My adult son has been giving me a hard time for several days about when I'm finally going to post again. I want to be clear that I'm posting this today because I want to, not because of his pestering. You hear me, John? This has nothing to do with you. I hope you like the photos, though. We're nine days into October but local prairies are still buzzing.

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!

Tuesday of this week was a cloudy day but the clouds thinned a little in the afternoon and made it worth carrying my camera around at the Platte River Prairies. Here are a bunch of photos from Tuesday afternoon, squeezed in amongst other work projects that day. The first series all come from one particularly nice-looking New England aster in a restored prairie we planted in 2016.

I've been sent hawk photos by two different people this week, asking if the photographed birds were red-tailed hawks. I'm really more into invertebrates and plants than birds these days, but I still remember enough from those earlier, simpler times in my career to be helpful. People tend to make hawk identification unnecessarily complicated, which is very frustrating for everyone involved.

I don't know about you but fall weather makes me want to test my natural history knowledge. If you're feeling the same way, there are probably good ways to do that somewhere on the internet. Or maybe even in real life. All I can offer is this dumb quiz. Sorry about that. What can we reasonably infer from the color pattern on this caterpillar?

Are you a recent college graduate looking for a career in conservation? Or will you be a recent college graduate by December? Would you like a year-long position in which you can gain a ton of different experiences without having to change jobs/locations every few months? The Hubbard Fellowship with The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska is a great way to complement your college education with real life experience - and lots of it.

I've been very lucky so far this month to have a lot of time to wander through prairies with my camera, both during and outside of work hours. Here is a selection of images from the first 10 days of September. Dotted gayfeather and annual buckwheat at the Niobrara Valley Preserve. A bumble bee joining the party. The Niobrara Valley Preserve continues to be accented by huge patches of annual buckwheat (

Back in 2025, Kaden Polt, a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln embarked upon an ambitious research and storytelling project. He deployed 54 camera traps to investigate and document the effects of prairie habitat heterogeneity on small mammals at The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies. Deer mice For five months, those cameras took photos of the animals that visited his traps, which were split between varying types of vegetation structure.

Prairies in central Nebraska continue to buzz with activity right now. Here are some local photos from the last week or so, along with a few from Wilson Lake in Kansas during Kim's most recent race (which she won! - more on that below). The first set of photos is from a morning at the Platte River Prairies, including a bunch from near or along our hiking trails.

Apologies for the nerdy subject matter in this post. I'm guessing it might be interesting to about 3% of you. For the rest of you, I tried to at least include a few pretty plant photos. I'll try to write about something more universally interesting next time. This is a post about the disparate ways coefficients of conservatism (C values) are assigned to plants in different places across the Central U.S.

This is a great time to visit local prairies here in east-central Nebraska. A lot of the bigger showy wildflowers are in bloom and there's a lot of insect activity, including a nice boost in monarch butterfly numbers and a lot of sound coming from mature grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids.

Kim and I recently moved across town. We waited a year before starting to work on the yard and garden, but things are underway now. Kim's in charge of the vast majority of the landscaping, but I'm putting together a strip of prairie plants along our east boundary. It'll take a few years to fill in all the space, both because I'll keep adding plants and because the early plants will grow and spread.

Quick last minute announcement - we are hosting a plant identification/habitat workshop at the Platte River Prairies next Tuesday (9am-2pm). Fore more information or to RSVP, please contact Kate Samuelson at kate.samuelson@tnc.org. I spent a couple days at the Niobrara Valley Preserve this week. There was a lot to see, as always. Here are some of the highlights.

Kim and I took our annual trip to the mountains last week. We've been refining our vacation strategy over the last several years, having recognized that we want somewhat different things from our trips. Kim wants to do some hiking and trail running, combining exercise and exploration. I want to camp where I can get decent morning and evening light for photography, and enough open area that it feels like I'm in a prairie - not closed in by steep mountains and dense forest.

