back on. Anne and I are in the process of learning to use all of the exciting hand and power tools in our shop so that we can more effectively help with maintenance and construction projects. Someday I hope we will complete our own.

Leave it to Anne to find a climbing wall in the middle of a prairie!

This photo does not do justice to the number of invasive thistles packed into that truck bed. We found a sizeable forest of musk thistles seeding out at the tail end of our thistle season and decided to remove them from the scene entirely because pulling off all of the flowers would have taken a full day. A dumpster brimming with these villains was a satisfying sight after weeks of focusing most of our efforts on eradicating them.

I have moments every single day in this job when I have to stop what I’m doing to relish the fact that scenes like this are my equivalent to an office. I captured one of these moments one afternoon while scouting our Kelly Tract for Canada thistles. Controlling invasives is a daunting task with some species, and I have found myself feeling defeated to the point of forgetting its importance to our conservation objectives, which has been a good lesson for me. As Chris recently described in a blog post, our goal is to strengthen the overall ecological resilience of our properties, which cannot occur without a resilient plant community.

We rescued this little lady from the middle of a highway on our way to Niobrara Valley Preserve. There was a stretch of ten or so miles in which we saw a high number of box turtles crossing the road, and virtually none before or after. While she certainly looked on at us indifferently, I thought I could detect a hint of sass in her expression and did my best to capture it here.

Once Anne had learned how to safely operate this tractor, she proceeded to mow our most recent restoration site for several hours. The key to our success in becoming comfortable using all these new vehicles and tools is, unsurprisingly, practice. Luckily there is no shortage of pastures that need to be mowed, trees that need to be felled, or fences that need to be relocated. Mowing is one of several land management strategies for knocking back invasives by thwarting their growth to prevent or buy time before they seed out. Mowing “burn breaks” is also an essential component of safe prescribed fire burns.

Back in February, I wrote about our new Hubbard Fellowship program. Anne Stine and Eliza Perry joined us in early June as our first two Fellows, and have been enthusiastically soaking in the prairie life ever since. Anne comes from northern Virginia, but just graduated with a Master’s of Science degree from Duke University. Eliza is from Maine and completed a Bachelor’s degree from Bates College.

We are in the process of setting up a blog for the Hubbard Fellowship, through which Eliza and Anne will be able to share their experiences over the next year – and those experiences are already coming fast and furious. During their first three weeks, they have controlled invasive thistles with spades and herbicide, killed trees with PVC herbicide wands ( “kill sticks”) and chainsaws, harvested seeds, learned to drive an ATV and tractor, attended conference with staff of The Nature Conservancy from twenty-three states, got a guided tour of lands managed by the Prairie Plains Resource Institute, wrangled a cow wrapped in fencing wire, herded cattle, repaired and erected electric fences, observed a prescribed burn, and have been learning the basics of grassland ecology and management. Since the Fellowship blog isn’t up and running yet, I asked Anne and Eliza to write down some brief thoughts about their experiences so far and am sharing them here:

Anne Stine (left) and Eliza Perry (right), dressed up for a prescribed fire – one of many new experiences during their first three weeks on the job.

Eliza:

The sky in Nebraska is without a doubt “bigger” than it is in Maine, where I hail from. As much as I love watching the sun rise over the ocean, I have experienced few sunsets that rival those here in the prairie, which spread melting color 360 degrees around the sky. Every day here has been another new and blissfully challenging adventure. I have entered a whole new landscape, ecosystem, and culture (and time zone!). As a student of Environmental Studies with a focus on environmental ethics and philosophy, I am always curious about the differing interests of those living in both the human and non-human communities I get to work with in the coming months. The “Midwestern hospitality” mindset that I heard about before my arrival certainly extends into Nebraska, even if there is controversy over whether it is a Midwestern state. Folks here really know how to make a newcomer feel welcome and at home, which is especially appreciated on my end.

I had always assumed there to be a well-established, precise order to the world of professional conservation, and while the staff here have extensive experience with grasslands, it is clear that their jobs present just as much of a learning experience as mine. At a Nature Conservancy conference not long after we arrived, I was privileged to listen in on a fascinating conversation between Chris and two other Great Plains ecologists about grazing strategies. Grazing is a staple management tool for grassland conservation. All three are veteran scientists, and they exchanged an amazing amount of insight during a back and forth discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of permitting cattle to graze in one area for an extended period of time versus quickly moving them along a specified route. I would have thought a resolution had long been set in stone, but the more I learn, the more I understand how complex and dynamic this ecosystem is, which is an awareness I was lectured on but rarely felt or experienced during my undergraduate coursework. At this point, I am not yet grazing or grassland savvy enough to offer my perspective on the matter, but the conversation itself demonstrated some general trends within the event, namely that TNC folks love their jobs and are eager to engage with topics of their own and others’ expertise. I have not encountered such enthusiasm anywhere that I have worked in the past and it was extremely energizing to see.

Yet as exciting as everything is and continues to be, inexperience is a strange—though exhilarating—feeling, and I am looking forward to the day when I can glance down and identify more than ten species at my feet, or fix an ATV or a fence without calling for help every step of the way (we work with some divinely patient people). That day is close, that much I know!

The Nature Conservancy’s wide open prairies along the Platte River are very different from the landscapes where Eliza and Anne grew up. They seem to be adapting just fine…

Anne:

I drove cross country three times before I stopped in the prairie. I zipped along the Gulf Coast to the Four Corners and California, only noting the silted up Americana along Rt. 287 from Dallas to Amarillo and the steppes and mesas of Northern New Mexico in the southern plains. Other than that, I was target oriented. Eyes glazed, listening to podcasts and classic country on the radio from DC to Arizona.

When I first arrived in Nebraska to interview for the Hubbard Fellowship it was April, and the great Sandhill Crane migration was underway. I saw long-legged, long-necked grey birds picking through the brown cornfields, I could hear them croaking to each other in flight overhead, and I could see what I thought was their grey feathers in coyote scat along mown trails in the brown prairie. I didn’t know what to make of this early spring grassland, but I was excited about the Fellowship and I decided to gamble on the unknown.

Returning to the prairie in June meant landing in a wide green meadow of wildflowers and sloughs. During my run along the Platte on my first morning, I saw two deer, three rabbits and a turkey. Nebraska seemed like a rich place for me to live out my Huck Finn adventures—I’d go fishing in the creek (done), hunting in the fall (enrolled in Hunter’s Education), and canoeing in the Platte (impossible, but more on that later). I’d learn every grass and flower, fix fences and help with restoration. The early summer greenness urged me to fully immerse myself in prairie life.

I am eager to learn more about this new world in which I am privileged to reside for a full turn of the seasons. This is a subtle landscape that one must inhabit to know, about which Willa Cather famously wrote:

“There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

The Prairie Ecologist

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

Tag Archives: eliza perry

Hubbard Fellowship Blog – Photos by Eliza

Fun and Fellowship in the Platte Prairies