Finding and Doing: June 29, 2018

What are we finding recently? 

Then, what are we doing about it? 

Setting priorities for action at the height of a rich season.

The photo below shows real prairie - a vanishingly rare thing.

We should start with this photo, so you'll know where we're heading. 

Late June and early July: it's now Heaven in the ecosystem. The best time of year (see Endnote 1) ... and about the busiest:

• If we don't get them broadcast, the spring seeds will rot, or their eliasomes (Endnote 2) will dry out, and the ants won't give them their helpful treatments. 
• It's also "do or die" for treating reed canary grass and crown vetch (before they set seed). 
• Does our planning for next steps have time to pay attention to butterflies (exploding now, along with so many other Great Invertebrates) and songbirds (all feeding chicks massive amount of insect flesh)?
• Late spring seed is maturing. Do we have enough trained people to harvest what we need? 
• Some of our rarest and most needed species are being ravaged by herbivores. Can we get them sprayed or caged?
• And because our ecosystems depend on democracy and support, can we remember to keep cellphones at the ready to grab needed shots. 

Thus, we mix technical eco-restoration question with politics (Endnote 3). What follows are tidbits. 

On June 25, we drop everything when we find crown vetch. See its ugly face, below.

It's a nightmare. We found this feared and hated killer invasive in a high quality area - near endangered species. We'll show what we did. But first we'll say why.

The photo above is a detail from Palatine Prairie where nothing was done years ago. It was an original prairie. In this shot, crown vetch had wiped out nearly every other plant and animal. Aside from couple of sprigs of bastard toadflax (white flowers) and a few blades of sedge, nothing else survives.

In another photo from nearby, a few more plants survive. In the upper left corner are some blazing star and prairie dock leaves, but the trauma is shocking. Perhaps twenty plant species that were in this plot are already gone, and vastly more species of invertebrates.

So what do we do at Somme on June 25? After much experimentation, we've adopted a radical approach. We cut most other vegetation, to save it - and get it out of the way. Think of a prairie fire in summer. Everything above ground is removed, and the prairie sprouts right back.

Here's what the patch looked like when we finished cutting. Next we spray with Transline, an herbicide that kills mostly legumes (like crown vetch and prairie clover) and composites (like blazing stars and asters). So we carefully cut all the natural legumes and composites, and we also cut any other vegetation likely to get in the way of the spray. We want to coat every crown vetch leaf with the medicinal chemical.

Next, step back for a minute to think about the context. The cut patch is in the middle with mostly prairie vegetation in the foreground and savanna vegetation near those trees. Literally hundreds of plant species here are threatened.

The open savanna or "prairie" vegetation here includes prairie lily, both white and purple prairie clovers, prairie violet, and scores more conservative plants.

The more closed savanna vegetation nearer the trees includes savanna blazing star, pale Indian plantain, and cream gentian.

The cut patch of toxic crown vetch was on the edge of a brush patch with such weeds as tall goldenrod and poison ivy. But those thugs were mixed with great Solomon's seal, Culver's root, heath aster, and big bluestem - which would (minus the vetch) have driven out the non-malignant ruffians over time.

So the next act was to spray:

The blue is a dye in the Transline herbicide. We can see it coats every leaf. We did not successfully cut out every other plant, but we cut most of them. The bergamot and violets we see here will probably survive fine. If not they'll spread back in from around the edges. We cut them, to some degree, to save them. But we cut mostly to make sure we killed all the crown vetch.

Too many times, we had returned to a sprayed patch, years later, to find that we'd missed a bit, and the infestation was again virulent. (This approach may be too demanding for larger populations, but even there, it might be helpful to save some areas of highest quality vegetation so that it and its soil biota can recolonize.)

Here, steward Eriko Kojima makes sure she coats every leaf. She has done this work more than once before in very high-quality prairie ("Grade A") with complete, permanent control of the vetch, and no loss of high-quality prairie plants. (Note from two years later: we repeatedly checked this spot. The crown vetch was completely gone. There was no noticeable difference between the sprayed patch of high quality prairie and the unsprayed high quality prairie all around it.)

But enough killing! Now back to the other side of the coin - restoring quality and beauty.

