Stories from the Prairie: Life in a Resilient Ecosystem

Prairies are an ecosystem that historically spanned the center of this continent from the Rocky Mountains to east of the Mississippi and from Texas north to Saskatchewan. Although less than 5% of that prairie remains today, it is critical habitat for a number of invertebrates. Prairies are incredibly diverse and hold many exciting stories.

To help us explore prairies and their critters is prairie ecologist Chris Helzer. Chris works for the Nature Conservancy as the Director of Science and Stewardship in Nebraska, where, among other things, he supervises TNC’s work on the Platte River Prairies and the Niobrara Valley Preserve. Chris also works to raise awareness about the value of prairies and prairie conservation through his photography, writing, and presentations. Chris is the author of The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States and Hidden Prairie: Photographing Life in One Square Meter.

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Photo: Justin Meissen/Flickr-CC

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Transcript

Rachel: Welcome to Bug Banter with the Xerces Society where we explore the world of invertebrates and discover how to help these extraordinary animals. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate.

Matthew: Hi, I'm Matthew Shepherd in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel: And I'm Rachel Dunham in Missoula, Montana.

Matthew: Today we are exploring prairies, an ecosystem that historically spanned the center of this continent from the Rocky Mountains to east of the Mississippi, and from Texas north to Saskatchewan. Although less than 5% of that prairie remains today, it is critical habitat for a number of invertebrates. Prairies are incredibly diverse and hold many exciting stories.

Matthew: To help us explore prairies and their critters is prairie ecologist Chris Helzer. Chris works for The Nature Conservancy as the Director of Science and Stewardship in Nebraska, where, among other things, he supervises TNC’s work on the Platte River Prairies and the Niobrara Valley Preserve. Chris also works to raise awareness about the value of prairies and prairie conservation through his photography, writing, and presentations. He is the author of The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States and Hidden Prairie: Photographing Life in One Square Meter.

Matthew: Welcome Chris!

Chris: Thanks, this is great.

Matthew: Upfront, I have to say that I'm a huge fan of grasslands. You know, forests and woodlands are wonderful, but some of my happiest times have been spent in grasslands. Earlier in my career when working in Britain, I spent several years managing chalk downlands on Southern England's hillsides, river meadows, heathlands, but just nothing like the prairies of the Great Plains. Nothing with that height of vegetation or that extent. To start us off, can you tell us what characterizes a prairie?

Chris: Sure. Prairies are, I mean, at their base, prairies are dominated by herbaceous plants, so mostly grasses, wildflowers, sedges, rushes. They tend not to have a lot of woody vegetation, or if they do, the woody vegetation is sort of a smaller component. If you get enough trees to show up in a prairie, that typically pushes it into a categorization of a savannah—which a savannah is like a grassland with trees. There's a lot of similarities there, but that would be a difference. I think, when most people think about prairies, unfortunately, they think about these sort of flat boring areas full of grass. And if they're small, then they're even less interesting. There’s a—. I think a lot about how people think about prairies, or like where they have interacted with prairies in some way, and a lot of it is through TV shows or movies, where you see these like huge sweeping plains with, you know, maybe covered wagons going across them, or a nature documentary with, you know, bison, and unending grasslands. And that is grassland, that is prairie. But prairie can also be very small. You can have a you know a piece of prairie habitat that's, you know, the size of a backyard that still functions in a lot of the same ways, still has a lot of the same diversity of plant and animal species, and so it's a wide range, I guess, is what I'm saying. So there's a big spectrum of what can be categorized as prairie.

Matthew: Yeah, within that, are they like—. I mean, apart from just the size, are there like different types of prairies based on vegetation structure, or something?

Chris: Yeah, a lot of it depends on a combination of soil and rainfall, which sort of work together. And in the central part of the United States, we have tallgrass prairie to the east, where we get more rainfall, which allows more vegetation growth, so you get taller plants. But it also builds more soil underneath, which also makes the soil more productive to grow taller plants. So it's sort of a cycle there. And then the further west you go toward the Rocky Mountains, you hit less and less rain, and so there's less growth of the plants, and so you end up with shorter plants and shorter vegetation. So you have sort of tallgrass prairie in the East, shortgrass prairie in the West, and a mixed-grass prairie in the middle, that is sort of a combination between both of them.

Chris: And the mixed-grasses, where I'm at—so I think it's most interesting—but part of the reason it's really interesting is that it combines plant species, for example, from both tallgrass and shortgrass communities. And the climate is really variable—it can be really wet or really dry. And during dry periods, we pull—we see more expression of the shortgrass prairie plants from the West, things like blue grama and buffalo grass, and things that only grow six or eight inches tall, maybe, have a great year during a drought because they're very well adapted to that. And in a wetter year, we get big bluestem and Indian grass, and some of the big tall stuff from the East that does better. And so it can be really variable year to year just based on what the climate's doing.

Matthew: Yeah, I was going to ask: why is a prairie a prairie? But you may have already largely answered that with the description of changing climate across the region and so on.

