flowers | The Prairie Ecologist

This was a really fun week, but it was one jam packed with social interactions. The America’s Grasslands Conference happened just down the road and I gave a few presentations and several tours associated (officially and unofficially) with that. I also had a great time meeting new people and catching up with old ones. By the end of Thursday, though, my social engine was pretty much out of gas (I should probably think about upgrading to a more eco-friendly social engine).

As a result, on Friday morning, I got up and drove down to our family prairie to catch sunrise. I spent most of my time in the 80×80 foot plot there tied to the post-grazing photography project I’m doing this year. It was just the thing to reinvigorate me.

Purple prairie clover (*Dalea purpurea*)

The prairie was full of life and activity, even on a dewy morning. Purple prairie clover is starting to bloom across my project area, adding a lot of color, but also drawing a lot of attention from various invertebrates (more on that below). Yarrow, flax, and daisy fleabane were still in flower, but obviously on the back end of their blooming period. Upright prairie coneflower, hoary vervain, and other wildflowers were also joining the party.

Upright prairie coneflower (*Ratibida columnifera*)

We’ve had good rains lately, so there were mushrooms around, including on manure piles. I was surprised to see what I think are the same species on manure from last season as well as from this season (in areas outside of my photography project area). I guess I’d expected to see mushrooms on fresh dung, but not necessarily on older piles. Or that maybe that the fungal species would differ between young and old piles. I’m not really sure why I thought that, but either way, I was wrong. Look at me – learning new things!

Back to the prairie clover, I saw a few crab spiders hanging around on them, and some drone flies had shaken off the dew and were making the rounds looking for pollen. I only saw one bee, but I assume that’s because the others were waiting for the dew to dry – prairie clover is usually one of the top bee-attracting wildflowers in our prairie when it’s blooming. I’ll go back soon and see what’s happening when the whole prairie isn’t soaking wet.

What I saw most on those prairie clover flowers were little katydid nymphs. They were ubiquitous. Tiny, long-antennaed, grasshopper-like creatures were hanging out and (I think) feeding on the pollen and/or anthers of many of the flowers. (I just had to convince my computer that “antennaed” is a word. It keeps underlining it to highlight the fact that it doesn’t think it’s correct. I even looked up the word to make sure I wasn’t the crazy one. What’s funny, of course, is that I looked it up online, which is a skill you’d think my computer would also have.)

Most of the tiny katydid nymphs were only about 1/4 inch long, but their antennae were several times longer than their bodies. As I’ve done countless times before, I wondered how they managed to move around in the prairie with those things sticking out like that. You’d think they’d get hung up in the vegetation over and over. Can you imagine trying to walk through a forest with 25-foot fiberglass poles stuck to your head? It must be similar. It’s just one more reason to admire katydids, I guess.

There were lots of other invertebrates around, of course, including ladybirds, grasshoppers (large and small), flies, lynx spiders, wolf spiders, funnel-web spiders, and many others. Damselflies were particularly noticeable as I walked carefully through the vegetation. As I’d step, a few would fly a short distance away from my feet and land again. The only way I could get close enough to photograph them was to lie prone on the ground and army crawl slowly toward them, keeping my head low. Even then, of course, only a few let me get close. One of them was distracted (I assume) by the small insect it was feeding on. I never did figure out what it was eating. Initially, I thought mosquito, but looking at the photos later, I’m not sure.

Damselfly and sparkling morning dew drops.

The biggest highlight of the morning was seeing purple coneflower in bloom. This is a species that I’ve only seen a few times at my family prairie, and never in this particular location.

Purple coneflower (*Echinacea angustifolia*)

A couple weeks ago, I spotted two different individuals of purple coneflower and it looked like both were going to bloom. One of them was doing just that on Friday morning, with three flowers in various stages of opening. The mystery now is whether those plants have been hiding there for many years and I just noticed them this year or whether they came in from seed.

I’ve been overseeding the site every year for the last 15 years or so – tossing seed out in the winter where cattle had grazed hardest the previous season. It’s been a slow, gradual process because I don’t have a ton of time to harvest seed. I know I’ve had some purple coneflower in my mix a few times over the years, but definitely not within the last 4-5 years. Either way, it’s pretty fun that the first time I’ve seen them bloom is the year AFTER their part of the prairie experienced a year and a half of heavy grazing (the last half of the 2023 growing season and all of the 2024 season).