One of the great surprises and gratifications of 2018 has been the resurgence of the prairie lily, one of the very most conservative of species. Our goal was to restore everything, as best we could. For years we got no seed. After a while we noticed, first, that numbers of this fine plant at our only site for it were dwindling. We caged it from the deer, and numbers seemed to increase, but we continued to find no seed. Now that we had those cages to help us find exactly where the few plants were, we learned to our horror why we found no seed. Meadow voles were cutting every yard-long stalk into little four-inch pieces, to bring the seed down to their level, so they could eat every one. For a week, Eriko, Lisa, and I have been out caging orchids, lilies, and gentians with all the time we can spare.

The big cage protects from deer. The little collar at the bottom protects from voles, sometimes.
This year we're trying taller vole excluders. 

Our burn plan may or may not be good for invertebrates. For decades now we've mostly burned the north half for the even year growing seasons and the south have for the odd. We're trying to find time to determine where our remnant-dependent insects hang out. If a species is widespread around the preserve, perhaps our burn patterns are less critical. But for very isolated populations, perhaps two years on followed by two years no-burn would be better?

After we learned to protect prairie gentian from the deer, then from the voles, we found that in most years some insect eats all the seed before it's ripe. We need prairie gentian seed. There is no way to restore a high-quality ecosystem without adequate seed or other propagules. Perhaps if populations get large, nature will find ways to solve the problems on its own. We definitely hope so in the case of the gentian. Perhaps a couple of solutions to over-populated insects are below:

A male yellowthroat scolds photographer Lisa Musgrave - because hungry chicks are nearby and vulnerable.
As soon as she moves back, the dad feeds the chick. 

Song sparrow mom waiting to deliver a fat grasshopper to its chick. 

Some studies have shown certain plants to be critically compromised by lack of certain birds, that eat insect "pests" of that plant. Part of the planning for Somme Prairie Grove (mostly savanna and shrubland) involves saving shrub copses required for nesting by yellowthroats and song sparrows (and indigo buntings, willow flycatchers, kingbirds, great crested flycatchers, orchard orioles and many more). We have thriving populations of them. They, no doubt, keep some insect species down.

In contrast, the Somme Prairie has no prairie birds. It still has too many shrubs and trees to attract nesting bobolinks, meadowlarks, or sedge wrens. Would the prairie birds help us with whatever those insects are that eat all the prairie gentian seeds? We'd like to think they might. We continue to learn - and have an inspired time doing it.

As part of the Federal recovery plan for the plant below, on a few sites we built up one of the world's largest populations in part by caging them from deer and voles. But that meant we had to hand-pollinate them all.

Back then, no natural pollinators helped us even on the few uncaged ones. Now, perhaps because of the larger populations, the sphinx moth pollinators are back on the job. And since it is now a challenging amount of work for us, we leave many of the flower heads out of the cages, risking deer herbivory, but perhaps worth the risk, considering the time saved? (Data will inform us.)

(If you happen to know what this species is, perhaps it's best if - on the searchable Internet - you don't connect it with any of the sites where we work? Please?)

This year the plant above came up in an unusual (for us) place. This species is called a prairie plant, and historically was said to be common in some prairies. But with us, most surviving populations are in wetlands. The Federal recovery plan calls for restoring both the "sedge meadow" populations and the "prairie" populations.

These plants are short-lived. They must reproduce frequently. The one shown above just appeared this week in prairie, with prairie associates. This occasionally happens, but we've never paid sufficient attention. Now we're realizing that we should pollinate the upland ones with each other. Perhaps if we do, the prairie populations will flourish once again. More on this later.

Now back to work in the ecosystem. A lot to decide and do, this time of year.

Endnotes

Endnote 1.

Well, this is the best time of year, because we're writing now. Two weeks from now will then be another "best time of the year."

Endnote 2.

Eliasomes are "ant candy" stuff attached to seeds that induce ants to take seeds down into their nests for a time and then disperse them at the right times for planting. We don't seem to know of any studies of whether the ants actually help the seeds, beyond distributing them, but this relationship is an ancient one and likely have many components we don't yet understand.

Endnote 3.

Yes of course I sometimes shirk work and go out in the beauty of the early morning light to take photos. I do it for you. Literally. I do it to make myself happy, and indeed it makes me very happy. But that wouldn't be true if I couldn't share them with you. More specifically: many of us take photos, write blog posts, give talks, and lead tours for the purpose of inspiring friends and saving nature. They go together. Indeed people and nature go together, and nature dies without some of us taking up its cause. "Leave it alone and forget about it" doesn't work anymore. Thus, we seek to build a culture of conservation and care.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Lisa Musgrave for bird photos.
Thanks to Kathy Garness and Eriko Kojima for proofing.
Thanks to a long list of stewards for dedicated restoration work.