Chris: Well, there's sort of two factors. That is one of them. One is the western prairie, the shortgrass prairies, especially, they keep trees out largely because of drought, and just aren't that many woody plants that can handle that. But in the East, it's a really more interesting story because it's really tied to people. And if you think about the end of the last ice age, as those ice sheets were receding—and that's 8 to 10 to 12,000 years ago, depending on where we're talking about—as those ice sheets receded—people had been on the continent for thousands of years already, at that point—and indigenous people moved in behind those ice sheets and started managing the land. They started using fire, in particular. And a lot of that fire use pushed those communities from more of a woodland community to, at least, to savannah, and a lot of places more of an open grassland.

Chris: And I think that's really important for a variety of reasons. But one of the reasons is it highlights the strong tie between people and prairies that have existed since these prairies have existed, right? So the contemporary prairies that we have today, post Ice Age, have always interacted with people and are adapted to the management of people. And so, A, we need to acknowledge that—just to acknowledge that people did good things, and continue to do good things—but also it really ties into the management we have today. Because we can't sit back and expect prairies to be better off without us, because they never have been, at least today's versions of prairies, right? They have always had people managing them and they're adapted to that sort of management. If we walk away, it becomes something different.

Matthew: Yeah, totally. No, because I mentioned my experience from Britain, and every one of those grassland types is because of people over the millennia.

Chris: But it is a different view of nature, I think, than a lot of people have, right? Where you feel like nature is something that does better with we get out of the way. And in a lot of cases, it's the opposite.

Rachel: Well, thank you for painting that picture of what a prairie can be. And I love the two examples you gave us [were] the two examples that popped into my mind. When I think of a prairie, I think of Little House on the Prairie, and I also think of bison in a prairie. So being such a diverse ecosystem, I assume that means that there's a high diversity of animals, of critters living in them—which is kind of the fun part that people might not really know. So what type of invertebrates can be found in a prairie? I know it's a really big question.

Chris: Yeah, everything. No, it's—yeah, it’s amazingly diverse. I love—as a photographer, I love exploring prairies that way, because I can take off my scientist cap and put my camera in my hands, and I just look for anything that's moving. And there's always things moving. You know, from pollinators—which is a really nice tie for the public. People recognize pollinators—so there's hundreds of bees, species of bees, butterflies, moths, ants, wasps, all those things. But you have to have predators, and you have to have herbivores, and you have things that are eating seeds, and you've got insects that are boring inside stems and living there. You've got things that are on the ground layer. There are lots of things digging in the ground—there's way more biomass of invertebrates underground than above ground. So it's full of life.

Chris: And one of the things about prairies, as I mentioned earlier—small prairies—even in those small prairies, the vast majority of invertebrate species that would be in a big prairie are still going to be in a small prairie. And so you might not have bison in a half acre prairie, and you won't have prairie chickens, but you'll have, again, the vast majority of insect species and invertebrates, in general. Which to me is great, as a photographer, because I can just go to a little prairie and find all the things I want to photograph that way. But just, it makes them really interesting and exciting. And it means that conservation can happen at a small scale, as well as a large scale.

Rachel: Yeah, definitely. And what is it about prairies that allow invertebrates to thrive? I assume it's the diversity of plants is—probably has a big influence on them.

Chris: Diversity of plants, for sure. There are a lot of sort of specific relationships between a plant species and an insect species and so those relationships are intact. But also the structure of the habitat in a grassland. I think when people think about forests, it's really easy to envision, you know, we have a canopy layer, and then maybe there's a sub canopy of trees that aren't quite that tall, and you've got a shrub layer below that, and then you've got a herbaceous layer of grasses and sedges and wildflowers, then you've got a leaf layer, then you've got the soil. And a prairie has a lot of those types of structure, but in some ways they're just more compact.

Chris: But also prairies are much more variable. So in a prairie that's managed well, you can walk around and you'll find an area that is tall and dense in one place, and you'll go to a different part of that prairie and it'll be short with a lot of bare ground exposed, and you'll go to another place that is sort of a mixed habitat structure where you've got some tall and dense, but you've got some open areas kind of mixed together. And invertebrates respond to all of those in different ways, right? You've got some species that really love a site that hasn't been burned or grazed for a while, for example, and there's a lot of buildup of thatch—old vegetation along the ground—and they can burrow into that and hide, and move around and feed on whatever they feed on—rotting plants or whatever it is.

Chris: But then you've got other insects that really love the open space and that their metabolism, for example, relies on sunshine and exposure to warmth. And so they are hanging out out in the open, and then maybe they're moving from sun to shade, so they like the mixed habitat structure. They can cool off when it's too hot, and warm up when they're too cold. So it's the combination of the plant diversity, and the relationships there for food and, then places to live and all that. And then the management that overlays on that, and changes the habitat structure, and makes that heterogeneous, or diverse habitat structure, and that supports the most insect species

Matthew: That’s fascinating. I hadn't really thought about the prairie in the same way as you described the layers of a forest. But when you pause and consider that, you're like, “Oh yeah, right.” I know you do a lot of invertebrate photography—in fact, there’s a caterpillar just over your shoulder there, which I assume is one of yours. Haha.

Chris: It is, yeah.

Matthew: How do you use those photos to get people interested in prairies and prairie conservation?

