Tag Archives: habitat

Photo of the Week – April 3, 2014

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This week, I present four photographs from one of the timelapse cameras along a restored wetland in our Platte River Prairies.  All four photographs were taken automatically by the camera, and none are particularly striking images, artistically speaking.

Nice sales job, eh?

Despite their quality as images, or lack thereof, they are very meaningful photographs to me.  In fact, the two photos of least photographic quality are actually the two I like best because they tell a story I’ve been hoping for since we first started the wetland restoration project more than 10 years ago.

Canada geese, some wigeon, and a few other ducks sit on the restored wetland in March of this year. This is a common sight, and a good one, but I was always hoping for more than just ducks and geese to use the wetland.

Canada geese, some wigeon, and a few other ducks sit on the restored wetland in March of this year. This is a common sight, and a good one, but I was always hoping for more than just ducks and geese to use the wetland.

When we first started talking about converting a long sand pit lake (left over after sand and gravel mining operations from early last century) into something different, we had several objectives.  Those included:

– removing the trees around the edge of the site to improve habitat for open-grassland and wetland wildlife species.

–  providing shallow stream and wetland habitat for fish, amphibians, reptiles, invertebrates (including mussels), and other species.

– restoring diverse plant communities including emergent wetland, wet meadow, wet-mesic, and upland sand prairie communities.

– providing habitat for migratory whooping and sandhill cranes and many other waterbird species with similar habitat requirements.

The first three objectives were pretty easy, and we’ve seen abundant evidence of success.  In terms of bird habitat, we’ve always had great utilization of the site by ducks, geese, herons, snipe and other birds during both migration and breeding season.  But no cranes.

Until this spring.

The chance that one of (approximately) 260 whooping cranes will ever land in this particular wetland is very remote, but I have been expecting to see sandhill cranes using the site; if not for overnight roosting habitat, at least as a place to feed and loaf during the day.  After all, there are hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes here each spring – surely some of them should see this as an attractive place to hang out now and then.  And if we see sandhill cranes using the site, we can reasonably assume that it’s suitable for whooping cranes too (though that’s not universally true).

However, during the 10 years since we started the restoration work, I’ve been looking in vain for a crane of any sort, or even tracks that would indicate they’d been there.  Nothing.  Last year, we had timelapse cameras up during the spring crane migration season but they malfunctioned and didn’t give me any evidence one way or the other.  But this year, I finally got what I wanted.

Three sandhill cranes stand in the middle of the wetland on March 8 of this year.

Three sandhill cranes stand in the middle of the wetland on March 8 of this year.  You can click on the photo to see a larger version of it.

I downloaded images from the cameras in mid-March and immediately scanned through them in the truck, hoping to see some evidence of crane use and – there they were!  Three sandhill cranes showed up in multiple photos over the period of a couple weeks.  Most of the photos were daytime photos, but it also appears they roosted overnight at least a few times, standing in the shallow water.  Three cranes is certainly not evidence that we’ve added significantly to bird conservation, but it is evidence that our wetland isn’t completely abhorrent to cranes – and that’s a good start.

Then, as I kept looking through the images, I got an even better surprise. Late in the evening on March 11, there was a whole flock of cranes standing in the shallow wetland, apparently preparing to roost.  Even better, the camera picked them up again early the next morning – pretty solid evidence that they roosted overnight.  It only happened once (through mid-March) but I’ll take it!

A flock of 70-80 sandhill cranes stands in shallow water at 7pm on March 11.

A flock of 70-80 sandhill cranes stands in shallow water at 7pm on March 11.

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At 7am the next morning, the cranes are still there - maybe more of them, in fact. Our first real crane roost, that we know of.

At 7am the next morning, the cranes are still there – maybe more of them, in fact. Our first real crane roost… that we know of.

The pictures aren’t of terrific quality.  They were taken by a camera set to fire every hour on the hour (during daylight hours) and low light and wind combined to the images a little blurry.  Nevertheless, I think they’re pretty great photos.

Of course, now that I’ve gotten my evidence of crane use, my scientist brain is kicking in and asking questions.  Why did the cranes only roost one night?  Why that particular night?  Why did they pick that particular part of the wetland?

And, there’s one more question my brain is asking, which I’m trying to ignore because I don’t think it’ll ever happen.

…Will we ever see a big white crane in one of those photos?

 

Some Things I’ve Learned Since I Wrote My Book

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It took me a long time to decide to write a book on prairie management.  One of my worries was that I was learning a tremendous amount each year, and a book captures a moment in time.  One of the reasons I like writing this blog is that it allows me to share lessons as I learn them, modify my ideas over time, and – best of all – get instant feedback from readers.  I learn a lot from watching prairies, but I learn even more from discussions with other people who watch prairies.

