I started planning for Monday’s total solar eclipse about two years ago. Using a plot of the path of totality on Google Maps, I spent hours studying satellite imagery along the track, in areas where the weather was especially likely to be clear. I particularly was searching for remote places where we could dry camp […]
Category: Natural History
Prairie Retrospective
Although earlier blog posts have covered our prairies trip in some detail, the purpose of this post is to provide a higher-level perspective on our trip as a whole, and to make recommendations for others touring the prairies. I normally impose on myself a 1000-word limit, for readability, but have allowed this one to go […]
Prairie Finale
Two days ago marked the end of our 4.5-month prairie trip itinerary, in north-central Montana. This post will cover the last 3.5 weeks, while another post will summarize the prairies trip as a whole, with reflections on how the trip went, and what we though were the best spots. From northwest North Dakota, we traveled […]
Prairie Medley
It’s been 25 days since the last post, during which time we have visited 21 locations in the Dakotas and the western edges of Iowa and Minnesota. Of these, 12 were preserves established by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), 7 were federal properties, and two were state parks. Four tallgrass prairie sites were in the distinctive […]
The Niobrara Valley: Biological Crossroads
From where we left off last time in southwest South Dakota, we crossed over into Wyoming, but still in the Black Hills. We stayed two nights at a lovely dispersed campsite next to a wetland in northeast Thunder Basin NG. There was a huge hatch of insects a bit before sunset, and the habitat looked […]
Storms and Shortgrass Prairies
In the previous post I mentioned a number of trip statistics but left off the most important of all: new species towards our goal of 10,000! Yesterday was our 108th day on the road, and we have seen exactly 300 new species, so we have averaged about 2.8 species per day. This brings the grand […]
Kee-kee-doo!
We returned to central Kansas to revisit Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area and Quivira National Wildlife Refuge at what is usually the peak of the shorebird migration. Unfortunately, all the recent rain had flooded the mudflats, sandy areas, and very shallow water preferred by most shorebirds, so the numbers were about the same as two weeks […]
Flood and Famine
From the Osage Hills in northeast Oklahoma, described in the last post, we headed across southeast Kansas. We’ve only run out of gas twice in the 30 years we’ve been married, but this was an extremely rural area, and when we finally reached a station, the truck’s display indicated only 9 miles to empty. Our […]
From Shorebirds to Bison
Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area and the adjacent land held by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), in central Kansas, comprise a globally critical area for migrating shorebirds (sandpipers, plovers, etc.). In some years, an estimated 40% of the shorebirds breeding in North America pass through the Bottoms during spring migration. The Bottoms is a natural wet area […]
A Quartet of National Grasslands
Leaving the Amarillo, TX area, we headed northwest to visit four National Grasslands (NGs) in a relatively small area, but one that spanned four states: Rita Blanca NG in the northwest corner of the Texas panhandle; Kiowa NG in northeast New Mexico; Comanche NG in southeast Colorado; and Cimarron NG in SW Kansas. As we […]
Nomadic Naturalists 