Chris: So I do love photography. I love photographing invertebrates and other small things. And I think it's a way—. Like I said earlier, you know, prairies for a lot of people are these flat, boring areas full of grass. Who cares, right? There's nothing interesting there, especially if they're small. But one of the greatest things about prairies is that diversity we've been talking about. And a lot of times I think what people need is they need a touchstone. They need something that's relatable. They need to understand who lives in a prairie to make it interesting, right? And so photography allows me to take a photo of an animal of any kind, or a plant, and show it to somebody and say, “Hey, this is something that lives in prairies. Let me tell you about it and why it's fascinating.”

Chris: Because I think as conservationists, we often make the mistake of trying to convince people that conservation is important because we focus on the utilitarian values. Grasslands are important because they sequester carbon, or they filter water—which they do. They're great for that—but when you start a conversation with somebody you've just met, you don't normally lecture them with facts. What you normally do is establish a rapport, and you talk about what you're interested in, and what your passion is. And so I think talking about why I am fascinated by and love insects, and why those insects are fascinating on their own, is a much better way to build a connection.

Chris: And then my hope is that when people look at photos of mine and listen to my stories about what those creatures are, and how they make their living, and why they're really interesting, that when they see a photo of a prairie, or they see a prairie itself, that comes into their brain and they think, “Oh, that habitat right there, that's where this caterpillar lives. Or that's where that really cool grasshopper lives.” And then it's real and it's important for a different reason, right? Rather than, “Yeah, I know it's important for carbon, but it still doesn't look that interesting to me.” Now it's full of life, and here's some examples of life that they can think about.

Chris: And then beyond that even, then if they go to a prairie—. I've been talking about this lately. I think that when most people show up at a prairie without someone there that can interpret it for them, there's this really awkward feeling, because you don't know what you're supposed to look at or what you're supposed to do. In some ways, I think it feels like showing up to someone's house for a party when you don't know anybody at the party. And nobody enjoys that feeling, right? So what I hope is that by using my photography to show them who lives there, that when they arrive, they'll have an idea of what they're supposed to look for, and it'll feel more welcoming. And then they won't just turn around and walk away, they’ll go in and explore. And then once they do, if they spend any time at all and really look, they'll find their own discoveries and they'll see all the things moving around, and they can start learning things on their own.

Matthew: Yeah, at Xerces, we’ve used photography for a long time and can appreciate its power. And I think particularly with insects and other invertebrates, which on the whole people overlook. It's like you say, “Oh, there's a sparrow,” they kind of know what a sparrow looks like. “Oh, there's a hawk.” “Yeah, we know that.” But if you say there's this really cool skipper butterfly, or some beetle, they'll have no idea. So to be able to show them—.

Chris: Or, even worse, they'll be afraid of it, right?

Matthew: Yeah.

Chris: They'll think insects as something as scary, and that's another great thing about photos, is it allows you to start a conversation and explain why it's interesting, and hopefully less scary than people would expect, and sort of normalize it, and make it more familiar.

Rachel: Photography is certainly a really amazing tool in being able to capture, almost sometimes the emotion of an animal, and gives you that scale, because I think, you know, we're so big compared to insects that we don't take the time to get that perspective of what is life like on the ground in a prairie with these grass blades that are really tall, because we don't live in that world. So photography sort of opens up this new universe for people, and I think it's, yeah, it's really incredible.

Rachel: So one of the books that you have written has a subtitle of Life in One Square Meter—was there any particular reason for deciding to focus on a single square meter?

Chris: Yeah, it was a project that I sort of fell into. I initially was thinking about—I read a blog, and I try to have some content at least once a week on average. And so in some ways it's like being a preacher, where you're telling the same story over and over, but you're trying to find new ways to tell the story, right? And one of the stories that I talk about a lot, one of the big themes, is why prairies are fascinating and how diverse and interesting and dynamic they are. And so I just—one day in January, an idea popped into my head. It was like, “Well, if I could show people how much is happening in a really tiny piece of the prairie, then we could talk about how to extrapolate that out to like how much must be happening in a larger prairie, right?”

Chris: And so I went out to a local prairie here in Aurora, Nebraska, where I live. There's a little prairie on the eastern edge of town, it's skinny little strips of grassland. They were mostly planted in the 1980s. They're surrounded by trees. It's right next to the local dog adoption center, so there's a lot of barking dogs. The city waste site is just like a half a block away. There's a trailer park right there. It's not wilderness by anyone's definition, but it's a really neat area for me to go and take pictures, because it's close to my house and I enjoy being there. And I went out in January and I put four flags in the ground and just marked out a square meter and thought, “Okay, I'm going to spend the next year photographing everything I can find in this little square meter of prairie. Let's just see what happens.”

Chris: And it turned out to be like a joyful obsession. I had a blast going out there—the longer I did it, the more I enjoyed it. I ended up—. The rule was that I wouldn't count a species on my list unless I got a really good photo of it. So there were a lot of things that just flew away or crawled away before I got a photo of them, but I still managed to photograph 113 different species of plants and animals, which was fun. But even better, I just, I got to tell the story of the sorts of things that I saw, why it was interesting to see them, how much it affected me personally to just spend time intimately looking at a prairie like that. And it turned into a book, it turned into a museum exhibit. I've done a bunch of presentations on it. It really resonated with people because it's a project that anyone can do, right? Even if you don't take a camera, the idea of looking at one space and how it changes over time, and learning to appreciate all the things that happen in that small scale is something that everybody can relate to.

