Tag Archives: prairie

Photo of the Week – August 19, 2011

Posted on by
20

No, someone didn’t toss a mess of orange plastic twine out in the prairie, though that’s certainly what it looks like.  That crazy jumble of orange is the parasitic plant called dodder (Cuscuta sp.).  It has no chlorophyll, so is unable to photosynthesize – hence the non-green color.  Instead, it attaches itself to its host plants and extracts food from them.  The dodder in our prairies appears to favor goldenrod and sunflower species.

A patch of parasitic dodder on Canada goldenrod in a restored Platte River prairie, Nebraska.

Dodder has no leaves, and only tiny flowers that produce tiny seeds.  We’ve never harvested the seeds, but dodder shows up in our restored prairies anyway.  I think that’s great.  The fact that a parasitic plant can find and colonize amongst its host plants is just another indication that our restored prairies are functioning well.  I’ve never been able to find anyone who knows much about how its seeds travel, but there is a lot of speculation that they hitch rides on people, equipment, and animals.  Whatever – it seems to work!

I have a soft spot for species like dodder that have made their own counter-culture way in life.  (I no longer remove cowbird eggs from grassland bird nests for the same reason – so sue me.)  A plant that doesn’t even have leaves?  What a great idea!  Why make your own food if you can get it from someone else??

I’ve never seen evidence that dodder is eaten by anything, though I have to assume that something feeds on it.  Otherwise, we’d probably be swimming in dodder – and that might reduce its attraction to me just a little!

Photo of the Week – August 12, 2011

Posted on by
8

As the sun neared the horizon during my evening prairie walk in Missouri last week (see last week’s Photo of the Week post) I had to be more selective about what I tried to photograph.  The low light intensity and the light breeze that was kicking up made it difficult to photograph flowers or insects – or anything else that moved or swayed very much. 

I found two last opportunities before I gave up and headed back to the hotel.  The first was a close-up photo of a compass plant leaf that was backlit by the sunset. The initial challenge was to find a leaf that was positioned so that I could set up the camera with the lens parallel to the leaf (which allowed me to get the whole leaf in focus).  I also needed the leaf to have shadows behind it so that the background, as seen through the spaces between the lobes of the leaf, would be dark and uniform in color/texture.  Once I found an appropriate leaf, I played around with exposure until I found the right balance between light coming through the leaf and the shadowed background.  Fortunately, the leaf was low enough to the ground that the light breeze didn’t move it too much.

A compass plant leaf lit from behind by the setting sun. Taberville Prairie, Missouri.

The second shot was simply a silhouette of a compass plant against the setting sun.  By shooting right at the sun, and not caring if the foreground went fairly dark, I was able to use a fast-enough shutter speed to freeze the slightly swaying compass plant.  The trick was to find an exposure that preserved some color in the sky but also enough detail in the foreground to make the photo interesting.  I was able to do a little correction in Photoshop to accentuate both, but in order for that to work, I still had to capture both the light and detail in the original photo.

Compass plant silhouette against the sunset. Taberville Prairie, Missouri.

It was a great evening.  Thanks again to the Missouri Department of Conservation for the invitation, and to Len Gilmore and Matt Hill for the tour of Taberville Prairie.  I look forward to going back sometime to see more of the beautiful prairies in southwest Missouri.