pollinators | The Prairie Ecologist

This week, I’ve found two different brief opportunities to poke around some local prairies with my camera. Both prairies were nice remnant (unplowed) grasslands with a good diversity of early season wildflowers, native sedges, and other little treasures.

My first stop was at Gjerloff Prairie, a terrific loess hills prairie owned and managed by Prairie Plains Resource Institute. It’s only about 20 minutes north of my house here in Aurora, so it’s a site I know pretty well. I usually try to visit at least once or twice each spring because it has some wildflower species I don’t see often in other prairies near home.

Showy vetchling (*Lathyrus polymorphus*) at sunrise.

The same plant, photographed at a slightly different angle to get the sun behind it.

Big portions of Gjerloff Prairie were burned this spring, and recently enough that there weren’t yet any flowers blooming in those burned areas. That meant I had to walk further than usual to get to some unburned areas and open flowers.

Prairie ragwort (*Packera plattensis*) is a terrific little biennial.

I have a hard time not photographing showy vetchling when it’s blooming.

More from the same patch of showy vetchling.

False Solomon’s seal (*Maianthemum stellatum*) is a confusing plant to me (I still love it) because I first learned it as a woodland plant but it does well in the middle of some open prairies as well.

Later in the week, I took a break from other projects and wandered around one of our sedge meadow/prairie sites (Caveny Tract) at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies. It’s a site with sandy alluvial (river deposited) soils, but still has a fair amount of overlap with Gjerloff Prairie in terms of plant species blooming right now. Prairie ragwort, pussytoes, and fringed puccoon are just a few examples. (For some reason a lot of the current wildflowers are yellow.) However, there are lots of different plants as well.

Prairie ragwort with a tiny moth at the Platte River Prairies.

Fringed puccoon (*Lithospermum incisum*)

Yellow stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta) is a “locally common” wildflower along the Platte River. It’s not in all sites, but can be very abundant in some.

The Caveny Tract includes more than 350 acres of prairie that is adjacent to hundreds of acres more. There are lots of little sedge meadow habitats embedded in the prairie, mostly in old swales formed by the meandering Platte River hundreds or thousands of years ago. Those swales are now close enough to groundwater to host a mixture of wetland and mesic prairie plants. Those sedge meadows, not surprisingly, contain both an abundance and diversity of sedges. In many places, you can stand still and see half a dozen sedge species within a few yards of your feet.

That’s assuming you’ve spent enough time with a dichotomous plant key to learn to identify some of the different sedge species. If you’ve never used a dichotomous key to identify plants, you’re missing a terrific opportunity to be overwhelmed by botanical terminology. I know enough to recognize differences between most sedge species and can identify the more common ones on sight. Every once in a while, I’ll grab a sample of one and run it through the key to stay in practice (and try to confirm my identification guess). It can take a while, mostly because I have to keep referring to the glossary to remember what a lot of the words mean.

If I did it more often, of course, I’d be better at keying plants. On the other hand, there are other things I’d rather be good at, so it’s all a matter of perspective and prioritization. I’m an ecologist, not a botanist, entomologist, or ornithologist. I don’t have to know all the species within any particular taxonomic group. I just need to know enough of them that I can recognize interactions between them. Or, at least, this is what I tell myself when I don’t feel like keying out plants.

I’m pretty sure this is *Carex tetanica*, one of many sedge species in the wet meadows of the Caveny tract and surrounding areas.

Here’s an example of what I mean about the terminology needed to quickly run through a plant key. The sedge pictured above is probably Carex tetanica. I think that because its lower pistillate spikelets appear to be loosely flowered, as compared to those on Carex meadii. Both species have perigynia with 2 strong marginal ribs and are glaucous at maturity. Their pistillate scales are also usually purplish brown on each side of the midrib.

If you’re a botanist, all the words in that paragraph probably make perfect sense (though you may also tell me that the pictured plant is Carex meadii rather than C. tetanica and I won’t argue with you). If you’re an ecologist like me, you’re content to live with a little uncertainty and keep some brain space reserved for other words and ideas.

These buttercups were thriving in a particularly low/wet part of a slough where a tree clearing/thinning project recently took place along the south edge of the Caveny tract. What species of buttercups are they? I have no idea. They’re really pretty, though.

