Mule deer on the Range...

On Saturday August 23rd I saw my first male mule deer on the Sandsage Bison Range. This guy was avoiding the midday sun by sitting under a couple of the scattered trees on the range. Eventually the deer had enough of our nosiness and bounded off over the sandhills. The tour participants were 4 hot air balloon pilots who were in town for the 5th annual Hot Air Balloon Classic in Garden City. I took several pilots on a tour last year so they recommended it to their friends this year.

Weekend visit to Wichita, KS

A view of the Botanical Gardens. Lovely!






Giant turtles at the zoo!











I spent 4 days in Wichita taking in the biological and cultural attractions with my parents. We really had a good time and I was impressed with Wichita, which was a 4 hour drive from Garden City. The first thing we did was visit the Sedgewick County Zoo. My favorite exhibit was the colossal-sized turtles, but I enjoyed the variety of exhibits and was amazed at the sheer size of the zoo. It was a lot more than I had expected. Definitely worth the time if you are in the area. My only complaint was the salt cedar tree planted in a concession area near the gorilla house. I think I am going to have to send an email to someone about getting rid of that highly invasive and ecologically devastating plant! ** Update ** I got a reply back from the zoo curator who said they know the plant is invasive, but they are "keeping an eye on it" and don't plan to remove it. That's downright irresponsible! But, unfortunately not illegal so thats that.

The next morning we strolled through the expansive Botanical Gardens. Talk about a plant lovers paradise! I loved the weird-looking plants that come from all over the world. I am a bigger fan of native prairie plants, but I definitely appreciate the effort it takes to put together a horticultural garden and the Botanical Gardens take extravagance to a whole new level. Top notch!

We also took time to check out the Wichita-area cultural history at the fancy County Museum. I learned that Wichita is named after an Oklahoma tribe of Native Americans. The Wichita Indians "agreed" to move from Oklahoma to the site in Kansas that eventually took their name. Other tribes that already inhabited that area did not respond well to the new arrivals and eventually the Wichita tribe went back to Oklahoma. There is a creek in Oklahoma named Skeleton Creek, which commemorates the sad and deadly trek of the Wichita tribe back to their homeland. So when you travel somewhere, ask yourself "What's in a name?".

After lunch at the River City Brewing Company my parents and I walked through the Museum of World Treasures in the Old Town part of Wichita. I was amazed at how clean and quaint the Old Town area looked. The World Treasures Museum is a shrine to all things opulent in the ancient world. It struck me that nothing has really changed throughout history. The powerful and wealthy have always walked all over the less fortunate in order to raise themselves to immortality. Museums tell you who owned the gold crown, but not how many people suffered as a result.

We also spent several hours going though a place called "Cow Town". It is basically a living museum. The several block-sized area is a reproduction of what a cow town of the old west would look like and how it operated. There are reenactors who portray the people that worked and lived in the town. We saw a blacksmith working the furnace, watched a mock gunfight, toured an actual working farm that only uses equipment from the 1800s, rode in a horse-drawn covered wagon, and watched the carpenter use a hand-cranked saw to split a 2x4 board. The interesting thing is that most of the tools are the same design as they are today only now with a motor instead of a hand crank attached to a system of pullies. Hey, if it isn't broke then don't fix it!

On a final note, one of the most enjoyable things we did in Wichita was go to two dinner theaters. The Mosley Street Melodrama was a comedy play with a singing/comedy variety show as well, which were both very funny! Basically, it was actors dressed as cowboys who poked fun at stereotypes. Then the other dinner theater was part of the Cow Town experience where real cowboys sang real cowboy/campfire songs and told jokes besides. Somehow I got assigned a seat front and center and I was so close that I could tell the time on the guitar players watch. The 2 dinner theaters were very different in style and content, but both were immensely enjoyable and I would go back in a heartbeat.

