Tag Archives: roost

Photos of the Week – September 30, 2026

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Quick note: The Hubbard Fellowship application period has been extended through this coming weekend. Applications are now due at midnight on Sunday October 4. Click here to apply and please pass the word!

I was in north central Nebraska over the weekend because Kim was running the Cowboy 100 ultramarathon. She ran 100 miles in about 23 hours, getting third place among women and sixth place overall – a great race for her!

While she was running, I ended up finding an opportunity to photograph more monarch butterflies than the miles Kim ran. I stumbled upon a big roost just north of the town of Bassett, Nebraska. I was driving slowly down a dirt road and flushed a few butterflies from the tree line to my right. They flew up and then circled back to the tree they’d come from. Intriguing. When I stopped and looked more closely, I saw that there were hundreds of them in scattered groups along about 1/4 mile of trees. Most were high up in the branches, and the overcast skies made photography difficult, but I found a few groups I could capture images of during some brief periods of slightly brighter skies.

Monarchs fluttering their wings as one of their compatriots flew past.

I was particularly glad to find this roost because it’s more evidence of the value of this part of the world to monarchs. I feel like the Midwest and eastern U.S. gets most of the attention when it comes to monarch conservation efforts and funding. We should certainly spend money in that part of the country to improve habitat. However, further west in the Great Plains, there are tons of monarchs as well, both during breeding and migratory seasons. The numbers are underreported, largely because the human population is low and most of the landscape is privately-owned and not well-explored by people who count butterflies.

I made sure to report this roost and get another data point out there. As I shared the sighting with some local friends, I was told they were also seeing lots of monarchs coming through, both in their yards and on the ranches they work on. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the 12 million acres of Sandhills prairies (and the other 8 million acres of grassland in Nebraska) provide a lot of monarch butterfly habitat, but it’s apparently a story we need to keep telling people. So, here I am telling it.

A slightly wider view of that same group shown above.
An even wider view of the same group. I count 54 monarchs in this photo.

Apart from the monarch roost, I didn’t find many other photo opportunities during the day. It was dark and dreary and just breezy enough that things didn’t line up well for photography. Plus, of course, I had race obligations – I had to stay ahead of Kim and meet her at the various aid stations where I could fill her up on water and encouragement. I did stop and watch a little family of milkweed bugs feeding on some milkweed pods, though. I also wandered around and enjoyed seeing the sights without trying to photograph everything I saw.

Large milkweed bugs on common milkweed.

As the sun went down Saturday night, a large full (or close) moon rose from the opposite horizon. As it emerged, large and pink, I was helping Kim get back on the trail, but once she was on her way, I drove out of town and found a spot where I could take a few quick photos before it got too high.

Full moon, cottonwood tree, and a country road.

My next photo opportunity came at about 4 in the morning. I managed an hour or two of sleep (car camping) but kept waking up to check on Kim’s progress (online tracking tool). When it was clear I wasn’t going to sleep anymore, I stopped fighting it and drove up to a high point above the Niobrara River, where the full moon and rolling clouds of fog created some magical conditions for photography.

Ponderosa pines at the top of a ridge that dropped down to the Niobrara River (which was concealed by fog). The only light source was the moon.

I spent time photographing ponderosa pines silhouetted against the moonlit fog and, periodically, glimpses of the stars above. I also went out into the dew-covered prairie and silhouetted some grasses against the sky as well. Despite being sleep deprived, I was no longer feeling tired. I was totally consumed by beauty all around me and tried my best to capture some of it.

A few stars are visible above these pines but the fog closed that gap soon after I took the photo.
Pines, fog, and the moon.
More of the same.
Indiangrass and foggy moonlight.
A different patch of grass.

After Kim finished her race at about 7am, I had one more brief window of photography time and focused mostly on the thousands of dew-covered spiders and webs that were scattered along the Cowboy Trail.

Orb weaver (Larinia borealis)
Orb weaver (Larinia borealis)
A different species of orb weaver (Neoscona pratensis).
Spider silk and switchgrass.