Chris: So I was really shocked by how, just how well it resonated with people, how much people were interested in it. And then I sort of thought, “Well, I did that. That was me.” And then last spring, I was out at the same prairie and the Prairie Plains Resource Institute—the organization that manages the site—had just burn the prairie. And I went out and I thought, “You know, I wonder if my old flags are still there, now that it's burned off, maybe I'll see if I can find them.” And I did, and they were still there and I replaced them with new ones because I thought, “Well, I'll come back a couple of times this summer and just visit the place and see what's happening.” And that lasted for about five days. And I went back out—I was like, “I got to see what's happening.” And I started taking pictures of little droplets of water, and then there was a robin that came by, and there were some ants moving around. It's like, “Man, this is so much fun.” So I started again. So I just, I'm just on the tail end of my second iteration. And it's been even more fun than the first time. I feel like I'm better at it. In fact, I've almost tripled the number of species that I've found. As of today, I'm at 319 different species—most of those are invertebrates, of course. And the number varies because I'm trying to have experts help me identify photos down to species, which is very difficult for some of them.

Chris: But 319 in a square meter in one year, that's a number that'll catch people's attention, right? So again, I'm hoping that that helps. But even more importantly—the science piece of it, the inventories pieces is part of it—but the thing that really resonates is the stories. It's, you know, I could show people photos of a series that happened over about an hour of two spiders mating. And the tentative approach of the male to the female and then, you know, the little dance that they do to get to know each other. And then the spider puts the sperm inside with its little pedipalps, and then scurries away real quick, and then sits next door to camp out and keep other males away. I saw that happening right in front of me. And it was six inches off the ground. I was laying on my belly with my camera, and there were just hundreds of stories like that within the course of a year, within that tiny little area. And so again, extrapolation. If I can see that much there, imagine how much is happening in a five-acre prairie, or a thousand-acre prairie, or a 10,000-acre prairie, and it's just mind-blowing.

Chris: So, yeah. To answer your question about why a square meter—the square meter happened because I used that plot size a lot in research. When we do inventory work, it's a nice, simple little metric that we use, and then we extrapolate from that. We average across a bunch of little square meter plots and talk about plant diversity, or insect diversity, or whatever. So it was a reasonable size and it was small enough that I could focus on it without having to move around a lot. I could lay on the ground and see the whole thing.

Rachel: Oh, your enthusiasm and passion for this just like bleeds through. It's just so inspiring. I'm like, “I'm going to go outside and measure out one square area and start taking pictures and documenting what's there.”

Chris: Yeah, it’s fun!

Rachel: It's just, I love the accessibility of it, and the picture that you painted of where this prairie existed. Because you think about all these like bigger animals—they get so much attention—and the number of people who get to see those animals in their lifetime is so small. But a lot more people could go out and find some sort of habitat somewhere around them. And that's still nature, and it's accessible. And I think that's the beauty of invertebrates, especially. Yeah, I'm just, this is so exciting. I feel like I'm really excited now. I might actually go out and do this—like, so inspiring.

Chris: See, that’s what’s fun. I've heard back from a lot of people who have done that, right? And sometimes it's, you know, “Hey, my kid and I are doing this in the garden in our backyard,” or, “I've got this, I've got this, I've got two potted wildflowers on my balcony on my apartment, and I'm starting to really watch them closely to see all the things that are coming and going.” So you—yeah, almost anywhere. I mean, a sidewalk crack has ants in it—you could watch those. I mean, there's just about anywhere you go, you're going to find invertebrates. And then you can just see what happens in that spot.

Rachel: Yeah, definitely. So obviously, I mean, over 300 that's—that is a shocking number. What were some of your favorite invertebrates that you encountered and why?

Chris: Yeah, I mean the ones that are my favorite tend to be things that I saw repeatedly, and I felt like I started to get to know them, or at least—we didn't have a relationship, but we had a familiarity with each other. So there were a couple of different spiders. There's some lynx spiders, which are—lynx spiders are like—they don't build webs, but they just sort of hunt freely. And I have photos of lynx spiders with all kinds of different prey species that they were catching. And then one of them had an egg sac in the plot, and I got to watch her sitting on the egg sac and guarding it for about a week. And then the eggs started hatching and all of a sudden there were little tiny lynx spiders all over the place, and they were hanging from silk threads, and they were ballooning out of the plot. I mean, that was really fun.

Chris: And then there was a day where I showed up—. There's a plant called black nightshade, which is an annual. It's a native, annual plant—wildflower. And I showed up, and a gang of blister beetles flew in. There were nine of them, and they started chewing on this plant. And within about two hours, they basically skeletonized the plant. They took it all the way down to stems, and this nine-member blister beetle gang was like, they were staring at me as I was doing it, like daring me to do something about it. They ate all the leaves, they ate all the fruits. And I was thinking, “Well, this is really neat.” But also like, “I was looking forward to, you know, seeing what else happened with that plant,” because I'd gotten to know the plant. I saw it germinate from the soil, and I watched it grow and make flowers and all these beetles descended on them.

