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Hubbard Fellowship Post – Ruminations While Disking

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This post is written by Kim Tri, one of our two Hubbard Fellows for this year.  Kim is an excellent artist, as well as an ecologist, writer, and land steward.  As you can see, her drawings of animals are exceptional.

A Swainson’s hawk takes wing not 30 feet from me, and I feel vindicated.  It rises from a patch of ground which I’ve just disked, and answers the idle question I had when I began disking that day.  I wondered whether the turning under of vegetation and hence the cover of the little critters living there would attract hawks in search of an easy-to-spot snack.  I’d seen it happen on a prescribed burn which I’d sat in on last year, in the property just across the creek.  Once the flames and smoke died down, we counted at least 20 hawks—most of them Swainson’s—soaring overhead.  They were attracted by the aftermath, the ground cleared of protected cover for the disoriented prey.  The black earth left in the wake of the disk plow reminded me of the fire, and got me wondering.

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For those of you not familiar with the practice of disking, it involves plowing using a disk plot (pictured above) pulled behind a tractor.  Picture by Kim Tri

I should have kept a tally of how many voles, mice, rabbits, and lizards I saw clearly fleeing across the worked ground as I plowed.  Creatures visible to my weak human eyes would be easy pickings for a (much) sharper-eyed hawk.

Sure enough, a hawk showed up after an hour or so and answered my question.  The neighbor was haying in his field just across the fence, which I’m sure was turning up quite a bounty of prey as well.  I don’t have enough agricultural experience to know whether the hawks usually show up around haying time, but the intent circling of the hawks above the neighbor’s tractor made me think that they’ve cottoned on to it as well as they have to burning.

While disking later that week, also I kept (slowly) chasing groups of killdeer.  A contractor had come in with an excavator only a few weeks before to reconstruct wetlands on the property.  The killdeer scuttled around the newly excavated wetlands, where before they had not seemed to give this property much of their time.  They, too, appeared attracted to the open ground where they might find prey.  After all, the wetland excavation as well as the disk plowing had suddenly provided them with some quite preferable habitat.

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A group of startled killdeer flee alongside the track left by an excavator.  Graphite drawing by Kim Tri

It got me thinking about the consequences of our actions as land stewards – the whole ecology of it all.  So often, during a day’s field work, we focus on the plant community.  This makes sense, since it’s really the only thing about our prairies that we can directly manage, and where the effects of our work are most easily observable.  The larger aim, though, is to create a diverse ecosystem with quality habitat for as many faunal species as possible.  We do this intentionally through a variety of practices, such as seeding, prescribed burning, invasive species control, and grazing.

There are plenty of unintended beneficiaries to these.  I did not set out that day with the disk plow to provide a meal to the local Swainson’s hawks.  The objective was actually to clear the remaining vegetation of a low-quality “failed” restoration in order to create a blank canvas for seeding it into a high-quality prairie.  It had been recently sprayed completely to clear out the brome invasion that was its major fault, and since then I’d come to view the area as kind of a dead space.  While looking ahead to what the tract could be, I’d forgotten about all of the things that it still was.  It was still habitat for a wide variety of animal life, judging by the creatures I was seeing.  The cleared ground of the excavated wetlands showed trails of deer and coyote tracks, and even now, after the ground has been completely cleared, the deer and coyotes still keep leaving tracks.

I’ve noticed, too, while mowing fire breaks around our burn units, that there are creatures benefitting.  While making a third pass around with the tractor to widen the line, driving alongside the line I’d already mowed, I noticed many voles and mice scampering out of the clippings left behind.  They seemed drawn to the mowed line, and I felt that I’d just created dream foraging habitat for them.  As well as laying down a dense layer of cover to protect them, I’d just brought down to ground level a cornucopia of seedheads that had previously been out of reach for the little critters.

I acknowledge that there are also species negatively impacted by some of the things we do, but that is a thought for another time.  The mice were definitely not happy about the disking or the hawks, but I hope that we balance this out by working to improve their habitat.

We’ll reseed the disked tract with the seed we’ve collected this year, and in the spring a new prairie will grow, bringing with it an influx of creatures back to the property.  In another few years, it will be burned, and then likely the Swainson’s hawks will come again, drawn by the promise of bounty on the black earth.

