Tag Archives: platte river

Photos of the Week – February 5, 2026

Posted on by
3

I’m very grateful to have been featured in a short (6 1/2 minutes) video on Nebraska Public Media’s Nebraska Stories. A terrific film crew spent two days with me at the Niobrara Valley Preserve and the final product came out really beautifully. I hope you enjoy it. (If you’re reading this in an email, either click on the title of the post to make the video active or just click on this link.) Huge thanks to Kelly Rush, Tiffany Johanson, and Emily Kreutz with Nebraska Public Media.

In other news, I did my best to take advantage of the brief spell of frigid temperatures we had recently. It’s over now, though, and I went to the grocery store in a t-shirt today. That’s not winter! Where’s the snow, ice, and ice? It has all melted away.

I had two great mornings in late January, though, with some gorgeous frost and ice. The first was at my ol’ dependable restored wetland and the second was out on the frozen surface of the Platte River. I’ve been waiting all winter for the temperatures to stay cold long enough to make some solid ice for me to walk out on. Right before the cold spell ended, I finally got that chance.

There are a lot of photos below, but if you make it to the end of this irresponsibly long post, there is a fun little surprise at the end.

Here are the photos from the frosty wetland.

There was a little open water coming across one of the many beaver dams at the wetland. I spent some time with an icy branch sticking out over the water.

Now, here are the photos from the river. It was well below zero (F) on this morning and I almost stayed home because it looked like it might be too cloudy. As it happened, I had about 10 minutes of light while the sun rose up through the thin band of open space between the horizon and the clouds. I scrambled around as much as I could during that short window.

Once the sun went behind the clouds, I wandered around for maybe 45 minutes without taking any photos – just enjoying the day. Eventually, the sun rose high enough and gained enough intensity that I had enough light (barely) to work with. It was still pretty dark, but that’s just mood lighting, right?

Ok, here’s the fun part I promised. At least, I hope you think it’s fun. I found a couple interesting patterns in the ice and thought I’d check to see if you see what I see.

Mini Quiz Question #1: In the photo above, look at the creature in the center of the image with its head on the left side of its body. See it? Ok. What direction is that creature looking?

A. It’s clearly looking to the right. Is it Woodstock from the Peanuts cartoons?

B. It’s looking to the left. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s a larval salamander of some kind.

C. Are you talking about an actual creature or just something your imagination sees in the ice?

D. It can be whatever you think. Also, it might be Woodstock even if it’s looking to the left?

E. Someone made a cartoon about peanuts??

Mini Quiz Question #2: How angry is the bird in the photo above?

A. So angry. Wow. I wouldn’t want to meet that bird in a dark alley.

B. You’re talking about the bird looking to the left with the slanty eye? It does look pretty mad, but sometimes it’s hard to know. It might just be discussing a serious topic.

C. Again, do you really see a bird? I just see ice.

D. That’s no bird. The proportions are all wrong. Well, maybe a cartoon bird, I guess.

E. There’s no bird in that photo. That’s clearly a ___________. (Feel free to tell me what it is in the comments.)

Photo of the Week – June 9, 2018

Posted on by
12

This week’s featured photos include three small creatures.  One is a beetle (I have no idea which kind) that was barely visible to my naked eye.  A second is a nymph of a praying mantis – probably a Chinese mantis.  The third is the most exciting to me, which is a burrowing owl nesting in our Platte River Prairies this spring.

This tiny beetle was perched on one of the flowers of false gromwell, aka marbleseed (Onosmodium molle) last week.

A praying mantis nymph hunting on a milkweed plant.

I was able to get barely close enough to this owl for a photo by using my pickup as a photo blind. I still had to crop the image a little to make the owl as prominent as it is in the photo, but I wanted to stay far enough away that I didn’t discourage it from nesting.

Burrowing owls occupy burrows of other animals as nesting sites.  These tiny owls are about the same size as an American robin, but their wingspan can be up to 8 inches wider.  They have a fascinating habit of spreading animal dung around the entrance to their burrow to attract dung beetles – one of their favorite foods.

We usually see a few nesting pairs of burrowing owls up at the Niobrara Valley Preserve each year, and they can be found elsewhere in the Sandhills and western Nebraska, especially within prairie dog towns.  However, their populations are in decline across most of their continental range, and it’s uncommon to see them outside of landscapes of mostly intact grasslands.

In this case, this owl and its mate are using a badger hole for a nesting site.  As far as I know, this is the first burrowing owl pair that has nested in one of our Platte River Prairies during the 21 years I’ve been working here.  As you might expect, they are nesting in a site we burned this spring and that is being grazed fairly intensively by cattle.  On its own, this pair of owls doesn’t equate conservation success, but it’s one more piece of evidence that makes us feel good about our work.