Tag Archives: spring

Photo of the Week – May 19, 2017

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Over the last five years or so, I’ve been learning a lot more about pollinators, and that has changed the way I look at prairies.  As I walk around our prairies, I often think about how I would see the site if I was a bee trying to find enough nectar and pollen to both survive and provision my eggs.  Often, our prairies are full of flowers, but April and May can be pretty tough months.  The flowers that are blooming tend to be small and scattered, and I can walk a lot of steps without finding anything.

Prairie ragwort (Packera plattensis) was a welcome sight for this orange sulphur butterfly after its northward migration this spring.

The lack of available flowers in the spring is not necessarily a new thing.  Spring weather is unpredictable, and investing resources in blooming early means risking a late freeze or (in some cases) flooding rains that can scuttle the whole process.  However, many prairies today have fewer spring flowers than they used to, and restored prairies (crop fields converted back to prairie vegetation) are often low on spring flowers because finding seed for those species is difficult.  Flowering shrubs can help make up for a scarcity of spring wildflowers, but they are also less common these days than they used to be.

Shrubs like this wild plum (Prunus americana) can provide critically important pollinator resources when few wildflowers are blooming. This photo was taken back in mid-April.

Prairie managers and gardeners can both play important roles in helping to provide spring flowers for pollinators.  In prairies, allowing shrubs to grow in some areas of the landscape can benefit pollinators in the spring, but also help out increasingly rare shrub-nesting birds during the summer.  Thinking about spring flower availability might also help inform prairie management plans, and enhancing restored, or even remnant prairies, to add missing spring wildflowers might be beneficial as well.  For gardeners, adding native spring wildflowers can be both aesthetically pleasing and extremely important for the bees and other pollinators in your neighborhood.

By the time this monarch emerges as an adult in a few weeks, there should be plenty of wildflowers available for it. Hopefully, it will be competing for nectar against a number of bees and other pollinators that made it through a tough spring season.

Photo of the Week – April 20, 2017

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I’ve been enjoying the early flush of wildflowers this spring, and have been trying to photograph them when I get time.  Because I already have quite a few close-up portraits of most of these species already, I’ve been trying to use a wide-angle lens to show the flowers in a broader context.  It means lying prone on the ground with the camera resting either on the ground or on my hand to get both the flowers and the landscape/sky behind them into the same frame.

Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) at our family prairie near Stockham, Nebraska.

Pussytoes are an easy one to photograph because they are allelopathic and hinder the growth of neighboring plants.  That short vegetation helps pussytoes plants compete with others, but also makes it easier me to photograph them without stray leaves and other plant parts getting in the way.  For other species, I’ve been spending most of my time photographing the flowers growing in sites that were grazed hard last year.  The grazing makes photography easier, but the access to light and weakened grass competition also stimulates more of the plants to flower than in ungrazed sites.  I’ve been collecting data on flowering plant numbers over the last several days, and the data confirm my casual observations.  There are many more flowers in prairie patches recovering from grazing than in patches that haven’t been grazed much in the last year or two.

Prairie violets (Viola pedatifida) in the area of our family prairie we grazed most intensively last year.

Carolina anemone (Anemone caroliniana) at Gjerloff Prairie, owned by Prairie Plains Resource Institute.  They are having a great year in the part of the prairie that was burned and grazed in 2016.

Ground plum (Astragalus crassicarpus) at the Helzer prairie.

More pussytoes at the Helzer prairie, with a little bit of dried manure for flavor.

For pollinator insects, this early spring period can be very challenging because flowering plants are in pretty short supply.  There aren’t many species blooming, and those that are tend to be spread sparsely across large areas.  At least in the prairies around here, last year’s grazing is increasing numbers of available resources for pollinators, including both short-lived and long-lived plant species.  That appears to be particularly valuable this year, given the number of butterfly and moth species taking advantage of strong south winds to make an early migration to Nebraska.  I can’t remember a year when we’ve seen so many of those insects in April, including monarchs (which we’re now seeing frequently), sulphurs, red admirals and many little moths.

Now, here’s a question I hope someone out there can help answer:  Pussytoes flowers are dioecius, meaning that some plants have male flowers and others have female flowers.  My understanding is that pussytoes is pollinated both by wind and by insects.  If the male flowers produce pollen but the females don’t, what attracts insects to move from male flowers to females and complete the pollination cycle?  Do the female flowers produce nectar?  I see mainly flies, and a few bees, landing on pussytoes.  I don’t think those flies could be accessing nectar from deep inside the flower, and I don’t see any evidence of nectar near the top (or in any part) of the flower.  Also, most of those flies and bees seem to be landing on male flowers, and I rarely see them on female blossoms.  Can anyone help me understand why/how this pollination process works?