Ordway Field Notes

  This was the chaotic scene in Ordway's prairie two Tuesdays ago: dark smoke rising from blackened earth, wind-driven waves of orange flame, urgent sounds of straining engines and shouting voices. If you haven't witnessed a controlled prairie burn before, it can be alarming.  And if you have any love for grasslands, the scariest part might be the destruction left behind. When the flames die and the smoke clears, the prairie has been completely erased. Any evidence of life that, moments ago, stood above ground is now reduced to a thin layer of soot evenly coating the landscape.  But things aren't always what they seem. As it turns out, the fire that seems to have destroyed the prairie is, in fact, helping ensure its continuation. To see why, it helps to understand a little bit about plant growth strategies. The grasses and wildflowers that make up a tallgrass prairie are mostly perennial herbs . The  herb  part means the plants do not contain any woody tissue....

  November is bleak in the Twin Cities. Over the four weeks that usually separate the fall of the last leaf from that of the first snow, the day shortens by more than an hour. For many of the humans that live here, that hour is the one whose loss we most acutely feel, of the nearly seven we lose in total between the summer and winter solstices. Other months have their compensations. October’s changing leaves make the world a kaleidoscope in slow motion. December’s early-season snowfalls remake the world afresh. November offers no such diversions:  only bare trees, bare ground, and the relentless, clock-like loss of two minutes of sunlight every day. OK, maybe there’s one diversion. If you spend any time in the ample forests in and around the Cities, you might have noticed it. A break in the pattern. Here and there, against the gray expanse of leafless trees – a spot of green, vibrant as mid-summer. If you’re the curious type, you might even have approached it for a closer lo...

It’s that time of year again. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting chillier, and the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is getting perilously thin. That’s what the ancient Celts believed, anyway. To them, this dangerous time of year – which they called Samhain (pronounced ‘Saa-wn’, and literally translated as ‘summer’s end’) – was the pivot-point between the light half of the year, concerned with planting and growing and harvesting, and the dark half, when the life-giving sun turned away from them, and life became frighteningly precarious. To protect themselves during this tense time, Celtic people held festivals of sacrifice, offering crops and animals to their gods in large communal bonfires. They often hid themselves from angry or vengeful spirits that might be moving across the veil – you can’t be too careful, after all – by dressing as spirits or animals, themselves. They also sought their own advantage: asking their priests – the Druids – to peer i...

This summer I had the opportunity to spearhead a new element of the on-going oak forest exclosures project here at Ordway: putting out camera traps! Camera traps are just trail cameras (the only trapping part is catching an animal in a photo or video taken by the camera) that are set out in a designated area to catch photo or video footage of animals in action. Here at Ordway, we are interested in deer herbivory and its impacts on various plant communities, so we put out 11 cameras to specifically catch deer.  How do these cameras work?  With both IR and motion sensors, the cameras pick up changes in heat or movement caused by animals (and occasionally plants). When this happens, it triggers the camera to take photos, videos, or both, depending on the settings selected.  Have you caught any cool photos?  My favorite part of this project was looking through the photos to see who was wandering around during the study period! Besides catching ourselves doing work on the...