Chris: But it was also neat—so then they left—and it was neat because a week later, the plant started regrowing leaves, and it ended up making fruits again. So everything turned out fine for the plant. But what was really neat was I've never seen that species of blister beetle before—it's an Epicauta, E-P-I-C-A-U-T-A something. I don't know the species, I just know the genus—and there were other black nightshade plants in the prairie nearby. I walked past them in and out, as I walked to my plot. I never saw blister beetles on those plants. I've never seen that species anywhere else. And so why those showed up on that day, in my plot, and just decimated this one single plant, I'll never know, but I'm really grateful that I was there to see it happen. So that's another one that was a favorite.

Chris: And then, you know, I mean, there's an ambush bug. Ambush bugs are really sweet, and like they've got like big Popeye arms, and they're really camouflaged and textured well, so they hide on flowers—those are always fun to see. Didn't have any praying mantises this year. Praying mantises, as a photographer, I mean, come on—they're so charismatic. They'll stare at you, and it looks like they have little pupils even though they don't. And in the 2018 version, I had two different species of praying mantis, and I didn't get any in 2024, which is a little disappointing, but there were still plenty of other things to keep me busy.

Matthew: Yeah, no, it sounds like you had a great deal of fun doing this, as well. And that kind of enthusiasm is always infectious. And as you noted, other people have started doing this, as well, and Rachel will too, which is awesome.

Chris: Haha. Yeah, send me your pictures, Rachel.

Matthew: Yeah.

Rachel: I will. Honestly, I think I will do it. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Matthew: So in the introduction, Chris, we said that like only 5% of prairies remain now—what happened to the rest?

Chris: To a large extent—especially in the central part of the country—prairie soil is very productive. And because it's really productive, it makes really good cropland. And so we can grow a lot of food for humanity on prairie soils. But you can't do it when the prairie's there. And so a lot of the prairies—especially the eastern prairies, those more productive soils—have been converted to row crops. And the places that weren't farmed tended to be places that were too steep, or too wet, or too rocky. And so those are the prairies that we have left by and large in the East. In the central part of the country, there's still a fair amount of prairie left in the mixed-grass, and even in the shortgrass, there's even more maybe, but a lot of that is in decent condition, but there's some of it that's had chronic overgrazing issues, or it's been broadcast sprayed with herbicide at some point—which really has reduced the plant diversity, and doesn't recover well from that usually. So we've lost some—. It depends on your definition of prairie. It's still grassland, for sure, and some people would argue whether it counts as prairie at that point. But it does provide a lot of habitat for lots of things, but it's not what it was, and it's not what we would hope it to be.

Chris: And then the other big thing that's happening right now is encroachment by trees. With the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing, we're seeing woody plants being more and more competitive in these grasslands, and it's really difficult to keep them out compared to even 20 years ago. We're really struggling right now to come up with strategies that work. Fire used to be really effective at keeping trees out of prairies, and we could burn every three or four years, and that was enough. And now you have to burn at least every year or two. And then even that—once the trees are there—even that kind of frequent fire doesn't necessarily push them back again. And so the world is changing in ways that are making us adapt as prairie people. And a lot of our discussions right now about management are less about how do we keep trees out of prairies, but how do we manage grasslands with more woody vegetation for biodiversity? How do we get back to that structure we talked about earlier, incorporating some of these woody plants into them? And keep it from being something where the trees overshade and sort of knock everything else out of the system.

Chris: So that's kind of the doom and gloom piece of it, but I want to balance that by saying that the resilience of prairies is also really inspiring. And the amount of even the small little prairies we have left still have, again, they have the bulk of the diversity that they used to have. So there are very few prairie species that have gone extinct. There are some that need enough size of area—so again, bison, prairie chicken, some of those big wide-ranging species are only found in the big areas of grassland that are left. But it's amazing to me how many small vertebrates and invertebrates have hung on even in these small isolated patches of prairies. And so it's not that there's not a conservation concern because there are plenty of those, but it's also really important to remember how much is still there, and still managing to function in a landscape, where in a lot of cases it's a five-acre prairie surrounded by hundreds of acres of cropland, and there's not another prairie nearby. And yet you walk out there and there's all that diversity we just talked about just sitting right there in that little five-acre patch.

Chris: So I'm fairly optimistic about the future. I think there's a lot of opportunities to do small-scale restoration projects, where we can take a couple of small patches of prairie and reconnect them together, and let them function as a larger unit, just by doing some restoration work in between. And little actions like that, without having to transform an entire landscape, we can make a lot of difference just by focusing small—on small areas and being very strategic. And I think there's a lot we can do.

Matthew: Yeah, no, I realized that my question was likely to be a doom and gloom one. So I appreciate you picking up the mood.

Rachel: We did take a sharp turn there very quickly. Haha. So you've obviously learned a lot about invertebrates over the years. Has that changed your perspective on land management at all?