This concludes my review of some attractions that Wichita has to offer. I encourage you to check out the biological and cultural attractions in your surrounding area because you never know what treasures lie in your own backyard!

Re-Visited by a Sphinx moth

I had another lovely visit from my local sphinx moths. I came home from walking on the Tally Trail and ran inside to snatch up my camera and clicked away as the moths hoovered around my petunias. Their wings beat as fast as hummingbirds, so it takes time to get a perfect picture. I hope to have more chances! This is only the second time I've seen these moths at my apartment and they only show up at dusk.

Yaa! I won a cool plant!!

I won the door prize tonight at my Horticulture Club annual picnic! I saw the plant sitting there beforehand and I was chanting to myself "please let me win". This plant is a garden variety of a native plant with the scientific name Liatris and common name(s) Blazing Star or Gayfeather. Liatris is a prairie plant that blooms in the fall, and is also a popular addition to flower arrangements and is grown commercially for that purpose. Who doesn't love a purple flowering plant?? I am going to keep it in the pot for now because my flower bed's soil is quite sandy and sucks up a lot of water and I'm afraid the Liatris will dry out and die in this summer heat.

The last time I won a door prize was earlier this year at an Eagles Club monthly supper. It was Valentine's Day and I won this huge stuffed dog, which I gave away to my coworker's 8 year old great-nephew and he loved it. I won't be giving away my Liatris though. This one is a keeper!

Garden Friends...

I have noticed these little toads outside my apartment. They are about the size of a quarter and love to hang out around my flower garden, probably due to the water. I'm just afraid that they'll get underfoot (literally)!


*Update* Jeff Hansen with the KS Native Plant Society told me the toad is either a woodhouse toad or a great plains toad. It depends on if their stomach is speckled or not. I guess I'll have to look next time!

**Update** The toads have gotten bigger! Plus they are going into my garages to get out of the cooler weather and I found one that had crawled up into my shopvac hose! That could get annoying...

Always something new to see...

As I give tours of the Sandsage Bison Range in Garden City, I tell visitors that I always see something new. This past Wednesday July 9th was no exception. For the first time I saw a rattlesnake on the bison range! This was about 7:45 in the evening. The snake slipped down a hole, probably hunting rodents. I have been a tour guide since May 2007 and given nearly 40 tours to date and this was the first time I saw a rattlesnake! I have seen several other reptiles, including 3 bull snakes, a toad (see Bob on the right), several different lizards, and tons of turtles.

I've seen 3 other rattlesnakes up close and personal in my lifetime. One was in northwestern Nebraska on a gravel road as my colleagues and I drove around photographers for Nebraskaland magazine. That was a cool first encounter because there was a lightening storm rolling in over the bluff as a backdrop. The second was in western North Dakota on a gravel road as I was driving in my Forest Service truck and I took some of the wickedest pictures ever. Too up close and personal to post, for the timid readers. The third and scariest time happened as I was walking through sagebrush headed towards the Little Missouri River, again in North Dakota. I was going to the opposite side of the river to look for a rare plant as part of my botanist job. The little snake slipped down a hole as I caught a glimpse of it, but that was enough to make me beat the bushes the rest of the day to scare any others away. There's nothing quite like being alone out in the middle of nowhere and hearing that buzz just a couple feet away!

Vacation at the Spring Creek Prairie

Over the 4th of July holiday I drove back to Nebraska to see friends and family. I also took time to check out a tallgrass prairie located 15 minutes from my hometown of Crete. I visited the Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center (www.springcreekprairie.org) and took a 2-hour stroll through a portion of the 808-acre area. There were tons of wildflowers, probably due to the recent rains in the area. I did not recognize many of the wildflowers, and for the first time I saw "butterfly milkweed" in person. It is a beautiful orange flowering plant (seen in the picture above). All together I think I took around 350 pictures with my digital camera.

