Tag Archives: native-plants

Photos of the Week – September 2, 2025

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August really flew by but it was a fun and interesting month. In addition to a full calendar of work and home events, I made time to explore several of my favorite prairies, including The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Niobrara Valley Preserve, and our own family prairie. I caught numerous sunrises and sunsets, foggy mornings, stormy evenings, and some bright overcast days. It was sometimes a struggle to keep up with my to-do list, but my time in the prairie always felt rejuvenating, rather than as something that subtracted from my productivity.

I spent a few mornings in the Platte River Prairies. August is often a good time for foggy mornings with light winds, and this year’s version was no exception.

Sunrise on a foggy morning at the Platte River Prairies.
Compass plant and sunrise.
Canada wildrye with dew and morning light.

One morning, I spent several minutes watching a small spider deconstruct its web, eating it as it went. Many spider species will re-make their web daily, and eating the old one is a way to gain back some of the nutrients it takes to create more silk. This one was working methodically, pulling threads toward her mouth as she circled the web and spiraled inward.

Spider consuming its web in the morning.

Hover flies are always a common sight on the flowers of grasses (as well as other wildflowers). Grasses are wind-pollinated, so the hover flies probably don’t help the grasses any, but there seems to be plenty of pollen to go around, so I doubt they do any serious harm. Plus, they’re pretty dang cute – especially when they grab anthers in their front legs as they eat.

Hover fly feeding on big bluestem pollen.
Widow skimmer in the morning.
Grasshopper peering at me from a sunflower.

We’ve had good rain this year, starting in the early summer, so most of our prairies are looking pretty lush. That includes my family’s prairie. The area we grazed hardest last year is the most full of wildflowers and insects, but the whole site looks good.

A metallic green sweat bee on purple prairie clover.
A bush katydid peering at me through the grass.
A bush katydid from a different angle.

One morning, I stopped at our family prairie well before sunrise. As I was scouting around, waiting for the sun, I saw a few bees clustered together on a flower. That’s not unusual, but I mentally noted the location in case I wanted to come back after the light improved. Shortly after that, I saw an even bigger group of bees, and then another. I’d never seen so many longhorn bees on the same flower before, and I saw similar groupings on at least 4 or 5 flowers.

Longhorn bees waking up in the morning on a stiff sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus).

I don’t know how to explain this. Longhorn bees (it looked like maybe two or three different species?) are solitary, meaning that females dig their own nest and work by themselves to gather food for their eggs. Males don’t have nests, so spend nights outside, sometimes a few at a time on a leaf or inside a flower. Seeing this many at once, though, was new to me. I wonder if a bunch had recently emerged (from pupae) and I was seeing the new generation on its first night, before they’d had a chance to disperse (or be eaten by predators)?

Whatever the explanation, it was pretty great, and I definitely circled back with my camera once sunlight started to hit those flowers. I had to work quickly, though, because the combination of my presence and the warmth of the sun caused the bees to start flying off pretty quickly.

More longhorn bees on a different stiff sunflower.
Another longhorn bee.

Meanwhile, in the Nebraska Sandhills, it’s been a terrific year for plains sunflowers, one of two annual sunflower species that grow in the state. They are especially abundant where grazing and/or fire created some bare ground for germination this spring, but they’re common across at least the whole eastern portion of the 12 million-acre prairie landscape.

Plains sunflowers (Helianthus petiolaris) and bison fence at sunrise. Niobrara Valley Preserve.
Plains sunflower and rising sun.

The bounty of sunflowers creates more than just abundant beauty. Sunflowers are very generous with their resources, including pollen, nectar, and seeds. They don’t hide pollen and nectar inside pods, and though the seeds are in shells, they’re laid out for easy access.

In addition to those resources, sunflower leaves are very nutritious, including for large grazers (especially early in the season) and lots of invertebrates, including as the favorite food for the plains lubber grasshopper. Plus, sunflowers produce extrafloral nectar from pores up and down the plants, which attracts hungry ants.

Huge numbers of annual sunflowers usually signifies a temporary drop in the vigor of dominant grasses and other perennial plants – from drought, fire, grazing, or a combination. While those other plants are regathering their strength, sunflowers step up and provide all their abundant resources to the members of the prairie community. Plus, of course, it’s a nice thing for photographers.

Lots of plains sunflowers.
More sunflowers.
An adult antlion with sunflower color in the background.

One evening, thunderstorms started forming off to the west of the Niobrara Valley Preserve and tracked northeast, providing a prolonged lightning show that kept just enough distance from the Preserve that I could watch and photograph it safely. After dark, the storms did pass directly over us, but I was safely in bed by then.

Lightning in Sandhills prairie. Niobrara Valley Preserve.
Lightning over the Niobrara River. Niobrara Valley Preserve.

In late August, my impressive wife, Kim, and a bunch of other tough athletes ran a 50-kilometer race on the trails at Wilson Lake (north-central Kansas). I was there as driver and crew member – mainly to say something supportive and hand her food, water, or dry socks when she passed through the aid station. Most of the time, I was free to do my own thing while Kim and a bunch of other human outliers ran up and down rocky hills all day.

