Prairie Camouflage

Do you see her?



I'm not quite sure what kind of bird she is, but she was intent on blending in to the grasses. When approached, she simply hunkered down and pretended to be spotty rocks.

Prairie Chic

My sister of Carrots and Chocolate asked me to post on prairie fashion. I think she was referring to prairie-inspired clothing. Something stark and sun-washed like this:

Or maybe these boho, childlike pieces from ModCloth:



But since she might be better at composing outfits, I’ll write instead about the actual field clothes that I've been living in for the last month. I came somewhat prepared to tromp through the knee-high grasses, but I’ve also acquired other helpful gear while here.

The first major purchase that I made was a Marmot PreCip jacket. I bought it a few weeks before class started. It was in investment, but one that has been worth it. It’s rained enough, both on daily excursions and on the very wet camping trip, that I’ve easily worn the jacket half of my time here.

Next, are my pants. I brought a few pairs of old jeans to wear in the field. I wasn't sure what else would work as well and figured that I could get the jeans as dirty as I wanted. I coated the cuffs in insect repellant each day and then waded through wet grasses. Later, I dried them from the shower curtain so they'd be stiff, but ready for wear the next day. I went a week straight on one pair of jeans, but they were miserable to put on each time. The thick cotton soaked up water and clung to my legs during the hottest parts of the day. I started noticing my classmates' pants with envy. They were made of lightweight nylon and had zip-off legs. The funny pants that I'd laughed at before the class now took on new appeal. I had to find some.

The North Face pair that I found have replaced the jeans. I bet I could go even two weeks in these pants!

The only downfall is that the thin fabric is easily pierced by some prairie plants. Don't expect the pants to protect legs from yucca or prickly pear cactus. Some porcupine grass got through as well.

Finally, sun protection is a must for fair-skinned prairie enthusiasts like me. Dr. S., having had a skin cancer scare in the past, strongly recommended that we watch out for sunburns. He laughingly told the story of a girl who had once shown up on the first day of class in her bikini, intent on getting a tan by the end of the course. The sharp grasses soon set her straight.

Dr. S. suggested that we all wear hats. He had quite a collection himself and wore different hats for different prairies. Here are a couple. He also wore a safari pith helmet sometimes.


As you can tell from the photos, most of Dr. S.'s hats had some porcupine grass seeds stuck through the band. He liked to show how the needles would dry out and twist together into corkscrew shapes. The corkscrew helped the seed burrow into the ground for the next year. The seed twists and untwists with moisture until safe in the earth.



As for me, I was content with my SPF 55 and a couple of baseball caps, a Cardinals hat and a Pioneer Seed Corn hat. Coupled with some sunglasses, the hats kept me from squinting in the bright open-field sunlight. Though not part of today's prairie fashion, I think the pioneers knew what they were doing with the sunbonnets. How different our ideas of prairie wear are now that the people creating fashion don't spend time out of the cities!

After Class

After taking the prairie ecology class for four weeks, I’m now staying at Lakeside Laboratory for an extra week to do some writing. I’ll continue posting about the prairie, but my general writing is gravitating toward other things as well.

This week, the time is mine to use as I wish, mostly for reading and writing. I am, however, also helping out with a kid’s day camp, teaching creative “journaling” for an hour each day. The camp is bug themed and the kids spend a lot of time each day with nets and bug jars. They’re a bright little group and they seem to enjoy the chance to write and draw for a little while after lunch.

Yesterday we worked on found poems, poems that are made from existing texts. I gave the children bug profiles from the National Geographic website and asked them to select their favorite words and phrases to combine in a new, poetic way. They would be able to add, change, and remove words as necessary. We talked a little about alliteration, line breaks, punctuation, and repetition. Some picked up on the idea a lot more quickly than others, but they all had a few good lines by the end of ten minutes of writing. My own found poem was about camel spiders:

Wind Scorpion

Rumors of bloodthirsty nature
circulating half size
but spread with voracious appetite.

Untrue.

What can eat camels’ stomachs and sleeping soldiers?

Not spiders, only solpugids. Another new arachnid
with misleading perspective.

Untrue.

Hardy desert dwellers
visit death
only upon small birds.

Everybody's Got a Wind Cave Buffaloooooo

At the Wind Cave visitor's center, we were able to speak with a botanist who told us a little about the Wind Cave buffalo herd. The buffalo in the park are not interbred with cattle and do not carry brucellosis, a disease which causes the bison to abort the first calf born after infection. The park prides itself in its high quality herds.

We saw a lot of herds with calves



and some old, solitary bulls.



My favorite, however, was the thin, shaggy bull who was walking down the middle of the road on our way out of the park. He was in the right lane, just ahead of us. We slowed, not interested in battling for the roadway. He seemed unfazed. He stepped into the left lane, let us inch past, then moved back to the right lane.



(Other buffalooooo)

On Transects and Buffalo

So what does a prairie ecology class do each time it visits a new prairie? Well, usually one or both of two things: a species list and a transect.