The really neat thing about the Spring Creek Prairie is that there are hilly grasslands, low wetlands, and also a wooded area all accessible by hiking trails within a square-mile area. After walking though the grasslands and around the wetlands, I felt like I was in another zipcode as I entered the woodland draw because it's a totally different habitat. I also saw tons of songbirds and a family of Canada geese hanging out around the wetlands.

A cool history side-note is that you'll also find wagon wheel ruts in a couple spots from the pioneer days. On a personal note, my grandparents used to farm part of the area, and there is a wooden bridge on the hiking trail that is dedicated to my cousin Chris Juricek who died in a car crash when I was in junior high.

The Spring Creek Prairie is truely a gem and I look forward to going back in the fall to see the late-blooming plants. I can't believe I've never been out there before this week! The Audubon Society happens to be looking for a manager for the Spring Creek Prairie and I probably would be perfect for the job, but it would be a big pay cut. I don't plan to give up shopping anytime soon, so I guess I'm staying in southwestern Kansas for awhile! Maybe some day...

A week in SE Colorado...

I just spent the work week in southeastern Colorado driving around crop fields for our June inspections. We check up on those fields a couple times a year to see if the fields are illegally being irrigated with surface water that is supposed to go to Kansas instead. We had an interesting tour. Not so much the work, but we had several technical difficulties of the computer-kind. I also learned how to replace blown fuses in both the Kansas state truck and the Colorado guy's state truck. You can always rely on fried fuses to lighten the mood between KS and CO water officials. We had a pretty good laugh as we drove around to 4 stores trying find the right fuses. The culprit that blew the fuses was a bad inverter box that my laptop was plugged into. Of course the inverter died when I only had 20 minutes of power left on my laptop. I did get a nice picture of a showy milkweed plant along an irrigation canal and a picture of a deer jumping a fence. Enjoy!

Wildflower Weekend at the Bison Range

Sundrops on the Range

This past weekend I spent Saturday morning helping with wildflower tours at the Bison Range. The Friends of Sandsage Bison Range have this wildflower tour event every other year, so this was my first year participating. Despite the dry prairie conditions, I think we had a great time. It's amazing that just a week or two before the prairie was teeming with amazing wildflowers and now their gone.

Some of the plants we managed to find include spiderwort, sand lily, prickly poppy, purple poppy mallow, tall velvet gaura, purple prairie clover, sun drops, white aster, sand snowball verbena, buffalo gourd, sunflower, wild four o'clock, prickly pear cactus, pink barrel cactus (without flowers unfortunately), and a few others. I was excited because we saw 2 ornate box turtles, burrowing owls, a 6+ foot bull snake (who didn't appreciate being cornered under a sagebrush by a certain tour guide named Chelsea), 3 adult male turkeys, pheasants, quail, and of course bison. We had the whole herd walk by the tour trailer, and one of the cows had a cow when she couldn't find her calf who was on the other side of the trailer. I've never heard a bison grunt that much before! Oh, someone also found an intact snake skeleton! Too cool!

Then on Sunday I gave another tour to a youth church group from Kansas City. I think several of the teenage passengers were quite horrified when I found a dead turtle with the head and feet still attached. It's a really nice specimen and completely intact, so I had them pass it around to look at. For kids who live in Kansas City and wear flip flops to the prairie, it was probably pretty gross. I decided not to pass around the bison "meadow muffin" lest anyone jump out of the trailer trying to avoid it. Hopefully they will share those one-of-a-kind experiences with their friends and family and spread the appreciation for our native prairies!

Visited by a (sphinx) moth...

The evening of June 6th I was watering my flower garden and I took some cool pictures of a couple big moths feeding on my flowers. In the close-up picture you can see the moth's long, brown tongue sticking out! A couple of these moths were flitting around like hummingbirds, so you are seeing action shots here. I didn't even know the moths had red and black on their wings until I looked at the pictures!

*Update* I checked my insect book and the moth is called a striped hawkmoth, or also a whitelined sphinx moth. Its common in North America.

