RAIN!!! After weeks of very little in the way of precipitation, Team Echinacea was rained out on Wednesday morning. Instead of the usual field work and phenology, we worked on data entry and other analyses for our individual projects. Fortunately, it stopped raining around 10 AM and I was able to head out to Staffanson Prairie Preserve to collect data for my phenology project. West Staffanson was burned this past spring and a lot of the plants are flowering later than usual. This rain seemed to have jump started flowering and it seemed like all of West Staffanson went from young, green sprouts to beautiful flowering plants over night. Walking into West Staffanson, I felt like Dorothy entering the land of Oz! Below I’ve attached a few pictures of the flowering plants and pollinators that I saw. Because West Staffanson was burned pretty late in the spring, many of the flowers that have already finished blooming in other remnants were in their prime on Wednesday. In the afternoon, we started working on phenology in Jennifer’s Plot at Hegg Lake.
Allium
An Echinacea on its first day of flowering.
Flowering Amorpha canescens with a pollinator!
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