A species list is simply a record of all of the recognizable species in the area. Take a notebook and a pencil (I learned the first day that my smooth, black-inked rollerball pen was not the best choice in drizzly weather.) and then wander around noting everything you see. If you don’t know what something is, collect a sample or take good note so that it can be identified later. A species list gives a sense of the plant diversity in the area and can be used to track the progress of a prairie over time.

Transect sampling is harder to do on your own, but it’ll provide more quantitative information about a prairie. A transect is a line made across the space. The line is then used as a guide for taking samples. The transects that we performed were 30 m long. At each meter, we took a sample using a 1/10 m sq. quadrat. The quadrat tool looked like a large tuning fork. We slid the fork into the vegetation at each meter mark and then estimated the basal coverage of each species inside the rectangle. At the base, plants take up much less space than you’d think. Most of the species accounted for no more than 1% of the quadrat, despite appearing thick at canopy level.

This kind of sampling could take quite a while, depending on how much of the vegetation we recognized. Inevitably there would be a few sprigs of something green that we’d have to show Dr. S. for identification. Sometimes he’d know right away, other times he’d have to look through a plant guide, carefully eliminating species until he knew the answer. On a few rare occasions, Dr. S. would look at the seedlings we brought him and shake his head. “Too tiny to even see,” he’d complain, telling us to bring him an actual plant next time.

And so, we learned to sample each prairie, down on our hands and knees, collecting data and chigger bites.

Out west, the sampling was different. During the first week of class, we had learned over fifty common Iowa species. In South Dakota, the plant life looked nothing like the wetter, greener Iowan prairies. There were no Canada anemones or golden alexanders. Instead, we started learning to recognize the split ligule of needle and thread grass and to differentiate between hairy grama and side-oats grama. There, the grasses seemed more diverse, and the forbs—scarlet globemallow, black Samson, fringed sagewort, ball cactus—more easily distinguished.

We tried to do three or so transects a day, mostly in the Badlands and Wind Cave National Park, but we also stopped in the Nebraska Sandhills on the drive back toward Iowa for a couple of samples. We missed a couple of sites due to rain and muddy roads too treacherous for a thirteen passenger van.

Only one transect was left incomplete. At Wind Cave, we worked on a transect of a meadow that prairie dogs had taken over in the last 6 or so years. The squeaking prairie dogs weren’t the only wildlife present that day and before long a herd of buffalo came over to see what we were doing. They approached us very slowly, probably trying not to scare us away. Dr. S. didn’t seem worried, so we kept working. Halfway through, however, he stopped us gently, but urgently. “Finish up the quadrat you’re on, then pack it up.” He rolled in the measuring tape and started toward the van.

The biggest bison, the bull, was now headed our way. We fudged some final numbers, made our way across the meadow, and grabbed cameras for a few pictures. The buffalo kept following; apparently now intent on frightening us away. We hopped in the van and took off.

Western Trek

There's been a large silence lately due to last week's travels into the mixed grass prairies of South Dakota and Nebraska. My class camped in the Badlands and in Wind Cave National Park, and while I didn't tote along my computer, I did bring a camera.



It rained every day of our trip, usually in the afternoons or evenings. On the first day, my tent mate and I had just gotten settled into our lodgings when the distant storm clouds started rolling our way. We watched from the class van as wind, rain, and hail pelted the nylon structure, bending to into a 45 degree angle with the ground. Afterwards, we were relieved to find that through our sleeping bags were a bit soggy, our tent and other belongings had survived. Our neighbors, however, were not so lucky.



When it wasn't raining, we enjoyed the South Dakota wildlife. Here I am in my field gear next to Wall Drug's giant jackalope. Though I saw many mounted specimens, I didn't find the strange creature in the prairies. Instead, squeaking prairie dogs populated these plains.

Prairie in a Can

A couple of days ago we were out at Cayler Prairie and my classmate Alex observed that he’d seen several similar species in the prairie across the street from our cabins. Dr. S., our professor, scoffed, “That’s no prairie; it’s someone’s wildflower garden.” He acknowledged that both areas may contain some of the same plants, but said that a prairie should have more than just a few native species.

To show us what he meant, the next day Dr. S. walked us across the street to the field. It did immediately appear to have different composition than the prairies that we’d been tromping through for the last couple of weeks. I recognized a few species: little bluestem, daisy fleabane, and June grass. Dr. S. pointed out many species that wouldn’t appear in native Iowa prairies and explained that the field had been planted with “prairie in a can,” a seed mix from somewhere in Colorado. He explained that a true restoration project takes into consideration the grasses and flowers that would appear naturally in the area. If possible, a prairie is planted with seeds harvested from a nearby, established prairie. To him, this re-seeded field could not be called prairie; instead it was someone’s experimentation with non-native wildflowers.