An Evening on the Sandsage Bison Range

Nothing says "summertime" quite like grilled buffalo burgers and a sunset tour of the sandsage prairie. On Sunday June 1st I joined my fellow Bison Range tour guides and board of directors for a relaxing evening of burgers and bison watching. Our expert griller was Tom Norman, the Wildlife and Parks manager of the Bison Range. While we enjoyed the meal we were serenaded by several species of songbirds. As it turns out, we were sitting right under a finch nest. The agitated bird-parents sat on a nearby telephone wire plotting our demise while we merrily enjoyed the good food and good company.

After supper the group loaded up on the tour trailer and took a 2-hour spin around the Bison Range. I was so excited because for the first time I saw pink barrel cactus, seen in the picture above along with a yellow-colored Englemann's daisy. I also photographed rusty lupine, which is a purple-flowered native plant that is only found in one spot on the Range.

Then for the first time this year I saw the whole bison herd together with all the babies. The current count is 32 calves. Too cute! We also saw pheasant, jack rabbit, cottontail rabbit, 10 mule deer, and 5 ornate box turtles! At dusk we also saw burrowing owls swooping in and out of the bison herd. The owls were after the grasshoppers that the bison were kicking up as they walked. Overall it was a wonderful evening and an experience I hope to share with many guests who come to see the Sandsage Bison Range!

Wildflower Tour in Barber County, KS

Hello! On Mother's Day weekend I participated in an annual wildflower walk in Barber County. The area is close to Oklahoma and is half way between Wichita and Dodge City and about a 2.5 hour drive from Garden City. The Barber County wildflower tour has been taking place for over 20 years, so they are an organized bunch! There were about 75 participants who were mostly locals plus a few of us from across the state.

I stayed overnight in Medicine Lodge and then Saturday morning we were treated to a slideshow of the wildflowers we were going out to see. My pictures never seem to turn out that nice... The area is a "mixed-grass prairie" so there are tall grasses like Indian grass, big bluestem, and switchgrass and also short grasses like buffalo grass. The Medicine Lodge area is beautiful because of the rolling gypsum hills, also called the red hills. Here is a website I found with a nice write-up on the gyp hills: www.naturalkansas.org/gypsum1.htm

The two half-acre sites we visited had small flags put in the ground to mark specific plants and the tour guides read a short blurb about each plant. Just FYI, a "meadow muffin" a.k.a. "cow pie" has nothing to do with baking. I was already familiar with several plants such as: buffalo grass, prairie groundsel, yellow wood sorrel, wavyleaf thistle, yucca, scarlet gaura, scarlet globemallow, Missouri milkvetch, common/Ohio spiderwort, white milkwort, prickly pear cactus, wild onion and purple poppy mallow. Species new to me were: prairie (native) dandelion, blue wild indigo, lemon paintbrush, rose verbena, and catsclaw sensitive briar. What a cool variety of plants!

Work Trip to Westcliffe, CO

Hello again! My travels took me to the mountainous region of Westcliffe, CO this past week and it was such a beautiful area! Westcliffe is about an hour west of Pueblo, which is south of Colorado Springs and Denver. I was attending the Arkansas River Basin Forum, where I listened to presenters talk about river issues near the headwater region of the Arkansas River. I went on a field trip tour of the valley just below the mountains where local ranchers are working to protect the natural area from housing development.

Unfortunately, I dealt with altitude sickness for over half of the trip. Aside from being sick, I had a great time in the mountains and enjoyed the fresh air and open spaces.

On the way to Westcliffe, our group stopped at a really cool place that everyone should see sometime. It's called Bishop Castle (see the picture I took at the top of this post). Tourists can climb all over the castle and sometimes it feels like you are walking on air! Below is a story I found online about the castle and its eccentric creator...

