Tag Archives: prairie

Hubbard Fellowship Blog – Mystery Tracks in the Snow

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This is a guest blog by Eliza Perry, one of our Hubbard Fellows.  All photos are by Eliza.

Last week I needed to check the fences around one of our properties. I only needed to walk a quarter of it to see that we had a lot of work to do.

During my travels, I found two mysterious tracks that I hope you all can help me identify. I stumped even Chris! (YES)

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See those weird claw-like marks? There were only these three sets of them, and they
were next to a bunch of small, amorphous tracks.  The tracks were bigger than cat tracks and smaller than dog tracks.

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Here’s a closer shot.

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The next mystery was this long trail. Chris suggested it was a collapsed vole tunnel,
but it is linear and vole tunnels seem to fork into many different smaller
tunnels. To me, it looked like something was dragging its belly, like a snake.

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Here’s it is a little closer, at a point that does look like a collapsed tunnel. But the rest of it was just an indentation on the snow.

Do you have any ideas?

Photo of the Week – February 20, 2014

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This the time of year when I start getting antsy to see green vegetation, flowers, and insects again.  Since our prairies are still brown and dormant, I have to live through photographs from previous field seasons.  Here is a photo from August 2012 I found yesterday while looking through old images.

A bush katydid on a rosinweed flower - The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

Bush katydid (Scudderia?) on a rosinweed (Silphium integrifolium) flower – The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

The beautiful green creature in this image is a katydid, not a grasshopper.  The easiest way to tell is by looking at the length of the antennae, which are very long on katydids but very short on grasshoppers.  There are numerous species of both katydids and grasshoppers in our prairies, and by late summer, most have gone through their final molt and have become fully adult – with the wings to prove it.

You may not be aware that katydids have special hearing devices on their legs.  In the photo above, you can see dark pits in the “forearms” of the insect, right below their “elbows”.  Inside those pits are tympana that vibrate just as our own eardrums do.  For an excellent description of this, and an explanation of how it’s an advantage to the katydid to have its ears on its legs, read this post on the Living with Insects Blog.