grassland | The Prairie Ecologist

Reminder: please join us this Saturday for the Platte River Prairies field day. RSVP by contacting Kate at kate.samuelson@tnc.org.

Kim and I both went up to the Niobrara Valley Preserve last week to help with that site’s annual butterfly count. Neil Dankert leads this count every year, as he has for most of the last 38 or so years. Check out his terrific website on Nebraska moths and butterflies here.

While I was at NVP, I found some time to do some photography. Looking back, it’s weird that I didn’t get a single photo of a butterfly, though I did photograph one moth.

Hairy golden aster and lead plant in Sandhills Prairie near the Niobrara River.

The butterfly count was on Friday but Kim and I stayed for an extra night so she could go for a run on Saturday morning and I could wander out with my camera. One of the first things I found on my sunrise walk was a couple clusters of male scoliid wasps. Female scoliid wasps feed on scarab beetle larvae, which live underground. Somehow, the wasps figure out where a larva is, dig down to it, and lay an egg on the hapless grub. The wasp larva then hatches out and eats the beetle larva before pupating and emerging from the ground as an adult wasp.

A male Scoliid wasp on its overnight roost with milkweed pollinia stuck to one foot.

The males don’t do any of that. They spend their time feeding on nectar and looking for females to mate with. Often, they do this with a bunch of other males. At night, they often congregate together to roost, either for safety in numbers, warmth, or some other reason we dont understand. I think the wasps I found are Scolia nobilitata but I’m not promising that’s true.

If you look closely at the wasp photo above, you can see the gummy candy-like pollinia of a milkweed plant stuck to its foot. Both adult male and female wasps of most (all?) species feed on nectar rather than other invertebrates (they eat invertebrates as larvae but not as adults) and end up as important pollinators of many flowers, including those of milkweeds. If you don’t know the incredible story of how milkweed is pollinated, you can read about it here.

This is a side view of the wasp shown ahead. You can see the pollinia in this photo, too (right side of the stick it is perched on).

Here’s a photo of part of the larger congregation of male wasps.

Prickly poppy (Argemone polyanthemos) was blooming during our trip, including a few plants right in front of the preserve office. On Friday, we had to wait for the vegetation to dry out before starting our butterfly count, so I took a few minutes to photograph the flowers and some pollinating visitors.

Metallic green sweat bee on feeding on pollen.

A cool-looking beetle, also apparently feeding on pollen.

Sand milkweed (*Asclepias arenaria*) flowers.

Lead plant was also in flower, and many different invertebrates were hanging out on the plants, including pollinators, herbivores, and predators.

A beetle feeding on the pollen and anthers.

Another moth, captured by a crab spider.

A flower longhorn beetle feeding on lead plant

Flower longhorn beetles of several (I think?) species were abundant last weekend, feeding on the blossoms of multiple wildflowers. I’ve only included a few of the many photos I took of them.

Flower longhorn beetle on upright prairie coneflower (*Ratibida columnifera*)

A flower longhorn beetle on bush morning glory

Bush morning glory (*Ipomaea leptophylla*)

Purple coneflower (*Echinacea angustifolia*)

The Niobrara Valley Preserve is near the eastern extent of ponderosa pine in Nebraska

Grasshopper exoskeleton (left after molting) on yucca leaves

Ants tending aphids (feeding on honeydew they exude) on fourpoint evening primrose

Hairy golden aster (Heterotheca villosa) and lead plant (Amorpha canescens)

In case you’re wondering, it was a mediocre day for butterflies. It feels like butterfly abundance has been relatively low on the prairies I’m familiar with this year. I’m not sure if that’s related to weather (I assume so?) and if it is, I don’t know what weather factor(s) are most relevant. It was an extremely warm, dry winter and spring and has been a wet summer. Both resident and migrant butterfly numbers seem low this year. Is this the case elsewhere this year?

Still, six of us found 28 butterfly species, including a number of at-risk species. Some of those included two-spotted skipper, regal fritillary, monarch, eyed brown, long dash, northern broken dash, little glassywing, dun skipper and coral hairstreak. Some years, we see large numbers of butterflies like orange sulphurs, common wood nymphs, and/or great spangled fritillaries, but not this year. We also didn’t find an ottoe skipper, which we’d hoped to see because the most recent Nebraska sighting was at NVP several years ago. Maybe next year…

When I woke up early last Saturday, I rolled very slowly out of bed and said to myself, “This is fun. You do this because it’s fun.”

I looked at the clock (6am) and then looked at the outside thermometer (31 degrees F). “Fun, I thought. This is fun.”

Normally, I really don’t mind getting up early for photography, but it had been a long week and I was behind on sleep. I had set my alarm because it looked like it might be a frosty morning and I very much enjoy photographing frost-covered flowers. Now that I was up, I wasn’t as sure about that plan but since I was awake and vertical, I plowed ahead. I had time to beat the sunrise to our family prairie, but only if I kept moving.

And you know what? As soon as I got to the prairie and started walking around, I did have fun. There was a really nice frost on the ground, especially in low-lying parts of the prairie. I had a little time to scout before the sun got high enough to hit the frostiest spots, so I picked out the flowers I liked best and then waited for the light to reach them. Then I just admired the beauty and tried to capture what I could before the ice crystals melted and sunlight got too bright. Here are some of the highlights from that morning.