Tag Archives: wildflowers

The Penstemon Lumberjack Mystery

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Shell-leaf penstemon in a restored grassland at the Platte River Prairies back in 2021.

One of my favorite wildflowers is the spectacular shell-leaf penstemon (Penstemon grandiflorus). It’s one of the showiest of the opportunistic wildflowers in our prairies. Shell-leaf penstemon thrives under heavy grazing, in sandy and/or low-productivity soils, or other places where most other plants struggle. Every year, as the month of May progresses, I watch closely for the first blooms so I can get out and photograph them.

Which is why it really ticks me off that an unknown entity chops a bunch of them down every year. I don’t know who’s doing it, I don’t know why they’re doing it, and it’s incredibly frustrating. I’m sorry to lose the flowers, but my biggest resentment is that I can’t explain what’s happening.

What’s particularly confusing is that whomever cuts the top of these plants off with their teeth doesn’t appear to then eat anything it removes. The tops of the plants are just left lying around.

It’s almost as if someone is annoyed by the excessive height of the plants and has a compulsion to hack them down and keep them short. Or maybe they just hate beautiful flowers. But if that’s the case, there are plenty of other gorgeous wildflowers in the prairie they could attack and I’ve never seen this “cut and leave it lie” behavior with any other plant species in our prairies.

Having said that, I guess prairie dogs do chop plants down around their towns, but we don’t have prairie dogs at the Platte River Prairies. Unless they’re really, really sneaky prairie dogs. I’m not dismissing any possibilities right now, but that one feels pretty far-fetched.

What is happening? Why would some animal nip the top off a penstemon plant and then just leave it there??

My top candidates are black-tailed jackrabbits, but thirteen-lined ground squirrels are high on that list, too. It also feels like the kind of thing a cranky, vindictive white-tailed deer might do, but the sharp angled cut feels more like rabbit or rodent. Google says pocket gophers can reduce the size of penstemon populations, but they’re underground foragers, so they don’t seem likely.

To be clear, I don’t begrudge any animal its search for food. By all means, eat all the plants you want to eat! In fact, it makes me feel good to know that our prairies and stewardship work are providing sustenance for wildlife.

But this looks like wanton destruction, not foraging. Apart from disliking the height or beauty of the plant, the only other explanation I can come up with is that something wants access to the liquid inside the stem. Are rabbits cutting the tops off the plants and then sipping xylem and/or phloem out of the stems like a kid with a soda straw?

Now that I’ve got that visual in my head, if that’s what’s going on, what I’m most mad about is that I’ve not gotten to watch it happen. It sounds adorable.

You can see the tops of the plants lying next to the bases they were nipped off of.
The sharp angled cuts look like what I’d expect from a rabbit or ground squirrel.

I’m hoping those of you who read this will have some helpful information for me. Have you seen this near you? Have you seen it with other plants besides shell-leaf penstemon? Any idea who would do it, or why? Do you have friends who might know? Acquaintances?

I don’t want to pressure you, but honestly, if we can’t use this blog’s reach and influence to solve a simple mystery like this, why am I wasting my time with it? I could do other things with my life. For example, I could…

Hm. Ok, I retract that threat.

But still, someone out there has to have an explanation, right? I’ve been seeing this phenomenon for years, so it’s not an isolated incident. I’m also pretty sure it’s not just one ill-tempered individual jackrabbit with a bad attitude about penstemon. As far as I know, jackrabbits don’t usually live longer than five years and I’ve been watching this for more than a decade.

Thanks in advance for your help. Any reporting will be appreciated. If you’ve seen something similar, tell me both where you saw it and any relevant details – plant species, topography, soil type, local rodent/lagomorph species, most popular local sports team, etc. We don’t know what will constitute key information, so the more the better. If you yourself don’t have anything to report, please pass this post on to others who might know something. Let’s figure this out!

Photos of the Week – May 8, 2025

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This week, I’ve found two different brief opportunities to poke around some local prairies with my camera. Both prairies were nice remnant (unplowed) grasslands with a good diversity of early season wildflowers, native sedges, and other little treasures.

My first stop was at Gjerloff Prairie, a terrific loess hills prairie owned and managed by Prairie Plains Resource Institute. It’s only about 20 minutes north of my house here in Aurora, so it’s a site I know pretty well. I usually try to visit at least once or twice each spring because it has some wildflower species I don’t see often in other prairies near home.

