Tag Archives: field day

Field Day in the Platte River Prairies – July 21, 2018

Posted on by
3

If you’re in the area, please consider joining us at the Platte River Prairies on Saturday July 21 for a special event.  We’re combining our bi-weekly volunteer work day with our annual Field Day, during which participants can join a number of hikes and educational sessions.  You can help us harvest seed for our prairie restoration work or just enjoy the various session topics during the day – or both!  If you’d like to help harvest seed, it would be helpful to bring work gloves and heavy scissors/garden shears, but we will have supplies as well.

This event is free of charge and open to the public.  Please bring your own lunch, and RSVP by July 19th so that we have enough supplies.  RSVP and get directions from Mardell at mjasnowski@tnc.org or by phone at (402) 694-4191.

Here is a schedule for the day (subject to change):

Session Descriptions:

Seed Harvest – Help us with our prairie restoration efforts by hand-picking seeds.  These seeds will be used to enhance the plant diversity of prairies that have been degraded by a history of overgrazing and/or broadcast herbicide use.

Bird walk/dickcissel research talk – Join Chelsea Forehead, a UNO graduate student, on a walk through the prairies.  Learn about grassland bird ecology and identification, including Chelsea’s current research project on the interaction between brown-headed cowbirds, dickcissels, and perch site availability.

Prairie ecology tour – Chris Helzer will lead a hike through the prairie, discussing ecology, fire/grazing management, prairie restoration, and whatever the group stumbles upon during the walk.  The morning and afternoon hikes will pass through different habitats, so feel free to join both!

Insect sweep netting – Sweep netting in prairies is a lot like snorkeling in the ocean.  From the surface, you’d never know how much life is actually there.  Grab a net and discover (and learn about) the incredible diversity of invertebrates found in prairies.

Plant identification hike – Join Olivia Schouten (Hubbard Fellow) on a walk and learn how to identify common prairie plants.

Botanical/Landscape Sketching – Alex Brechbill (Hubbard Fellow) will lead a session in which participants will sketch, paint, or otherwise depict the landscape or portions of it.  Bring your own art supplies if you like, or we will provide some basic sketching supplies.

Abundant rainfall this year has brought on abundant wildflowers in the Platte River Prairies. Please come hike through the prairies with us on July 21.

Miscellaneous Sightings

Posted on by
9

One of the best perks of my job is simply that I get to be outside enough to see a lot of interesting ecological phenomena.  Today, I thought I’d share a few vignettes from the last couple weeks.

Monarch caterpillar (finally) on common milkweed.

Last year, we set out to count monarch caterpillars on our sites, hoping to compare numbers between various management treatments.  We were stymied by the fact that there were almost no caterpillars to be found anywhere, let alone enough to make comparisons.  This year, I assumed the numbers would be better, but since finding eggs and caterpillars in May from the early migrants from Mexico that arrived this spring, I haven’t seen any caterpillars until this week.  And I only found one this week.  Whoopee.

Dodder flowers on Maximilian sunflower. Platte River Prairies.

Dodder is a fascinating parasitic plant that wraps its plastic twine-looking self around prairie plants like sunflowers and goldenrods and more.  Later in the season, the orange twine dries up and disappears, leaving only the fuzzy spirals of flower/seed heads on the stems of its host plants.  If you didn’t see both of them together, you might never guess the twine and fuzzy spirals were from the same plant.  This week, dodder is in transition, with both flowers and twine at the same time.

A male brown-belted bumblebee (Bombus griseocollis) perches high in the prairie, hoping to find and mate with an emerging queen of its species.

A few years ago, I found out about a fun behavior by male brown-belted bumblebees.  As colonies start producing queens for the next year, males spread out across the prairie and wait for those queens to enter the world.  The males sit on tall perches for hours, scanning for big females.  Once they see one, they (and all the other males who spot her) race to be the first to mate with her.  This week, they were at it again.  I’m really glad to have been clued into this really cool phenomenon.  Otherwise, I’d probably just see the bees and assume they were resting.

Finally, I’d like to thank those who helped with and attended our field day last Saturday.  The forecast didn’t look promising but the rain cleared out right before the event started and we ended up having fantastic weather.  The attendance was lower than hoped because of the forecast, but we still had people from at least 7 states and U.S. territories and we all learned a lot about prairie ecology and invertebrates.  Big thanks to presenters Julie Peterson of University of Nebraska Extension, Rae Powers of Xerces Society, and Sarah Bailey of Prairie Plains Resource Institute, along with Kayla Mollet and Katie Lamke from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Hey Ed, your mom caught a toad.

Julie Peterson (pink shirt, blue hat) shows attendees an insect.