A couple weeks ago, I arrived at our family prairie to find a couple milkweed plants being assaulted by Japanese beetles. That wasn't a surprise. My understanding is that Japanese beetles have been in the U.S. since about 1916. They're widely considered to be an invasive species because they are both non-native and because they can cause significant damage to both crops and native plants.

Over the last ten days or so, I've made several trips out to our family prairie. Those included (among others) two foggy mornings and a steamy evening, all of which lent themselves to photography. I tried to take advantage of the conditions, while fighting off mosquitos and sweating through my clothing. I also just about stepped on a skunk but both of us managed to extricate ourselves from the situation unharmed.

Reminder: please join us this Saturday for the Platte River Prairies field day. RSVP by contacting Kate at kate.samuelson@tnc.org. Kim and I both went up to the Niobrara Valley Preserve last week to help with that site's annual butterfly count. Neil Dankert leads this count every year, as he has for most of the last 38 or so years. Check out his terrific website on Nebraska moths and butterflies…

I was trying to pay attention to the tour. We were at the Shaw Nature Reserve for the 2026 Grassland Restoration Workshop and learning about some great prairie and woodland restoration projects. I really was trying to stay tuned in. Unfortunately, I couldn't stop watching carpenter bees steal nectar from penstemon flowers. Both the foxglove penstemon (Penstemon digitalis) and the carpenter bees (

Please join us for a fun day in the prairie on Saturday July 11! Our annual Platte River Prairies Field Day will feature opportunities to learn about the ecology of prairies and wetlands and the identification and natural history of small mammals, plants and invertebrates. You can help with active restoration projects by harvesting seed and make your own art project with pressed wildflowers.

Here's one of the top lessons I brought back from the Grassland Restoration Network workshop, hosted this year at the Shaw Nature Reserve in Missouri: There is a convoluted confusion of coneflowers in that part of the world. The prairies I work with in Nebraska have one species of purple coneflower - narrow-leaved purple coneflower (Echinacea angustifolia). It is a wonderful wildflower and more than sufficient for our needs.

I don't have a favorite plant. I don't even even have a favorite milkweed. Having said that, spider milkweed, aka green milkweed (Asclepias viridis) is right up there. It has gorgeous flowers, but they aren't particularly flashy. Their yellow-green color doesn't stand out from a distance like the orange of butterfly milkweed or the pinks/purples displayed by many taller milkweeds.

Photography is all about light, and quality outdoor light often comes in short spurts. Now and then, though, a long window opens up and it sure feels good when I have time to take advantage of it. Last Saturday morning was cloudy, which meant sunrise light wasn't anything worth rushing out the door for. On the other hand, the clouds were thin and it looked like they might hang around for a while, so I took time to eat some breakfast and then headed north to…

I spent a couple days at the Niobrara Valley Preserve this week. I'll be back again next week for our plant identification/habitat workshop on Tuesday May 19 (9am-2:30pm). If you're interested in joining us for that (it's free!), it's not too late to sign up. Just email Kate (kate.samuelson@tnc.org) to RSVP. There might even be some housing available on the preserve if you act fast!

When I woke up early last Saturday, I rolled very slowly out of bed and said to myself, "This is fun. You do this because it's fun." I looked at the clock (6am) and then looked at the outside thermometer (31 degrees F). "Fun, I thought. This is fun." Normally, I really don't mind getting up early for photography, but it had been a long week and I was behind on sleep.

Today's post is written by Sarah Kennings. Sarah and her colleague Leah Zuschlag joined The Nature Conservancy as Hubbard Fellows in early February of this year. Their Fellowship will run 12 months and end at the end of January 2027. Sarah comes from Chelsea, Michigan, graduated from Michigan Tech University, and came into the fellowship with immense enthusiasm and energy, along with many talents.

A bison bull at the Niobrara Valley Preserve this week Today, I want to share a bunch of announcements, a wonderful surprise I received last night, some photos from this week's trip to the Niobrara Valley Preserve, and some spring/summer prairie bingo cards. Thanks for your patience with this omnibus post. I'll start with an invitation to volunteer at The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies or Niobrara Valley Preserve.