Dr. S. agreed that the blooms in the field were beautiful, bright showy flowers, but also said that he didn’t think that some of the plants would survive for more than a few years. The non-native flowers included blue flax, lance-leaf coreopsis, lupine, Indian blanket, Shasta daisies, and even musk thistle. Despite the field's failure to be an Iowan prairie, I was glad to it was there to enjoy, almost like a public botanical garden.

And Then the Sky Dropped

Here are a couple of pictures of yesterday's storm, just minutes before it hit. We were in Minnesota at The Nature Conservancy's Red Rock Prairie doing a transect when the sky turned dark. (More on transecting later.) You can see some of my group in the second picture, walking toward the van. We drove away from the storm, but watched the wind and nearly horizontal rain whip the grasses around and pound the prairie flat. The radio said that the winds were around sixty mph. We returned after lunch, about an hour later, to a sunny but humid field.

Small Song

The pre-storm wind across the grasses today make me think of A. R. Ammon's "Small Song." Simple, yet powerful. A poem to remember and take with you everywhere.

Small Song

The reeds give way to the wind
and give the wind away.

Happy Little Fabaceae Family

In the last week, I’ve learned to identify over fifty prairie plants. We’re concentrating on learning the ones now in bloom in northern Iowa. Most of these flowers are distinctly different in color and shape, and this makes the identification easy. Three of these plants, however, are in the same family and look very much alike: veiny pea, American vetch, and marsh vetchling. They all have similar leaves and pinkish- purple flowers. At first these three plants perplexed me. How would I ever tell them apart? I’ve since learned the secret.

In order to distinguish among the plants, first, look at the stipules. A stipule is a pair of tiny leaf-like appendages at the base of the petiole. “Petiole” is a fancy word for the little stalk that attaches the leaf to the stem. The stipules in the veiny pea and the marsh vetchling are plain, but in the American vetch, they have teeth. Rough stipules are a sure sign of the American vetch.

If the stipules are not jagged and toothy, the plant may be either the veiny pea or the marsh vetchling. A quick guess could be made between the two through observation of the surroundings. The veiny pea grows more readily in dry areas while the marsh vetchling grows--you guessed it--in marshy, wet areas.

But to be sure, check the plant's stem. If the stem is relatively square, it is likely a veiny pea. If, the square stem has a pair of wings and appears almost two dimensional, ribbon-like, farther down on the plant, it is the marsh vetchling.

Puzzling specimens like these make plant identification much more fun. Even the same species can look differently and so I’ve found that I’m learning largely through comparison. I really have to get down there in the grasses and look carefully at the plant before making a judgment. It can be tedious work, but is also very satisfying!

Not Quite a Prairie Rattler

Today we drove out to Kirchner Prairie. The class has been searching for some more seasonal flowers to add to our field identification notebooks, and at Kirchner we did find several new ones. One was the white camus plant, Zigadenus elegans. It belongs to the Liliaceae family and has small, six-petaled white flowers, each marked with a green band. The stamens are yellow, and, though poisonous to most animals, flies seemed to be drawn to the plant.

As I stopped to record and sketch the delicate flower, the student next to me nudged my shoulder.

“You’re not afraid of snakes, are you?” he asked.

“Wha..Why?” And then I understood and looked down. A winding black cord was making its way between my feet.

I stood very still and looked at the dark body and yellow stripes. Just a garter snake. And then, for a moment, I thought about trying to catch it. It seemed as though it’d be easy to bend down and close my hand around its thin neck. Then I’d hold it, dangling the twisting tail as the snake squirmed in my fist.

I remembered how my father would sometimes catch a garter snake in our yard, then let us pet it, hold it. The scales felt so cool, so glassy under my fingertips, like a thick beaded bracelet. And yet, for all of its rigidity and shape, the body seemed flexible and alive, definitely not a toy. The belly, wrapped in softer and smoother scales, contained a pulse, the eyes moved, and the tongue flickered. We let the snakes go in our garden. “Snakes are good,” Dad said, “they eat the things that bother us.”

Today, I didn’t pick up the garter snake. Instead, I carefully stepped over it. Here, it wasn’t in my “territory,” my yard, but I was in its home. Something about handling it seemed rude, as though perhaps there is prairie etiquette to understand and follow, rules that I’m just now learning. I didn’t even follow the snake, but stood back and watched as the it quickly slithered into less compacted grasses, then disappeared.

A Field Notebook

Before I start notes, here are some things to know about me and my postings:

1. This is meant to be an exploratory record of my surroundings and experiences. I am new to the ecology and won’t pretend to be an expert. These are my beginner’s observations.

2. I am spending the next four weeks in northern Iowa taking a class in prairie ecology. We work in the field as well as in the lab. I hope that by becoming intimate with the area I will gain a greater appreciation of the much-neglected landscape of my Midwestern home.

3. My favorite color is green.

4. My class is intensive and time is limited (Also, it’s summer and I’m hanging out with a bunch of college students near a lake); my postings may be sporadic.

5. I believe that the arts, humanities, and sciences can and should collaborate. We can learn a lot from each other.