Showy vetchling (Lathyrus polymorphus) at sunrise.
The same plant, photographed at a slightly different angle to get the sun behind it.
Big portions of Gjerloff Prairie were burned this spring, and recently enough that there weren’t yet any flowers blooming in those burned areas. That meant I had to walk further than usual to get to some unburned areas and open flowers.
Prairie ragwort (Packera plattensis) is a terrific little biennial.
I have a hard time not photographing showy vetchling when it’s blooming.
More from the same patch of showy vetchling.
False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum stellatum) is a confusing plant to me (I still love it) because I first learned it as a woodland plant but it does well in the middle of some open prairies as well.

Later in the week, I took a break from other projects and wandered around one of our sedge meadow/prairie sites (Caveny Tract) at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies. It’s a site with sandy alluvial (river deposited) soils, but still has a fair amount of overlap with Gjerloff Prairie in terms of plant species blooming right now. Prairie ragwort, pussytoes, and fringed puccoon are just a few examples. (For some reason a lot of the current wildflowers are yellow.) However, there are lots of different plants as well.

Prairie ragwort with a tiny moth at the Platte River Prairies.
Fringed puccoon (Lithospermum incisum)
Yellow stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta) is a “locally common” wildflower along the Platte River. It’s not in all sites, but can be very abundant in some.

The Caveny Tract includes more than 350 acres of prairie that is adjacent to hundreds of acres more. There are lots of little sedge meadow habitats embedded in the prairie, mostly in old swales formed by the meandering Platte River hundreds or thousands of years ago. Those swales are now close enough to groundwater to host a mixture of wetland and mesic prairie plants. Those sedge meadows, not surprisingly, contain both an abundance and diversity of sedges. In many places, you can stand still and see half a dozen sedge species within a few yards of your feet.

That’s assuming you’ve spent enough time with a dichotomous plant key to learn to identify some of the different sedge species. If you’ve never used a dichotomous key to identify plants, you’re missing a terrific opportunity to be overwhelmed by botanical terminology. I know enough to recognize differences between most sedge species and can identify the more common ones on sight. Every once in a while, I’ll grab a sample of one and run it through the key to stay in practice (and try to confirm my identification guess). It can take a while, mostly because I have to keep referring to the glossary to remember what a lot of the words mean.

If I did it more often, of course, I’d be better at keying plants. On the other hand, there are other things I’d rather be good at, so it’s all a matter of perspective and prioritization. I’m an ecologist, not a botanist, entomologist, or ornithologist. I don’t have to know all the species within any particular taxonomic group. I just need to know enough of them that I can recognize interactions between them. Or, at least, this is what I tell myself when I don’t feel like keying out plants.

I’m pretty sure this is Carex tetanica, one of many sedge species in the wet meadows of the Caveny tract and surrounding areas.

Here’s an example of what I mean about the terminology needed to quickly run through a plant key. The sedge pictured above is probably Carex tetanica. I think that because its lower pistillate spikelets appear to be loosely flowered, as compared to those on Carex meadii. Both species have perigynia with 2 strong marginal ribs and are glaucous at maturity. Their pistillate scales are also usually purplish brown on each side of the midrib.

If you’re a botanist, all the words in that paragraph probably make perfect sense (though you may also tell me that the pictured plant is Carex meadii rather than C. tetanica and I won’t argue with you). If you’re an ecologist like me, you’re content to live with a little uncertainty and keep some brain space reserved for other words and ideas.

These buttercups were thriving in a particularly low/wet part of a slough where a tree clearing/thinning project recently took place along the south edge of the Caveny tract. What species of buttercups are they? I have no idea. They’re really pretty, though.

The photographic highlight of my Caveny Tract exploration was a big patch of pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) going to seed. I spotted the pale patch of fuzzy plants from 50 yards away or so. Growing right in the middle of it was a lone prairie ragwort plant. I found the combination of the two species really attractive and spent a lot of time photographing the ragwort flowers surrounded by the pale fluff.

Prairie ragwort and pussytoes
Prairie ragwort and pussytoes
Prairie ragwort and pussytoes
Prairie ragwort and pussytoes

These are just a few of the many photos I liked from the myriad composition options I played with. I used three different lenses to photograph the flowers, including a wide angle, a macro telephoto (180mm) and a longer telephoto (400mm). After I’d been shooting for a while, a little sweat bee arrived on the scene and kept me captivated for a few more minutes.

Prairie ragwort and pussytoes with a sweat bee for fun

Later in the season, both of these prairies will have much bigger, more abundant, and showier flowers. Right now, the short stature and scattered nature makes most of the blooms are hard to see from the road. From that perspective, it doesn’t look like much is happening in the grasslands. Once you start walking, though, wildflowers are dotted around throughout and each one is a joy to come across. That’s especially true if you’re just appreciating their beauty and not worrying about whether their achenes are tuberculate or not.