Chris: Yeah, in a big way. I think being a photographer has led me to discover a lot of invertebrate species, because I take a picture and then I'll learn about it. I learn its story, learn how it lives and what it needs to survive. And then that becomes incorporated back into my science brain, as a land manager. And so I talk about like when I look at a prairie through bee goggles, you know, like I see it through the eyes of a bee and I think, “Okay, are there flowers that are blooming every week through the season? Are there multiple options available throughout the season?” Because that's what bees are going to need to survive, right? Or if I'm a ground beetle, “Is there enough cover over here that I can move around and be okay?” And with every different group of invertebrates that I learn about, I start to be able to look at a landscape through their eyes, both for, you know, we have the diversity of plants that we need, but also again from managing that habitat structure when we think about fire, or grazing, or whatever else. If I was that species, could I live in this prairie right now? And if so, where would I be? And if I can't answer those questions, then I have to sort of reconsider what the management is happening, or how the management is happening.

Chris: And then I can take that and then help other land managers think about it more broadly. Because I think a lot of land managers, if you don't know it's there, you're not including it in the thought process of how you're creating habitat. And so the more, the more species land managers are aware of, the more challenging it is, but the more robust your land management planning can be. So the downside of that—if there is one—is that you also start to recognize all the trade-offs of, “If I manage habitat for this species, it's not going to favor this other species. So that I gotta make sure that there's something for that species over here.” But it really forces you—it pushes you in a good way into this idea of creating a mosaic of habitat types within a single prairie so that everybody can find a place to go each year, right?

Chris: And then you want to move those around because you don't want to manage the same spot the same way, and get into a pattern where you start favoring the same species too many years in a row and they become dominant. And others are sort of dropping out because they're just, they never get a chance to do what they need to do. So we create the shifting mosaic of, you know, a mix of habitat patches this year, and the next year it's a different mix of habitat patches. And that's really informed by understanding all the different conflicting and complementary needs of invertebrates.

Matthew: Because superficially managing grassland seems like an easy task, but—.

Chris: Yeah. Haha. “What, you can just go burn it.”

Matthew: “It's just grassland, right? So that's all the same.”

Matthew: In your day job, so to speak, you oversee work on Nature Conservancy sites in Nebraska on the prairies. I mean, how does The Nature Conservancy manage their land?

Chris: I mean, so in Nebraska, we—the two big tools that we use are fire and grazing. And from the grazing side, we use cattle and we use bison, depending on where we're at and what we're trying to accomplish. And then, of course, prescribed fire. And those two sort of make—they create sort of like the baseline management everywhere. And then layered on top of that is more of an invasive species control effort—mostly with invasive plants. Where sometimes we can take care of a lot of that with our fire and grazing management, but there are other times where we have to come in on top and manage a particular species with loppers, or herbicide, or whatever it is in that, you know, to be very specific about, “Okay, we need to remove this out, or suppress it, or whatever we need to do.”

Chris: From the fire and grazing standpoint, a lot of it is what I just talked about in terms of that shifting mosaic of habitat patches where, for example, we know that if we take a prairie that has a fence around it, and we burn a portion of that prairie, and we have grazing animals in there—either bison or cattle—whatever has been most recently grazed is—er, whatever has been most recently burned is where they're going to graze. And so we can focus their grazing—without even cross fencing or anything else—we just focus their grazing by where we burn. And then we burn a different place every year, and that shifts that grazing around so that we always have something that is being grazed now, something that's in the recovery phase from being grazed, and something that's really ungrazed. Which means we have short habitat, patchy habitat, and tall and dense habitat.

Chris: And so that's a really basic model that we can play with, and then we add in different variations there. But there's also places where fire is difficult to use either because we're limited on our capacity to do fire or because, for example, it's right next to a highway, or there's other sort of restrictions about using fire. And so there we're being more experimental about how to use grazing in different ways, but maybe incorporating mowing. So, for example, we could also go out and mow a patch and then the cattle will focus on that mowed area, because it's the same green regrowth after mowing that we get after fire, or at least very similar.

Chris: Broadly speaking, we create that shifting mosaic of habitat patches. That tends to take care of a lot of our invasive plants. Things like smooth brome, for example, or Kentucky bluegrass are two invasive grasses that if you leave them alone or you give them favorable environments, they'll grow into near monocultures and squeeze a lot of other plants out of the way. And then you've got low plant diversity, which means you have low invertebrate diversity. But under this shifting mosaic idea, what we see is that those species are always there, but there aren't very many years where they get to really flourish and be dominant. And in all the other years, there are other plant species that get to be more dominant. And it keeps things mixed up. So in some ways, it's like being a land manager in a way is like being a referee at a game where you're trying to make sure everybody's playing fair, and everybody gets to be there. And it's actually a combination of coach and referee because you want to make sure everybody gets playing time and stays happy and will stay on the team, right? And so you're trying to make sure that whether it's plants or animals, everybody has a winning season now and then, and then they'll stick around for the next one.

Matthew: Yeah. And what kind of period of time does this cycle from fresh burn, to mixed, to long last?