A Swainson’s hawk takes flight from a disked field. (Yes, the ground does look that messy) Graphite drawing by Kim Tri

A Swainson’s hawk takes flight from a disked field. (Yes, the ground does look that messy) Graphite drawing by Kim Tri

Hubbard Fellowship Blog – Up and Down the River

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This post is written by Kim Tri, one of our two Hubbard Fellows for this year.  Kim is an excellent artist, as well as an ecologist, writer, and land steward.  You can look forward to seeing more of her writing and artworks soon.

Sometimes, I have to remind myself that it’s in the name: Platte River Prairies, the collection of lands that we conserve.  They are strung out and fragmented, but the Platte is what unifies them.

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The Platte River at sunset.  Photo by Pat Lundahl

It can be hard to see it sometimes.  The river, altered as it is, follows its own sinuous course, dictated by geology, varying flow rates, and other natural vagaries.  However, the roads we travel to reach our properties along the river follow man-made lines.  Though the river laid down their sandy grades long ago, the roads were built on section lines and survey coordinates, east-west, north-south.  (The exceptions in this area are Interstate 80 and the Lincoln highway, which roughly follow the river and the 19th century Mormon Trail.)  Trying to follow the Platte along the county roads from one property to another involves a confusing handful of miles of zig-and-zag.  These miles take long enough to travel on an ATV that it is easy to lose track of the river and the relative position of different tracts of land in this maze of right angles.

So, to keep myself straight, I build a mental map of the different disconnected pieces of land, re-centered along the river which ties them all together.  It’s not very precise—there are no exact boundary lines and the distances are all approximate, but it helps me visualize the big picture.

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My mental map of the Platte River Prairies on paper. It covers roughly 14 miles west to east, with the river represented in blue, the roads in black, and collections of our properties in green symbols, which represent unique aspects of these properties. From left to right, the symbols are: Siberian elm leaf (invasive), tall gayfeather, black-tailed jackrabbit, plains topminnow, and sandhill crane. Map by Kim Tri.

Allow me to explain the map briefly.  I chose to represent our properties, or collections of them, with symbols highlighting unique character aspects of the land tracts, rather than exact boundary lines, which aren’t really a part of my mental map.  I’ll explain them from west to east.

Sometimes I think of the Bombeck property as Siberia, because it is way out there and has our worst Siberian elm (a non-native tree) invasion, which I’ve represented with a Siberian elm leaf.  To the east of that is the Miller/Uridil complex, which is represented by a tall gayfeather, since one of the Uridil prairies has an abundance of gayfeather flowers.  The black-tailed jackrabbit to the east of that covers the Derr and Suck properties, since that is almost exclusively where I see jackrabbits when they aren’t dashing across the road between cornfields.  The plains topminnow on the right represents or Sandpit wetland restoration, a restored stream channel that serves as habitat for native (and non-native) fish.  The last symbol to the east is a Sandhill crane, representing the Studnicka and Caveny properties, located next to the Crane Trust, and where we view cranes on their migration stopover on the Platte.

This map gives me a perspective that helps me make sense of the everyday, the right and left turns chasing the treeline that marks the river.  It helps me to see that while our properties may have edges defined by man, the boundaries within which we work are defined by a natural watershed.  And though our lands may not all be connected by land, they are still connected by the Platte.  The water that flows through the Kelly tract—two hours to the west—also flows past the Rulo property along the Missouri river, below the confluence of the two great rivers.

Photo by Pat Lundahl.

Great blue heron and shorebird tracks along a sandbar.  Photo by Pat Lundahl.

The Platte provides the focus of life here.  It feeds the groundwater which fills our wetlands, spawning frogs and toads, watering the sedges and rushes.  It draws much of the wildlife to its banks.  A walk along the river last weekend yielded the tracks of raccoon, deer, bobcat, and otter mixed in with those of the shorebirds.  Here and there were dotted the massive prints of a great blue heron.  In the spring, the sandhill cranes will blot them all out.  We are working to preserve all of this, as well as the tallgrass prairie which the river feeds, and which we walk every day.