I feel like I need to apologize to long-time readers of this blog. This is the seventh spring season I’ve photographed and shared via this blog, and each of those spring seasons starts with essentially the same wildflower species. Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta), ground plum (Astragalus crassicarpus), and dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) – in no particular order – are the first three wildflowers I find and photograph almost every single year. I’m always excited to find them because they are an important signal of a new growing season, but also because I’m desperate for something vibrant and colorful to photograph after a long winter.
Sharing those spring flower photos with you each year feels to me like a shared celebration of the annual prairie rebirth, but I also imagine some of you checking in on the blog, seeing the photos, sighing deeply, and checking right back out again. If that’s you, I really do apologize, and you’re free to go. I’ll try to do better next week. For the rest of you, guess what! It’s spring! Look at these gorgeous flowers!!
Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) was blooming at our family prairie this week. Most were extraordinarily short still, but flowering nonetheless. It was as if they didn’t feel like they had time to grow to their typical height – they just needed to BLOOM ALREADY.
Quite a few insects were flying between and crawling upon the pussytoes flowers, but many were tiny enough I had to look awfully close to see them. That included this tiny true bug.
Because of the extended cold weather this spring, the flowering season is getting a late start, but plants seem to be responding with phenomenal speed. I visited our prairie six days before this photo was taken and didn’t see any flowers of any kind. Less than a week later, ground plum (shown here) and its colleagues seemed to be racing to catch up, and were in full bloom in all their regular places.
Dandelions bloomed first, but were still difficult to find a week ago. Now they are all over the place, especially in places that were grazed hard last year.
More pussytoes.
While not particularly showy, the flowers of pussytoes must produce fairly significant resources of pollinator insects, at least in comparison to the mostly barren (of flowering plants) landscape around them. Flies were the most abundant visitors, but so were bees, moths, and even a few butterflies.
The Prairie Ecologist 