Chris: Multiple cycle lengths, I guess. But in most cases we're—. Like in one prairie, we might burn something, a portion of it every year, or maybe every couple of years. And then the frequency that one particular part of that prairie gets burned is like maybe every three to five years, it'll get another fire. Or it'll be grazed hard again maybe every three to five years. And so then you've got a long period of rest in between. And a lot of the grazing we're doing, by the way, the—what we tend to do most is that when we graze it, we graze it for a full season, or for a large part of the season. And if you went out there and all you saw was the area we were grazing, you might think we're not very good land managers, because it looks very short. And there's maybe not a lot blooming at the time. But it is a really valuable habitat, even in that condition, for a lot of animals.

Chris: But then that particular place will not be grazed again for maybe two or three years, and so that period of transition between grazing and sort of full rest is the most interesting, and also, by the way, the most diverse in terms of our invertebrates. Because the grasses, after being grazed all season, they take a year or two to kind of get enough energy to grow again and be competitive. And in that sort of gap is when you get a lot of wildflowers that take advantage of the lower competition from those grasses—native grasses and invasive grasses. And they just had this huge party. And when that party's happening, all the invertebrates are also partying. And so it's the most interesting and pretty part of that cycle that we talked about.

Chris: And what we found is that [when] we graze for less time, there isn't as much loss of energy on those grasses, the party's not as big, it doesn't last as long. So the longer we graze, and the longer recovery period we give it, the better it feels like it acts for diversity. Yeah, so the annual cycle—or the cycle would be like a three to four-year cycle of intense grazing for a long season or two, and then a long period of rest on the back end.

Rachel: So it goes without saying that prairies are important for a number of reasons. And, as we've learned today, they can be these massive spaces that are far from people, but they can also be smaller and very close to even more urban areas. So what can people do to directly help with prairie conservation?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot you can do. Obviously, one is that you can support conservation organizations, right? Like Xerces Society or The Nature Conservancy. But beyond that, there's a lot you can do. If you have a backyard, or if you have any space that you can control and do planting, it's amazing how much will show up in a small area if you provide some plants and habitat for them. And things like using native plants, using a diversity of plants in your space. Don't forget to leave some bare ground for bees to nest, and have some piles of—. Make it messy, I guess is the thing, right? The messier the better for a lot of diversity. Some of that is you should do it because it gives you a place to go watch and interact with nature in a really interesting way, but it also has a really tangible conservation benefit, right? I mean, even if a lot of the species that are there are common species, common species still need habitat.

Chris: And then, like in our part of the world, we have a lot of insects that migrate north and south through Nebraska, and I know that when I have a little bit of a backyard habitat, I see a lot of those species stopping by and using my habitat as a really important part of that migration. And so, I'm supporting this incredible migration of butterflies and moths, and dragonflies, even things like large milkweed bugs, you know, that move through and they need to have a stopover spot. And in this part of the world where a lot of our landscape is crop field, those little oases of habitat become crucial. So it's fun to do it because you get to see things that are there, but you can also feel good about the actual conservation value.

Chris: And then maybe most importantly, whenever you do that, you become more informed and educated about conservation, because you start seeing species, and of course you're going to learn about what they are and you start to see how plants and insects interact with each other. And it just makes you a more informed voter, makes you a more informed activist, or educator, or whatever other role you could play. And then you can start telling stories about what you see to all your friends—in person, through social media, whatever. But the best way to get conservation to grow is for everybody who sees the value of it to talk about why it's valuable and why they have a passion for it. And having that very tangible, up close and personal view of that is so helpful in terms of creating the stories for you to tell all your friends.

Matthew: Yeah, that's great. Well, Chris, we're coming to the end of our conversation, so thank you so much for sharing this time with us and sharing your knowledge, your enthusiasm. I mean, this has been a really enjoyable time. We have the last two questions that we ask all of our guests, and the first one is: what inspired you to study and work in prairies?

Chris: I was an outdoor kid as a young person, which was lucky for me. My mom was a birdwatcher, and my dad is a soil scientist, and we went fishing together, and camping sometimes. And I was in Scouts. So I got interested in the outdoors early and sort of naturally, but I didn't get interested in prairies until I was in college. And it was—it took a friend of mine to come up to me one day at school and say, “You notice that nobody really pays attention to prairies that much? Even though we're in Nebraska, which is a prairie state.” And it's like—and that really struck me because I had not thought about prairies. Every time we went fishing, we drove through the prairies to get to a lake, and then I sat under a tree and fished. And so nature to me was trees and lakes. And prairies just hadn't entered my consciousness. And as soon as he said that, something flipped in my brain and I became an advocate for prairies, partly because it was an underdog and I needed a cause, because I was in college and everybody in college has to have a cause.

Chris: But as soon as I dove into it I started seeing all the things we've talked about today, how diverse they are, and how dynamic they are, but also, again, that they're like a coral reef where from the surface you don't see much. And as soon as you sink down into them, everything is there in front of you. And so it became a real cause for me to help people learn how to sink down and see everything that can be in a prairie. But it's still frustrating to me that it took that long for an outdoors kid to discover this landscape, this habitat type that he'd been surrounded by my, you know, my whole childhood. But it's a good reminder that there are a lot of other people in that situation. And so I hope that I can be that catalyst to sort of flip that switch and have them see what's been around them for a long time and appreciate it differently.