This has been a month of having to squeeze little bursts of photography into tight windows. That's certainly not my ideal approach. Nevertheless, I managed some fun exploration time and came away with some images I liked. Here are some you haven't yet seen. (Why do we use the word nevertheless to mean, basically, "however" or "despite that"? Who decided that was a word that makes sense in those contexts?

Welcome to the latest in the long, recurring series of posts sharing photos I took while my wife ran very long distances. This time, as a special treat, my son was also running. Not me - I walked around slowly and looked for flowers and spiders. This past weekend, Kim and John ran a 50K (31 mile) race as part of the FlatRock 101 Ultramarathon along the Elk River Hiking Trail near Independence, Kansas.

Managing grasslands for biological diversity and resilience depends a lot on habitat heterogeneity. Every plant and animal in the prairie has its own needs and preferences related to factors like vegetation height and density, diversity of blooming flowers, the amount of exposed bare ground, and many others. To provide for all those needs, we have to manage in a way that provides all those habitat types.

“I’m doing a prairie restoration project - how many plant species should I put in my seed mix?” The answer to that depends on why you're doing the restoration project.  Do you want a planting that is both beautiful and resilient?  Are you trying to enlarge or reconnect existing habitats?  If the answer to either question is yes, the answer to your question about species diversity is easy: …

I'm sorry not to have posted much lately. It's not you, it's me. Well, to be fair, it's also the roughly 1 million sandhill cranes that come through the Platte River each spring and all the people who come to watch them. If you've never visited the Central Platte River in March, it's hard to describe what you're missing. Eighty five percent of the world's sandhill cranes pour into a fairly narrow reach of the Platte and each bird spends a few weeks or more eating as much as they can.

I don't know about you, but a nice quiet walk through the prairie can often help me deal with everything else going on around me. Last weekend, I spent parts of both Saturday and Sunday cutting trees and fixing fence at our family prairie. I also wandered around a fair amount and, as always, found things to stir my curiosity and wonder.

We had a few days of real winter this last week, including a little snow and some freezing temperatures. As a result, I had a few chances to go out and photograph snow, ice, and frost. It was great! Now, the temperatures are back to a spring-like feel and it looks like it'll be that way for a while. Who do I complain to about the winter temperatures being too warm?

I don't ever plan to write an autobiography, but if I do, the title might very well be, "I Was Always Glad I Went Out". And, of course, it will sell badly because that's not a very catchy title for a book. Plus, no one wants to hear about my childhood. Although it's a terrible book title, it really is something I feel whenever I kick myself out out of the house and into the prairie.

I'll get to the Ask The Prairie Ecologist part of this post below. First, though... One of the best things about this blog is that it has connected me to amazing people and stories all over the globe. The most recent example came last weekend, when I got an email from Sri Harsha in Gundmi, India. He reached out because he had recently started a project to document all the insects he could photograph in a square meter near his house.

I'm very grateful to have been featured in a short (6 1/2 minutes) video on Nebraska Public Media's Nebraska Stories. A terrific film crew spent two days with me at the Niobrara Valley Preserve and the final product came out really beautifully. I hope you enjoy it. (If you're reading this in an email, either click on the title of the post to make the video active or just click on…

At the beginning of the 2025 growing season, I picked out three sites I could visit repeatedly to photograph/document how a prairie responded to having been grazed the previous year. That turned out to be overly ambitious, but I did manage to focus on one of those sites - an 80x80 foot square marked out at our family prairie - and visited it frequently throughout 2025.

Well, I was out sliding around on the ice again this week. I made two trips up to the tiny reservoir north of Aurora to search for photo compositions on its frozen surface. I was not disappointed. Hemp dogbane seed (Apocynum cannibinum) Dogbane seed. Dogbane seed. Some recent windy days had blown seeds of both dogbane and milkweed on to the ice, where they'd ended up perched on their comae (their fluffy parts).

