After the excitement of yesterday’s goat herding adventure, Riley and I were happy to return to life and work as normal today, but that didn’t stop us from checking in with our favorite mischief-makers first.

We knocked out a small demo site before tackling harvest in P1 and P8 before lunch. After lunch we trucked out to P2 to harvest more heads. Though Echinacea flowering has concluded, the views from the plot are still gorgeous and bright with other flowers.

After heading back to Town Hall Riley bid me farewell and took off to the Twin Cities for his brother’s wedding. The mathematically-minded may have worked out that Town Hall’s population currently numbers just one person– me! (Unless you count the 72 ghosts in the basement, of course.) That’s a pretty lonely way to live though, so I convinced Baby the goat to come home with me and rematch for the WWE title.

Our morning began fairly quietly, with phenology in P2 and the remnants underway. We officially put the pulse-steady pollination experiment to bed for the field season, with no more styles left to pollinate. Chekov was resurrected and put to the test staking the corners of P9.

After lunch the entire team headed out to P9 to begin (and ultimately end!) measuring. We had a more exciting afternoon than any of us had anticipated; while measuring has its own thrills, no massive leaves or first-time flowering plants could compare with the thrill of accidentally sticking your foot in a Bombus griseocollis nest and hearing the resulting furious buzzing. I exclaimed “Uh—BEES!” and Jay and I scrambled back down the row we were working on. While I chose a two-legged locomotive strategy, I looked back and saw Jay army-crawling away from the threat. We both assumed Jay was a goner, and I continued my sprint southward.

The griseocollis were all buzz and no sting, and we returned to the plant we abandoned. There I found a katydid and a grub of some kind duking it out. The katydid was happy to climb around my arm for a photo op, and even happier to fall back into the duff and skitter away.

Before making our great escape Jay had spotted a mysterious orchid-like plant, which we lead Stuart to after he and John found another in a nearby row. We all puzzled over the plant and took careful note of its position so we can return to it later. Stuart suggested that errant seeds, micorrhizae or both may have traveled from the Chicago Botanic Garden to the plot on our equiptment, resulting in the plants establishing in the plot. Hopefully as it blooms and we get more opinions on the identity we’ll be able to make better-informed guesses about where they came from!

We were able to finish measuring every plant in P9, and will revisit the sea of white flags for rechecks in the near future!

Town Hall woke up bright and early this Saturday– or at least those of us left, since four of us are traveling this weekend! We had intended to perform the steady treatment in the pulse-steady pollination experiment before it got too hot and the bees beat us to all the pollen, but the end of yesterday’s thunderstorm system was still rolling through Kensington and we decided to wait it out. After the rain let up we finally arrived at the plot but found neither pollen nor pollinators. We futilely scraped wet pollen out of anthers until deciding to return when the sun came out.

A little over an hour later it had become a gorgeous day, and we were greeted by insects of all kinds.

Unfortunately the heavy rains and the cold front seem to have scrambled pollen production. The heads we bagged to harvest pollen from didn’t show signs of presenting pollen any time soon, and heads in P2 were lucky to have one or two anthers with pollen on them. We collected what data we could, but decided to hold off on pollination until tomorrow. Our expedition wasn’t for naught, however, because Miyauna found an Andrena nest!

We bagged a few more heads in the area around P2 so that tomorrow we’ll be able to harvest plenty of pollen. Though Miyauna found a tiny bee nest with ease, she was briefly puzzled when Avery disappeared into the prairie.

With Avery located, we headed back to Town Hall to nap and putter around doing chores. We celebrated the bee hole discovery by voyaging out to the DQ in Starbuck, which has the most charming signage and most savage mosquito population of any ice cream joint we’ve visited.

The following is our two accounts of first-day field experience, which comprised of orientation to the remnant prairie ecosystem and honing of field skills:

Riley’s Experience

When Erin and I rolled up to the Nessman prairie remnant for directed observations, I immediately felt threatened by the sheer amount of Bromus inermis present at the site. Although it is generally reported to be passive, I did not believe it necessary to disturb the rows of brome grasses that waited on the roadsides. Fortunately, the west ditch had a considerably lower amount of brome, and I felt considerably more comfortable stepping into its diverse collection of cold and warm season grasses, forbs, and legumes. Fortunately, I was not tasked with scouring this site for unknown plants so I was able to create a map of the site in the shelter of the middle of the road. Unfortunately, my partner Erin was not so lucky. Erin spent limited time on the east side of the road (the side with sea of brome), and she was fortunate enough to actually leave the brome sea unscathed. I was pretty impressed by the ninja skills Erin showed to avoid the constant onslaught of Bromus inermis in her personal space, it was cool. However, as Erin moved to the west ditch, there was a change… there was the emergence of an X factor, some may say. When I looked up from my mapmaking, I saw Erin under attack in the west ditch. Not by brome, but by caterpillars. Little known fact about caterpillars: caterpillar is Swahili for “guerilla warfare.” I unfortunately did not know this upon my site visit to Nessman, and I believed for a time that my partner suffered the consequences of many caterpillar attacks. At this point, however, I had known Erin for less that 24 hours and had failed to learn her most important skill: Erin serves as a trusty steed for a wide variety of grounded insects and she can communicate with them via hand signals to say, “Hi my name is Erin and I’ll be your Lyft driver today.” I was so happy to see that this seemingly menacing interaction between caterpillar and partner was actually a mutualistic one… One that I will not forget as I continue my year with the caterpillar whisperer.

Erin’s Experience

Before visiting Nessman I had experienced remnant prairie only a handful of times, and all of those instances occurred earlier that morning. The landscape is gorgeous, diverse, and completely alien to me. I had never been in such a lush grassland before, and after our brief orientation in the morning, I could name maybe one in 100 plants I saw. Before arriving in Minnesota after the long drive from North Carolina, I had only ever seen Echinacea angustifolia on Google Images. Just picking it out from the surrounding prairie plants to estimate the number of flowering heads for our skill-building exercise was difficult. Riley knows his stuff and was an amazing help for any plants I had questions with, and could make a really educated guess even when he was unsure. I couldn’t distract Riley from his tasks forever, though, so I set out on my own to characterize the community for our record. As I carefully stepped over delicate plants and wracked my brain for plant identities and functional groups, I was desperate for something that looked familiar.

When I stumbled upon the first tent caterpillar my mind lit up with recognition before I could even process what I was seeing, or why it reminded me so much of home. I immediately recognized the little fuzzy caterpillar hanging out on a leaf as a friend; it took longer to remember that I spent many springs in my childhood catching the harmless and ubiquitous creatures in jars. Eventually tent caterpillars become far less charismatic tent moths that make unsightly silk nests in trees, but before then they make very good schoolyard pets. I scooped up the caterpillar and examined it for any significant differences from what I remembered in my youth, but it looked just the same as the ones we have back home. The familiar tickly feeling of the caterpillar in my hand was oddly comforting, and I carried it with me for the next few meters of my search before releasing it back to munch on foliage.

As I continued through the west ditch, I was surprised to find many more caterpillars, and not just of the tent variety.

Riley and I discussed the interesting difference in plant assemblage between the two sides of the road; while the east was dominated by invasive species, the west seemed to have greater native diversity of both plants and caterpillars. I look forward to visiting Nessman again in the future and hunting for more caterpillars, or maybe moths and butterflies!