Purple coneflower and dotted gayfeather.

After a couple hours of exploring the prairie, I left for home feeling much better. That happens after walking any grassland, but the feelings are especially strong after I leave a prairie with which I have a strong connection.

At work, I have built lots of prairie from the ground up (both harvesting and planting the seed – with help from others, of course). Our family prairie has been under my management for about 20 years now, counting the years I helped my grandmother when she was still around. In both cases, the emotions that come with those personal ties are awfully profound. I know that every plant, every insect, every bird, skunk, mushroom, or other organism I see in those places is responding to a chain of events I helped put in motion through my restoration and/or stewardship work.

I mean – wow. Just wow.

Life is funny sometimes. Last week, I spent a morning setting up some research plots aimed at helping us learn how to suppress the growth and spread of deciduous shrubs in grasslands. When I finished, I walked about 50 yards to a patch of wild plum (a deciduous shrub) and spent a half hour photographing an incredible abundance of pollinators using the patch as a source of food. Really makes you think, huh?

Wild plum, aka American plum (*Prunus americana*) at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies.

Deciduous shrubs, of course, are great. Wild plum, for example, is one of several early-blooming native shrubs that play a vital role for pollinators in April. There aren’t a lot of blossoms among the herbaceous prairie plants in our area at this time of year. As a result, blooming shrubs draw insects in like big, showy, nice-smelling magnets. Aside from their pretty, nutritious flowers, shrubs also create nice little pockets of habitat for a lot of animals that need a little woody cover with their prairie vegetation.

On the other hand, deciduous shrubs have been spreading into and through grasslands at an increased rate. That rate of spread is caused by a lot of factors, including changes in native browser populations and a style of landscape fragmentation that has broken grasslands into pieces and introduced woody plants along the edges of those pieces. Most importantly, higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are fueling the growth and spread of deciduous woody plants in a way that is very different than even a couple decades ago.

Adding all that up, it can be hard to know how to feel about and act around deciduous shrubs in prairies. Shrubs yay? Shrubs boo? Yes.

Probably the same species of sweat bee as shown above, but a different individual.

This photo give you some idea of how many little pollinators were using the plum blossoms. All those little specks are flies, bees, and/or wasps.

I was only able to photograph a tiny fraction of the pollinator species frenetically bouncing between the plum blossoms. Many were so tiny, it was hard to photograph them at all, and most were moving so quickly, I couldn’t focus my lens before they skipped off to the next flower. Even so, I managed to capture a decent sample of the kind of diversity I was seeing. You’ll just have to imagine the others.

A drone fly with kaleidoscope eyes. I assume her name is Lucy.

Managing the size and spread of deciduous shrub patches is already a major focus of many prairie managers. The challenge of dealing with that issue is growing like – well, like a patch of carbon dioxide-fueled deciduous shrubs. Most of the shrub species we’re facing, though, aren’t enemies. As with the wild plum I was photographing, the majority are native species that happen to be gaining a competitive edge because of a number of enabling conditions we can’t do much about.

As land stewards, we need to find ways to manage shrubbier grasslands for biodiversity and productivity because shrubbier grasslands are our future across much of the Midwest and Great Plains regions of North America. In fact, the future is already here in many places. We’re all free to think what we want of that future, but ignoring or denying it won’t do us much good.

But they’re also pretty! And they provide a lot of pollen, nectar, fruit, shelter, and other resources for prairie species.

A long-bodied, long-antennaed beetle with short wing coverings.

Really, the dual experiences I had with shrubs last week were a great illustration of how we should all be thinking about them. We have a lot to learn, and quickly, about how to manage the competition between shrubs and other prairie species. As we experiment with various approaches to the issue, we need to share our experiences with each other. At the same time, we should all recognize and celebrate the positive traits of those shrubs. That’ll help us make better decisions, but it’ll also give us a helpful perspective on the changes we see around us.

Happy Earth Day.

The Prairie Ecologist

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

Tag Archives: flowers

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