Well, Kim and I had another ultramarathon vacation last weekend. We were down in eastern Oklahoma for the Ouachita Switchbacks 50K race. While Kim and her fellow runners were performing insane feats of athleticism on very steep, rocky trails, I wandered around a little with my camera, looking for anything visually-interesting in the dormant forests of the Ouachita Mountains. No one cheered for me.

I spent several days at the Niobrara Valley Preserve this week engaged in long brainstorming discussions about conservation and land management. It was invigorating, but we basically worked from dawn until dusk, so I didn't have much time to wander with my camera during daylight hours. Working from dawn until dusk, of course, isn't that hard this time of year, since the days are so short.

I'm generally a pretty happy person. Negativity tends to slide off my back. I hope this blog reflects that. I try to keep it pretty positive and full of wonder and exploration, not loaded with complaints, gripes, and negativity. I also appreciate alliteration, actually. However. Even I, Mr. Optimistic, have a few pet peeves related to my favorite topic of prairie conservation.

Quick announcement. We are hiring a land steward for the Niobrara Valley Preserve. This person will join our land management team and work with prescribed fire, cattle and bison grazing, invasive species suppression, and much more, across 56,000 acres of Sandhills prairie, woodlands, and one of the most scenic rivers in the Great Plains. It will be a lot of manual labor, but also a terrific opportunity to contribute to an innovative stewardship team looking for ways to manage for biological diversity and ecological resilience.

First, a quick announcement that we are again offering up to five $1,500 grants to graduate students working on research related to conservation in the Great Plains. Read more about the Weaver Grant program here. Yesterday, I headed out to watch the sunrise over my favorite frozen wetland at the Platte River Prairies. It was a beautiful, calm morning with temperatures in the low single digits (Fahrenheit).

It has finally gotten cold enough for my favorite winter wetland to freeze over. Mostly. I made two quick trips this week to the restored wetland at the Platte River Prairies. It's a former sand and gravel mining site and we converted it from a sandpit lake to a stream with side channel and backwater habitats about 15 years ago. It's one of my favorite places to visit, especially in the winter, when I can slide around on the ice looking for frost and ice patterns - and, of course, ice bubbles.

People sometimes ask me if I have a certain number of posts I'm supposed to write in a year. A quota, if you will. I always tell them that if that were the case, you'd probably know because I'd occasionally post something that was clearly a space-filler. A post that didn't really serve any purpose other than to be a post that counted toward a quota.

Recently, I've spent some time mining my photo library for images to use in a couple different projects. While I was down that hole, I took advantage of the process to build some collections of some of my favorite photos and post them on their own web page. I hope the photos help inspire people to see prairies as something worth caring about.

I mean, you knew this was coming, right? If you're on any social media platforms, you've already seen enough northern lights photos this week to last a lifetime. Well, guess what? I took some too. Then I waited until everyone was already saturated with images from other sources before dumping mine out there into the world. It's a terrible marketing strategy.

I got my first frost photography morning of the season yesterday. I'd been watching the forecast and had blocked out a couple hours on my calendar to make sure I had time to get out enjoy it. I woke up early and drove out to our family prairie well before sunrise. I'm glad I got there early because there was a terrific explosion of color in the sky before the sun came up.

This might be an awkward week to laud the value of having a non-native wildflower in my yard. I'm an invited speaker at the Indiana Native Plant Society's annual conference this coming weekend. It's probably (?) too late for them to cancel my appearance. I'm mostly kidding. Today's post is not intended to diminish the importance of native plants, either in ecological restoration or in suburban landscapes.

I've had too many hours in front of the computer this week and my eyes were complaining this morning. I looked outside and saw that some high clouds were nicely-diffusing the sun and decided that was enough of an incentive to take a prairie break. I scooted over to Lincoln Creek Prairie and spent about a half hour looking for milkweed seeds, milkweed bugs, and other treasures before heading back to the computer.