For 40 years, Jim Bishop has been building a castle on a mountainside in central Colorado. "Did it all myself, don't want any help," he says mechanically as he unloads a pile of rocks that he's hoisted to the 70-foot level on one of the castle towers.

Every year since 1969, Bishop has single-handedly gathered and set over 1000 tons of rock to create this stone and iron fortress in the middle of nowhere. Bishop calls it "a monument to hardworking people" and "America's biggest, one-man, physical project." "I always wanted a castle. Every man wants a castle," Bishop continues, his voice a broken record, answering the same questions he's obviously been asked thousands of times before.

Bishop's goal is to complete his castle before he dies. He has no thought of slowing down. Although the castle is still just a hollow shell of cemented rocks and ornamental ironwork (Jim Bishop's regular line of business), his future plans include a moat and a drawbridge, a roller coaster mounted on the castle's outer wall, a balcony big enough to hold an orchestra, and a second castle for his wife.

Address: 12705 CO-165, Rye - Beulah, CO
Directions: I-25, turn west at highway 165 going through Rye or Colorado City approximately 27 miles to Bishop Castle.

April Fool's Day Surprise...

On April 1st I experienced a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence at the local horticulture club meeting. Several weeks before the 1st, I made plans to attend the horticulture club meeting upon recommendation from a Bison Range board member, Doug Floto. Then I got a call at work from the president of the club, Mike Ramsey, who was looking for someone from the Division of Water Resources to do a presentation about the non-native shrub/tree called salt cedar/tamarisk. I agreed to do the presentation because in grad school at North Dakota State University I helped give educational seminars about salt cedar identification and control.

Fast forward to April 1st. I went to the Finney County Extension office for the hort club meeting, and as I pulled in the parking lot there was another car pulling in and I noticed the driver looking really hard at something. I assumed the person was new to the club like me and was just looking to see if he was in the right place. So I went inside the building and found the meeting room and headed out to my car to get the laptop and projector for my presentation. I opened the door and standing there was a guy I knew from grad school in Fargo, ND. In fact, he worked on part of my grad school research project. We had no idea each other was in Garden City. What a shock! It took me a couple seconds to recover and shout "Ankush! What are you doing here?", which is probably what he was wondering about me!

Turns out that Ankush has been in Garden City for only a month working at the KSU extension research station as an entomologist (insect biology). He came to the hort club meeting because he heard the topic was salt cedar control by insects, but I bet he never imagined I would be the one giving the presentation! I laughed at his email the next day which said "April has never fooled me better". I found out that his wife (from New York City) and 10-month old daughter will be arriving in Garden City in 2 weeks. I hope to make them feel as welcome as my co-workers did for me about 17 months ago!


If running into Ankush wasn't weird enough... later that same week I got a visit from another grad school friend. Lesley from Cavalier, ND (see January post about Manhattan), was in southwest Kansas with her boyfriend Mike and we spent a day going to the zoo and bowling before they headed to Dodge City and then Ashland for a bull sale, which is why they were in the area. I had to laugh because the temperature here was a cool 50 degrees but they were loving it because in northeastern North Dakota there is still snow on the ground!

First Bison Tour of the Season...

At last! On Monday March 10th I gave my first bison tour of the season to an after school program group of 16 students. I was also training 2 of the 7 new guides who have signed up to help out with tours this summer. I feel all the effort that went into guide recruiting at the recent coffee hour on February 23rd and subsequent training on March 8th was well worth it!

I predict that I will do around 30 tours for the Bison Range in 2008. I also look forward to going on my own wildflower tours of the range this spring and summer. There are several species of wildflowers that I hope to photograph, including the sensitive cat's claw and the pink barrel cactus. I have decided that a plant collection is too cumbersome and photos will retain all those vibrant colors of the wildflowers, and are much easier to turn into a PowerPoint presentation! I just found out yesterday that there are 37 recorded species of grass on the Sandsage Bison Range. Talk about a hotspot of plant diversity!