It was a cloudy, breezy day, so I wandered down to the sandy banks of the lake where the wind wasn’t as disruptive for photography. I spent a lot of time on my belly, trying to photograph invertebrates who were feeding, hunting, or trying to warm up on the open sand whenever the sun peeked out from between clouds.

As per usual, I had to ignore the onlookers who were trying to figure out why a grown man was lying in wet sand with a camera. The diversity and activity of little creatures was well worth it.

A juvenile wolf spider on the beach of Wilson Lake in Kansas.
A big sandy tiger beetle on the beach. There were LOTS of these.
This is what the lakeshore looked like (featuring an invasive salt cedar tree in the foreground). Now just imagine me on my belly and boaters, dog walkers, and others passing by.
A band-winged grasshopper, one of several similar species that were extraordinarily well-camouflaged.
Damselfly.
A robber fly on an old common reed rhizome.

Along edge of the sand, just before the land rose up into the rocky prairie, I found an abundance of marsh-fleabane (Pluchea odorata). It was a very pretty plant, but even more attractive to scads of pollinators than it was to me. I photographed quite a few different butterflies, flies, and wasps on and around the plant. Since this has become a long post, I’ll just share one example.

A wasp feeding on the nectar of marsh-fleabane (Pluchea odorata) on the edge of the beach of Wilson Lake.

It’s hard to believe there are only about six weeks of this growing season left here in Nebraska. I spend a lot of time outside, but I still feel like I’ve missed way too much this year and am now running out of time to see everything that’s happening. It’s going to be hard to concentrate on any indoor activities during the next month-and-a-half, knowing that while I’m stuck indoors, prairie species are rushing around trying to do everything they need to before frost hits. I should be out there with them!

Ok, gotta go.

What Is High-Quality Prairie Anyway?

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Does this look like a high-quality prairie?

What about this one?

What if I told you the first one was 2 acres in size and the second was part of a 20,000 acre grassland block? 

Would it affect your opinion if you knew the first site was isolated from any other prairie habitat by miles of cropland and was directly adjacent to a busy highway?  What if I told you the second prairie hosts three different prairie dog towns and a herd of bison?

(None of this is true, by the way.  These are just hypothetical statements meant to be thought-provoking.)

The term “high-quality prairie” is often used in conservation circles, but people have very different definitions for it.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, it’s fascinating to see how the quality of a prairie is defined by people in different parts of North America, let alone in other parts of the world.  The cultural context is incredibly important to the way prairies are assessed and appreciated.

Here’s another example.

Does this look like a high-quality prairie?  Would it change your opinion if you knew it was planted on former row crop land?

Taking that further, does it matter if that restored prairie is about 10 acres in size and not connected to any other natural areas?  In contrast, what if it was 50 acres in size and connected two formerly-isolated remnant (unplowed) prairie parcels together?  Does that affect its quality or value?  Does it affect the quality or value of those remnant prairie parcels?

What are the criteria we should use for evaluating prairies?

A very common way to assess prairies is by looking at their plant species.  That makes good sense.  Prairie plants are beautiful.  In addition, of course, the plant community has a huge influence on the other components of the larger prairie community, including animals, fungi, and other soil microbes.  Maybe more importantly, you can always find plants.  They are literally rooted in place. 

When you visit a prairie, you might not see a pocket mouse, a katydid, or a badger, but if there’s a population of stiff sunflower, you can go to a particular spot and see it – it might even be in flower if you time it right.  Over time, it’s easy to see how that population is doing because you can check on it whenever you want.

There are multiple ways to evaluate a plant community.  The diversity of species is usually considered to be one important factor.  The presence of rare plant species, or species that have very specific habitat or management requirements, can be another.  The second can be particularly significant in landscapes where very little prairie is left.  Finding a prairie that still hosts rare plants is a big deal.

Prairie turnip (Pediomelum esculentum) is hard to find across much of its historic range. This one is part of a large population at the Niobrara Valley Preserve.

Looking at the diversity of plants and the presence and abundance of rare species is a very sensible way to begin evaluating a prairie.  I often do it myself.  You can visit a prairie at any time of year and make at least some assessment of the plant community – though it’s much easier during the growing season. 

In contrast, you have to time your visit carefully if you want to see what the bird community looks like (many species are only present for a few months each year).  Small mammals are tricky because they’re hard to see and you probably need some kind of trap system to even find any.  You can see a lot of invertebrates if you look closely, and of course you can pick up a sweep net and very quickly gather a bunch of them to inspect.  But invertebrates are notorious for having massive swings in population size from year to year, and many are only aboveground for short periods of time each season.  That means it can take a lot of time and a lot of effort to get any picture of what’s happening with invertebrate communities.

Insects like these bush cicadas can experience huge population booms and busts between years, making it hard to evaluate invertebrate communities.

However, notwithstanding the challenges of evaluating their populations, birds, small mammals, and invertebrates are all important components of prairies, right?  Any assessment of prairie quality should probably include them – not to mention reptiles, amphibians, large mammals, fungi and other soil microbes, and lots more. 