The photographic highlight of my Caveny Tract exploration was a big patch of pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) going to seed. I spotted the pale patch of fuzzy plants from 50 yards away or so. Growing right in the middle of it was a lone prairie ragwort plant. I found the combination of the two species really attractive and spent a lot of time photographing the ragwort flowers surrounded by the pale fluff.

These are just a few of the many photos I liked from the myriad composition options I played with. I used three different lenses to photograph the flowers, including a wide angle, a macro telephoto (180mm) and a longer telephoto (400mm). After I’d been shooting for a while, a little sweat bee arrived on the scene and kept me captivated for a few more minutes.

Prairie ragwort and pussytoes with a sweat bee for fun

Later in the season, both of these prairies will have much bigger, more abundant, and showier flowers. Right now, the short stature and scattered nature makes most of the blooms are hard to see from the road. From that perspective, it doesn’t look like much is happening in the grasslands. Once you start walking, though, wildflowers are dotted around throughout and each one is a joy to come across. That’s especially true if you’re just appreciating their beauty and not worrying about whether their achenes are tuberculate or not.

Life is funny sometimes. Last week, I spent a morning setting up some research plots aimed at helping us learn how to suppress the growth and spread of deciduous shrubs in grasslands. When I finished, I walked about 50 yards to a patch of wild plum (a deciduous shrub) and spent a half hour photographing an incredible abundance of pollinators using the patch as a source of food. Really makes you think, huh?

Wild plum, aka American plum (*Prunus americana*) at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies.

Deciduous shrubs, of course, are great. Wild plum, for example, is one of several early-blooming native shrubs that play a vital role for pollinators in April. There aren’t a lot of blossoms among the herbaceous prairie plants in our area at this time of year. As a result, blooming shrubs draw insects in like big, showy, nice-smelling magnets. Aside from their pretty, nutritious flowers, shrubs also create nice little pockets of habitat for a lot of animals that need a little woody cover with their prairie vegetation.

On the other hand, deciduous shrubs have been spreading into and through grasslands at an increased rate. That rate of spread is caused by a lot of factors, including changes in native browser populations and a style of landscape fragmentation that has broken grasslands into pieces and introduced woody plants along the edges of those pieces. Most importantly, higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are fueling the growth and spread of deciduous woody plants in a way that is very different than even a couple decades ago.

Adding all that up, it can be hard to know how to feel about and act around deciduous shrubs in prairies. Shrubs yay? Shrubs boo? Yes.

Probably the same species of sweat bee as shown above, but a different individual.

This photo give you some idea of how many little pollinators were using the plum blossoms. All those little specks are flies, bees, and/or wasps.

I was only able to photograph a tiny fraction of the pollinator species frenetically bouncing between the plum blossoms. Many were so tiny, it was hard to photograph them at all, and most were moving so quickly, I couldn’t focus my lens before they skipped off to the next flower. Even so, I managed to capture a decent sample of the kind of diversity I was seeing. You’ll just have to imagine the others.

A drone fly with kaleidoscope eyes. I assume her name is Lucy.

Managing the size and spread of deciduous shrub patches is already a major focus of many prairie managers. The challenge of dealing with that issue is growing like – well, like a patch of carbon dioxide-fueled deciduous shrubs. Most of the shrub species we’re facing, though, aren’t enemies. As with the wild plum I was photographing, the majority are native species that happen to be gaining a competitive edge because of a number of enabling conditions we can’t do much about.

As land stewards, we need to find ways to manage shrubbier grasslands for biodiversity and productivity because shrubbier grasslands are our future across much of the Midwest and Great Plains regions of North America. In fact, the future is already here in many places. We’re all free to think what we want of that future, but ignoring or denying it won’t do us much good.

But they’re also pretty! And they provide a lot of pollen, nectar, fruit, shelter, and other resources for prairie species.

A long-bodied, long-antennaed beetle with short wing coverings.

Really, the dual experiences I had with shrubs last week were a great illustration of how we should all be thinking about them. We have a lot to learn, and quickly, about how to manage the competition between shrubs and other prairie species. As we experiment with various approaches to the issue, we need to share our experiences with each other. At the same time, we should all recognize and celebrate the positive traits of those shrubs. That’ll help us make better decisions, but it’ll also give us a helpful perspective on the changes we see around us.

Happy Earth Day.

The Prairie Ecologist

Essays, photos, and discussion about prairie ecology, restoration, and management

Tag Archives: pollinators

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