Then it was time to head home so both Kim and I could catch up on sleep. I drove and Kim tried to doze while icing her ankle and trying to get her stomach to settle enough to eat some food. Ultramarathoners do this for fun…

A runner coming through the fog on Sunday morning, heading toward the distant finish line.

I’m mostly caught up on sleep now and Kim is already dreaming about future races. Fine with me! I’m happy to hand out dry socks, nutrition, and encouraging words now and then if I also get time to kick around some beautiful places with my camera. It’s also fun to see Kim do something she’s really good at, even if I think it stretches the definition of “fun” a little.

If you want to see a little video of the race Kim ran, check out this link. It’s a local news story featuring the Cowboy 200/100 ultramarathon. There’s video of Kim crossing the finish line right at the beginning of the clip and brief interviews of a few of the top runners trying to explain why they do what they do.

Photo of the Week – August 3, 2018

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I walked around one of our newer prairie/wetland restoration sites yesterday morning.  The sun was just starting to punch some holes in low-lying fog and everything was wet.  A cool and wet summer morning is usually a great time to find immobile insects and photograph them, but I for some reason I wasn’t seeing much as I walked.  Not a dragonfly, not a butterfly, not even a big ol’ beetle…  I did eventually find some bees encased in dew drops, waiting for the sun to emerge to warm and dry them.

A sunflower bee (Svastra obliqua) hides beneath a wet sawtooth sunflower leaf while waiting for morning fog to completely disperse.

Unlike females, male solitary bees don’t have nests to defend and spend most of their days chasing around foraging females.  When night comes, most species (except for a few night-feeding bees) just find a convenient place to shelter until morning.  Many times, they seem to choose roost sites where they can be a little protected from potential predators, but other times they just end up on the exposed surface of a flower (the equivalent of falling asleep on their dinner plate, I guess).  Most of the bees I saw yesterday were at least somewhat hidden- which is why I had to look pretty hard to find them, but there were a few out in the open as well, including the one pictured below.

This little fella (Melissodes agilis) looks like he fell asleep and became covered in dew drops while feeding on this rosinweed plant (Silphium integrifolium).

As I wandered along a wetland swale, I was admiring one of my favorite plants – prairie gentian (Eustoma grandiflorum) – when I happened to look down inside the blossom and spotted a fuzzy little bee.  Because it seemed like a convenient and relatively safe hiding place for bees, I started looking into other flowers too, and sure enough, I found more bees.

An agile long-horned bee (Melissodes agilis) sheltering inside a prairie gentian blossom. The circular holes in the flower petals were made by a different kind of bee – a leaf cutting bee, harvesting materials for its nest construction.

All the bees I was seeing in the prairie gentian flowers looked like the same species to me, but I’ve become smart enough not to overestimate my ability to tell bee species apart, so I double checked with Mike Arduser.  Mike confirmed that they are all male agile long-horned bees (Melissodes agilis), as was the bee I’d seen on the rosinweed flower.  He said they appear to have just recently emerged, based on their fresh appearance.  I’ll take his word for that and so should you.

There are actually three bees stacked on top of each other on this flower.

Mike also confirmed that the agile long-horned bees don’t have any particular tie to prairie gentian (they don’t specialize on its pollen or use it for nesting sites or materials).  Instead, it just appears a number of them independently recognized the potential value of prairie gentian flowers as safe overnight roost sites.  If I hadn’t been specifically admiring the gentian flowers, I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed the bees.  I’m guessing most predators wouldn’t have spotted them either, though if a smart predator had happened to find one then and decided to do what I did and check other flowers nearby, it would have had a pretty easy time filling up on bees for breakfast!

After hearing from Mike, I followed up with a series of questions I’m guessing even he can’t answer.  Among those, I’m wondering if an individual bee returns to the same roost site night after night – assuming it isn’t disturbed while sleeping the previous night.  If that hasn’t been studied, it seems like it would be relatively easy to do a mark and recapture study on them.  The trick might be to catch the bees AFTER they leave their roost, though, so they don’t associate that roost site with being caught…  Ok, maybe it wouldn’t be as easy as I was thinking.  If you try it, however, let me know what you figure out!