Looking at the plant community can provide hints about some of those other organisms.  Plant diversity is strongly correlated with invertebrate diversity, for example.  However, not all prairie animals have such strong ties to the diversity of a plant community, or to the presence or absence of particular plants.

Most grassland birds, for example, are really dependent upon the size of a grassland area and the habitat structure present. Some species nest in short grass, others in tall.  Still others need a variety of habitat patch types because they use different vegetation structure for nesting, brood rearing, wintering, and/or courtship displays.  In addition, a lot of grassland nesting birds are sensitive to the size of a prairie and/or won’t nest near wooded edges, roads, etc. (or suffer poor nest success when they do).

Upland sandpipers nest on the ground in large prairie patches with short, open habitat. They then take their young chicks into cover where the habitat is open enough the chicks can feed and move around easily, but there is overhead cover (especially broad-leaved plants) they can use to hide from predators and find shade.

Small mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates also respond strongly to the kind of habitat structure in a prairie.  Just as with birds, each species has its own preferences or requirements – some looking for short/sparse habitat, others for tall/dense cover, and some need something in the middle or a mix of all of those options.  Also, like birds, many of those animals and their populations will thrive best in larger prairies than in smaller ones. 

So, in addition to a “good” plant community, you could argue that a high-quality prairie should also be one that is large and managed in a way that provides a mixture of habitat structure.  Maybe, but this is where things get really interesting. 

In many places, large prairies just don’t exist anymore.  We’re left with small remnants of grassland, surrounded by row crops, urban areas, woodlands, or other land cover types.  Does that mean none of those prairies are high-quality?  Of course not.  But the context matters.  The quality of a site is measured against objectives (what do we want a prairie to be or to provide?) and objectives are informed by local culture. 

Small prairies can still provide excellent habitat for many species, including plants, invertebrates, and many small vertebrates, though stewardship gets really tricky.  It can be really challenging to manage those sites in a way that doesn’t eliminate any animal populations (by repeatedly burning the whole site, for example) while still staving off woody plants and invasive species.  However, when comparing a bunch of small prairies to each other, we can come up with criteria for determining which are higher or lower-quality.

On the flip side, there are parts of the world where we still have huge, unplowed grassland landscapes.  These prairies have the scale to support a lot of animals that can’t survive in isolated small prairies, and – if managed appropriately – the habitat structure those species need as well.  That might even include many large animals like bison and pronghorn, or other charismatic species like prairie dogs or prairie grouse. 

The Nebraska Sandhills is 12 million acres of contiguous native prairie.
Pronghorn – one of many large prairie animals supported by the Nebraska Sandhills.

However, in some of those landscapes, much of the prairie has lost plant diversity and/or populations of plant species that used to be there, and that has big implications.  Not only is the plant community an important component of “quality”, it also supports many of the other organisms that make up a strong, resilience grassland community.  Scale and habitat heterogeneity can make up for some of that, but species diversity is also a huge component of resilience.

Looking across a landscape like this, with lots of grassland but varying degrees of plant diversity and other components, we can pick out places that we think are of higher quality than others.  The criteria we use to make those decisions, though, will surely be different than the ones we use in a landscape where only small prairie patches remain.

Here’s why all this matters:

All of us who live around and work with prairies evaluate them through our own lenses.  Some of the criteria we use are shared, but others are heavily influenced by local conditions.  That’s ok, but we should recognize the biases we each have.  More importantly, we should make sure we’re talking to and learning from each other. 

About 15 years ago, I wrote a post about these different views on prairie quality.  In that post, I talked about how some of us focus a lot on the species composition (mainly plant composition) of prairies, while others look more at habitat structure and processes.  Those tendencies tend to be correlated with geography (east/west) and with the amount of grassland remaining in landscapes. 

In that post, I was hoping to stir people to expand their definition of prairie quality and to borrow perspectives from others.  There’s been some movement in that direction, but there are still some big differences in the way people assess prairie quality, and that strongly influences the way those prairies are managed.

As examples, I would love to see people working in fragmented prairie landscapes think more about how to vary habitat structure across even relatively small prairie parcels to benefit invertebrates and larger wildlife species.  At the same time, I wish people in landscapes with much larger prairies would pay more attention to plant composition.  While we have extensive prairies where the plant communities are in terrific shape, there are also lots of places where plant diversity is relatively low and many plant species are hard to find. 

My family prairie is is surrounded by cropland. I work really hard to provide a variety of habitat structure types each year to support wildlife, while constantly striving to improve the plant community. I’ve learned a lot about how to do this (and measure success) from colleagues and friends across the country.

There are lots of ways to create more heterogeneous habitat structure in prairies – even small ones.  We also have ways of managing for, and even rebuilding, plant diversity in places where it has diminished.  Good, creative land stewards working in today’s grasslands should be able to do all of that.  However, we aim our stewardship at the goals we set for ourselves, and those goals are tied to the way we evaluate prairie quality.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to compare a 10-acre prairie fragment in northern Illinois to a 5,000-acre prairie pasture in central Kansas and argue about which is better.  It’s ok to say both are high-quality prairies (or not), based on local criteria.  What’s crucial is that we continue trying to learn from the way we each see and value our prairies.  All of us can benefit from expanding our perspectives, right?