Rachel: We do hear that, you know, people are into nature their whole lives and it's not until they're in like grad school that it really clicks for them. And now, like you said, you could be that person that can inspire other people to care about prairies and to study them. And you got to thank your friend, I guess, for asking that poignant question.

Chris: Yeah, thanks, Steve.

Rachel: Haha. Thanks, Steve. So our last question: if you could see any bug in the wild—and bug is a very loose term for invertebrate, and wild being anything outside of captivity—what would it be?

Chris: All right. I'm going to cheat a little bit because it's something I have seen in the wild before, and it's the caterpillar that's right behind me here. So the camouflaged looper is an inchworm that turns into a little moth called the wavy-lined emerald moth—it's a really neat little, green moth. But the moth part is less interesting to me than the caterpillar, because the caterpillar decorates itself or camouflages itself with little pieces of flower, as it eats flowers. So it feeds on flowers, but every few bites it'll stop and it'll take a bite. And instead of eating it, it sticks it to its back, and it'll camouflage itself like the flower that is feeding on, which is amazing, right? And then when it switches to a different flower species, it changes its costume to match. Or if parts of it start to dry up and get withered, they'll take it off and put a fresh one on. And you can watch this happen, if you are lucky enough. I've seen them, I think I've only found them five times in my life, and I've managed to get a picture of them four times.

Chris: And the one that's behind me here in the picture, I found at the Niobrara Valley Preserve several years ago and it was feeding on a sunflower, and it had taken pieces of sunflower and put it on its back, and that was really neat. And I took pictures of it. And when I got done, I thought, “You know, I've got all these workmates that would love to see this.” And it was in the evening, so that nobody was around, but I thought, “I'm going to take this flower with me back to headquarters and put it in a vase overnight.” So I did that. And then I grabbed a different flower that was purple—so it was on a yellow sunflower—I grabbed a purple flower and I thought, “Well, maybe overnight it'll change locations, and change its costume by morning and that would be fun.” I put them in a jar with some water, put a paper towel underneath it, so it wouldn't fall into the water, because that would be sad. And then I went to bed.

Chris: And when I got up in the morning, the first thing I did was I went to check to see if it had changed its costume, and I found it—it took me a while to find it—and when I did find it, it had changed its costume, but it didn't change to the other flower. It ended up sitting on the paper towel, and it chewed up little pieces of paper towel, and it put the paper towel on its back and it converted itself into being camouflaged on a paper towel! And it's my favorite insect in the whole world. And that was even like—that was just reinforced what was already my favorite insect. And now I just, that's my, that's my obsession—looking for those little caterpillars. And I know they're super common, but they're obviously very hard to see. And so that's the one that I want to see in the wild, every time. I want to see it as many times as I can.

Matthew: Yeah, those are just incredible behaviors that you described there. And I was also thinking like, “Of course, trying to find a camouflaged caterpillar in a 100-acre prairie—.”

Chris: Yeah. Haha.

Matthew: Yeah, that's not that easy. They're like a proverbial needle in the haystack, really, isn’t it?

Chris: Yeah, so if you can flip your—or, snap your fingers and make that happen, that would be great. I would appreciate that.

Matthew: Haha. We'll do our best.

Rachel: I absolutely love that story—you're such a good storyteller. And it's funny because if people come on Bug Banter twice, we have to come up with new questions, and one of the other questions we ask people is: what is your favorite experience with an invertebrate? And you somehow rolled, unknowingly, that one into this one.

Chris: Haha.

Rachel: And I just, I really love it. I don't think we've ever had anybody answer with a bug that they've actually already seen. But I just think that it makes sense that you'd want to see them because there's something new every time. Yeah, I love that. Haha.

Chris: Does that mean I'm not invited back anymore because I've already answered all your questions?

Rachel: Oh, no, we have more.

Matthew: We’ll come up with questions, don’t worry. Haha.

Rachel: We have more. Don't worry. Haha.

Rachel: Well, Chris, this has been wonderful. I think one of my favorite parts of my job is being a co-host with Matthew on Bug Banter, because every time it's like this new part of the world opens up to me, and I get a new perspective. And I didn't know a lot about prairies before this and I thought, “Well, this would be an interesting episode.” And you just sort of blew all my expectations out of the water. I feel so inspired, and light, and grateful that prairies exist. And people like you exist that are protecting these areas. Just knowing that I can do something to help as well. So this has been lovely. And I'm sure our listeners also enjoyed it, but I do hope we have you back. And we just so appreciate you, and your time, and the work that you're doing. And thank you for inspiring me and I'm sure a lot of other people today.

Chris: Well, thank you. That's very kind. Yeah, I'd be happy to come back and talk about prairies, or anything else.

Matthew: Bug Banter is brought to you by the Xerces Society, a donor-based nonprofit that is working to protect insects and other invertebrates—the life that sustains us.

Matthew: If you’re already a donor, thank you so much. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate. For information about this podcast and for show notes go to xerces.org/bugbanter.