Tag Archives: grazing

Photo of the Week – June 14, 2013

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This was an interesting week for observations.  Here are some of the things I saw and learned.

A

Our burn from last week is greening up nicely.  This photo was taken one week after the burn.  We’re supposed to get some rain today and through the weekend, so that should help keep the green-up going.  In a few more weeks, it’ll be difficult to tell the site had been burned.

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B

Another photo of last week’s burn.  Most of the earliest regrowth was grass.  Wildflowers were just barely resprouting.  Cattle have access to this now, and we expect them to switch their focus from unburned portions of the prairie to this lush regrowth.

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C

Some of you who have followed this blog for a long time may find this particularly interesting.  In general, patch-burn grazing with a light stocking rate leads to very selective grazing by cattle in our prairies – the cattle eat mostly grasses and avoid most wildflowers.  However, rosinweed (Silphium integrifolium) is one of the few wildflowers cattle often target even in unburned areas of our prairies.  One of the joys (truly) of using cattle grazing as a management tool is that I’m often surprised by what cattle do.  In this case, cattle seem to be ignoring rosinweed completely, which is very unusual.  I have some theories…

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d

This headless and hollowed out carcass of a gar, lying along a restored wetland, was a great indication that river otters are still active along the creek where we did the restoration project.  We converted ponds into a stream with adjacent shallow wetlands, and I wondered whether we’d see a decrease in otter activity since the ponds were excellent feeding areas for the otters.  Based on some scat (poop) sightings recently and the presence of this gar, it looks like the otters are still around.

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f

This is a photo of some remnant sand prairie, showing two species that are prominently blooming right now.  The grass in the foreground is needle-and-thread (Hesperostipa comata) and the yellow flowered plant is hairy puccoon (Lithospermum caroliniense).  Both species are present, but still in low numbers, in a restored prairie we seeded immediately to the south (see below).

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h

This is the photo of the restored sand prairie mentioned above.  You can see the same tree line on the horizon of both photos.  The re-seeded prairie has most of the same plant species, but often at different levels of abundance.  The shell-leaf penstemon (Penstemon grandiflorus) shown here is an obvious example of that.  As I’ve mentioned many times before, our restoration goal is not to recreate history or mimic an existing site.  Rather we want to use restored areas to enlarge and reconnect isolated remnant prairies to increase their health and long term viability.  Having somewhat different plant species compositions in adjacent sites has advantages – especially for species such as pollinators.  Right now, many bees nesting in the remnant prairie are likely spending foraging time in the restoration, where the penstemon is providing easy and abundant food.  (A PhD student is currently trying to document that.)

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Lessons From a Project to Improve Prairie Quality – Part 1: Patch-Burn Grazing, Plant Diversity, and Butterflies

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We recently completed a large multi-year restoration and management project at our Platte River Prairies.  Our specific objectives were to improve habitat quality for various at-risk prairie species and evaluate the impacts of our management on at-risk butterflies – particularly regal fritillaries.  The project was supported by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, who funded our work with two State Wildlife Grants (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service money).  Over five years, we conducted fire/grazing management in our prairies and enhanced plant diversity through overseeding and seedling plugs.  We measured the results of that work by measuring changes in prairie plant communities and by looking at the use of our prairies by regal fritillaries and other butterflies.

Plant diversity and buttterfly habitat were the objectives of our 5-year project.

We’ve worked hard to get plant diversity in our restored prairies, including this one.  We wanted to know whether or not our management was maintaining that diversity, and also how it was affecting butterflies.  The prairie shown here was being grazed at the time of the photo – July 2009.  The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

The following is a brief summary of the major lessons we’ve gleaned from the fire/grazing component of the project, including implications for future management and restoration work.  I will summarize the overseeding/seedling work in a separate upcoming post.  If you want more details, you can see our entire final report to the funding agencies here.  As a warning, the report is 14 pages long, with an additional 21 pages of Appendices, full of tables and graphs.

What We Did
Between 2008 and 2012, we treated over 1,500 acres of prairie with varying applications of patch-burn grazing management.  During that time, we altered the timing of burning and the intensity of grazing from year to year, and included years of complete rest from grazing in some prairies.  For the purposes of this project, we evaluated the results of our work in two main ways:

–          We measured changes in plant diversity and mean floristic quality.

–          We conducted three years of butterfly surveys to evaluate how regal fritillaries and other butterfly species responded to our restoration and management work.

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