Attending workshops such as the annual get-together of the Patch-Burn Grazing Working Group has helped me continue to learn at a fast rate. (2013 Workshop in South Dakota)

Attending workshops such as the annual get-together of the Patch-Burn Grazing Working Group has helped me continue to learn at a fast rate. (2013 Workshop in South Dakota)

My prairie book came out in 2010, but I actually did most of the writing in 2008 – five years ago.  By the time the final manuscript passed through reviews and layout and made it to the publishing stage, there were already a few sections I would have liked to modify.  Now that five years have passed, there are even more changes I wish I could make.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very proud of the book, and satisfied with its contents.  But reading through it recently, I picked out some portions that I would handle differently if I was writing the book today.  Here are a few of those:

Page 12 – “Mycorrhizal fungi help plants fix nitrogen”.  Ok, I really flubbed this one.  As Inger Lamb kindly pointed out to me after the book came out, mycorrizhae help plants pull in food and water more effectively.  Bacteria are what help plants fix nitrogen.  I should have just skipped the whole topic in the book, given my very rudimentary knowledge of what happens belowground.  In my defense, the book went through several technical reviews, and none of the reviewers caught the error either.

…On the plus side, I did manage to spell “mycorrhizal” correctly.

Insects.  The insect section in the book was originally three times longer.  I was urged (coerced?) by the publisher and reviewers to chop it back drastically because it was so much longer than similar sections on mammals, birds, etc.  I wish I’d fought harder to keep it long.  As I’ve discussed numerous times on this blog, insects and other invertebrates are WAY more diverse and important to the way prairies functions than any other group of above-ground creatures.  The existing insect section in the book is a good primer on some of the insect communities of prairies and their impacts, but doesn’t go nearly far enough.  Maybe I’ll write a whole book on prairie invertebrates someday.  (But probably not – can you imagine how quickly THAT book would become out of date?  We still have a massive amount to learn about invertebrates.)

I didn't know much of anything about wasps a year ago, but I'm learning more now. This one is in the genus Sphex and feeds its larvae on grasshoppers. (Thanks to Mike Arduser for that information)

I didn’t know much of anything about wasps a year ago, but I’m learning more now. This one is in the genus Prionyx and feeds its larvae on grasshoppers. (Thanks to Mike Arduser for that information)

Page 79 – “Managing prairies really means managing the competition between plants.”  This is a nice statement, but it’s too narrow.  If I was writing that now I would replace “plants” with “species”.  In general, my biggest beef with my 2008 self is that I was too focused on plants, and not enough on habitat for other species.

In the prairies I know best, maintaining plant diversity appears to be dependent upon periodically suppressing dominant grasses and giving other plants a chance to thrive.  Our management strategies create a dynamic disturbance regime that helps keep any single group of plants from bullying others out of the prairie.  However, not all prairies work like the ones I manage.  Especially in some eastern tallgrass prairies, which have abundant rainfall and deep organic soils, many prairie plant communities seem to be pretty stable without any management that suppresses grasses.   For example, very frequent spring fires seem to do a fine job of maintaining populations of most plant species in some of those sites – maybe because there is less intense competition between plants when soil moisture is abundant?

While frequent fire is able to sustain diverse plant communities in some prairies, I still think the shifting mosaic of disturbances I advocated for in my book is very important.  Burning an entire prairie every year creates a single habitat structure across that prairie.  That’s great for the species that like that habitat structure.  However, a prairie with patches of short, tall, and mixed-height structure is going to provide for more animal species than one with uniform structure.  I’m convinced that creating heterogeneous habitat can be done without hurting the plant community, and I think it’s a critical component of good prairie management.  So – I think my management advice in the book is still sound, I just wish I’d explained the value of it differently.

Prairies that are annually burned or hayed (like this one) may be able to maintain their plant diversity, but provide only a limited range of habitat options for wildlife and invertebrates.

Some prairies that are annually burned or hayed (like this one) may be able to maintain plant diversity, but they provide only a limited range of habitat options for wildlife and invertebrates.

Small Prairies.  I spent a little time in the book talking about the challenges of managing small prairies, but I’ve spent more time thinking about this subject during the last few years.  I wrote a post that summarized much of that thinking back in March, 2012.  Many prairies are small enough that providing the kind of habitat patchiness I just discussed might not be feasible or even appropriate.  In the eastern tallgrass prairie, many grasslands are only a few acres in size, and much of what I talked about in the management portion of the book would be difficult to apply.  I wish I could go back and put in a whole chapter that fleshes out what I discussed in my blog post.

Too bad, so sad.  Those are a few of the things I’d change if I could alter my book today.  Unfortunately, because of layout challenges and other issues, I can’t just add a few paragraphs or re-write a chapter and then just reprint the book.  Even if I could, there’d still be a couple thousand books in people’s houses and offices preserving my out-of-date ideas forever.

I may write another book someday.  I might even go back and revise the one I’ve already written, though I dread that process.  In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the opportunity to write in this blog format, which allows me to constantly adapt my ideas as I learn from prairies and from you.  Thank you for helping me with that process.