Tag Archives: nebraska

Saving Nebraska’s Oak Woodlands… by Burning Them

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Last week, I helped arrange a tour of recently-burned oak woodlands at Indian Cave State Park, an eastern Nebraska site owned and managed by Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.  Indian Cave State Park is one of very few deciduous woodlands in Nebraska that is managed with prescribed fire.  The Nature Conservancy’s Rulo Bluffs Preserve is another, but while we started using fire back in the mid 1990’s, we’ve not been able to use it as consistently as we’d like.  Seeing the results of four years of annual burning at Indian Cave State Park was a good incentive to keep trying to find ways to increase our burn frequency down at Rulo.  You can read here about a fire we conducted at Rulo last year.

Kent Pfeiffer (center) stands in a portion of woodland that has been burned four years in a row and points out some of the changes that have occurred over that time.

The tour was led by Gerry Steinauer (state botanist for Nebraska Game and Parks) and Kent Pfeiffer (Northern Prairies Land Trust), who have been leading the charge for woodland burning in eastern Nebraska.  In addition to Kent and Gerry, and several other Game and Parks biologists, the tour group included staff from the Nebraska Forest Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

We started by talking about why Game and Parks is implementing prescribed fire at Indian Cave State Park.  Some of those reasons include:

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Ground Nesting Robins?

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Walking the prairies this morning, I found a bird’s nest on the ground.  That would have been fun, but not really newsworthy, except that it appeared to be a robin’s nest.  I can’t think of any other bird species around that lays blue eggs in open cup nests except dickcissels, and dickcissels haven’t arrived yet this spring.  I think the eggs were too big for bluebirds, and both bluebirds and starlings lay blue eggs in nests placed in tree cavities (or nesting boxes).  In addition, there was a robin hanging around the area…

A robin nest (?) on the ground in a burned/grazed portion of our Platte River Prairies.

I’m sure it’s not the first time it’s happened, but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a robin nest on the ground.  Maybe our efforts to keep trees from encroaching on our prairies have been so successful that robins can’t find trees to nest in?  

…That’s definitely not the case, though it was ironic that the nest was placed right at the base of a small Siberian elm tree that had been top-killed by a prescribed fire this spring.   I’m not sure what the bird’s actual rationale was for nesting on the ground, but I wish it luck.

A punctured egg a few feet away from the nest.

Unfortunately for the robins, it looks like I wasn’t the first to find the nest.  A few feet away from the nest I also found an egg that had apparently been removed from the nest  – and it had a hole punched in it.  Cowbird, maybe?