Grassland Groupies

Helping to Save the Bees With Plants in Kansas (Gift Article) About 97 percent of the land in the state is privately owned. Meet the people helping to make it friendlier for native bugs.

We are incredibly proud to represent Kansas in NYT's "50 States, 50 Fixes" climate series. Nothing gives us greater hope than the power of community action! 

Oct. 21 is Reptile Awareness Day, and while you are undoubtedly aware of reptiles, are you aware of THIS reptile? No, not Texas horned lizards, I mean THIS particular lizard. It emerged from a peanut M&M-sized egg to gobble ants on our grasslands. We're making you aware of it. You're welcome!

On the left, a healthy Xyrus grass. On the right, a fungal pseudoflower atop a hijacked plant hoping to lure in unsuspecting pollinators! 😱
This month's Best Biome brings you tales of vegetative body horror that will make your chlorophyll run cold.
https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/the-best-biome/

The Evergreen Library planting was a success! Our sincere thanks to the 20 helpers that came out to put 31 different native plant species in the ground. Although this library is known to house The Very Hungry Caterpillar, we expect the garden will absolutely thrive when it blooms next spring!

In case you missed it, Nicole's celebration of rattlesnakes on Best Biome was short, sweet, and easy to digest. Just like... well, most things injected with rattler venom. 😌
Catch up now before next week's special Halloween episode drops!
https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/the-best-biome/

Smallest Herbivores Create the Biggest Impact for Grassland Forage

A new Smithsonian Institute study found that prairie dog towns do the heavy lifting when it comes to improving soil nutrition.  Another reminder that essential grazers include more than bison and cattle!

On their lecture at Ninnescah Biological Field Station this week, our Friends U. students flipped a number of boards in name of scientific inquiry, finding ringnecks, ribbonsnakes, and a prairie king. Shout out to Station Manager Dexter Mardis for demonstrating proper (and fearless) herp handling!

Afraid of snakes?  On this month's Best Biome, Nicole illustrates how our lovely grassland rattlesnakes have helped humanity more than they've ever harmed it (even offering the cure to some nasty diseases). Now TICKS? Ticks you should be afraid of.
https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/the-best-biome/

The GG's took their Friends University Grassland Ecology class on their first field lab this week! Sightings include: monarch cats prepping for the big trip, bees and beetles crossing paths on gumweed, a coffee-loving pyrausta moth that's maybe a bit undercaffeinated. 

Reminder: go look at bugs.

Much like Maury Povich, scientists rely largely on egg testing to determine paternity in birds because they're very secretive with their extra-pair passions. The degree to which backyard birds are NOT the father of their broods is staggering.
 https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/filthy-animals/ (18+)

ICT Bee Fest ICT Bee Fest is a free come-and-go event perfect for nature lovers of all ages, celebrating native Kansas bees, butterflies, and more.

Want to learn more about native gardening, how to best support pollinators, and even certify your own garden to show off to your neighbors? ICT Bee Fest has you covered! Join us on Sept 27th in Wichita, KS for monarch tagging, native plant vendors, local art, and so much more! Read on:

One of the best parts about native gardening is taking the time to sit and watch nature use the space. Sometimes you get lucky enough to capture a bumblebee flying in and the perspective makes her look like a creature feature horror movie star. 🐝

Did you know "cuckold", "cuckquean", and even "bigamy" are used as legitimate scientific terms in breeding biology? On this month's Filthy Animals, Rachel explores the complexities of animal infidelity, from birds to beetles. New ep out now! (18+)
https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/filthy-animals/

American canebrake habitats may have gone the way of many of our world's grasslands, but they're far from extinct. This month's Best Biome takes a look at the people fighting to bring rivercane back. Listen now! https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/the-best-biome/

Not long ago, the eastern United States was populated with ample bamboo forests, where bison and elk plowed through the brush like elephants. Nicole tells us the story of America's rivercane ecosystems on this month's Best Biome, available now! https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/the-best-biome/

The Tallgrass Prairie Reader

The editor for the Tallgrass Prairie Reader is John T. Price. uipress.uiowa.edu/books/tallgr...

When it's too hot to go out, try taking a literary trip. Experience wonder through others.

Public Domain:

*William A Quayle "The prairie and the sea" www.biodiversitylibrary.org/creator/3115...

*Margaret Fuller "Summer on the Lakes in 1843" Chicago prairie begins p25 tile.loc.gov/storage-serv...

Bright reddish butterfly milkweed blooms: a crown of petals pointing up with a skirt of petals around each. Photo by Rachel Roth (account contributor)

Wildflowers captivate. For many like Fuller, the flowers made them pause, consider the prairie, and fall in love with it.

"O, this square mile of prairie is an intoxicant to the soul!" wrote William A. Quayle about his KS prairie.

Fall's eruption of plains wildflowers is here, asking us to pause.

Its previous owner underlined in the introduction, "Even as a literary landscape, the tallgrass is endangered."

This being the result of the American imagination's fixation on forests, mountains, and other Thoreau-ish places of wild beauty—

"—or at least a more mainstream notion of that beauty."

A black-and-yellow wasp with a large head buries its face in one of the many fluffy yellow flowers in a blooming cluster of goldenrod flowers. Photo by Rachel Roth (account contributor)

"I enjoyed a sort of fairyland exultation never felt before, and the first drive amid the flowers gave me anticipation of the beauty of the prairies." - Margaret Fuller

I stumbled on a used copy of "The Tallgrass Prairie Reader," whose written accounts of the prairie obviously came home with me. 🧪📗

Dear scientists: As science communicators, we love sharing your work, jargon and all.
 ICYMI, be sure to catch Nicole's fantastic deep-dive on tegus. New Best Biome drops next Thursday! https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/the-best-biome/

This bee is smaller than a bumble but bigger than a sweat bee. She has dark eyes, dense fuzzy yellow hind legs, and pale yellow strips going down the length of her abdomen. There's a large black spot and a black stripe below it on her thorax, and her antennae are mid-length and black.

Way more bee species were visiting that day, but I'll stop myself here. Thanks for checking out the bees, and as a bonus, here's a little guy I haven't identified. Anybody know who she is???

A big and extra fuzzy bee, with a smooth satchel of pollen on its back legs. She has a tiny head, a black spot in the middle of her back, and some fuzzy yellow around her waist. Even the black parts of this bee are fuzzy.

Finally, a good old-fashioned bumble bee. Brown-belted Bumble Bee, based on the Great Plains Bumble Bee Atlas, because that second abdominal thorax is crescent-shaped with a rusty swoop. FULL pollen baskets on that fella's legs. What a cutie.

A shiny, black bee that is SO TINY it could probably stand on the head of that carpenter bee from the earlier pic. It's blurry and flying, with a pointed abdomen.

A tiny metallic, bottle green sweat bee is inside the cuplike flower of a poppy mallow, going to TOWN on the white pollen at the center of the flower. The dusty pollen is getting everywhere.

TINY BEE ROUND: "tiny dark bee" and "green sweat bee" groups. That tiny little bee is ZOOMing, and she's probably a small carpenter bee. Then there's the itty bitty green, metallic sweat bee just doused in poppy mallow pollen. The purple poppy mallow neighbors the bee balm, and I had to include it.

A bee sticks his face into a pink flower. His antennae and wings are gold, and the antennae are super long. The yellow fuzz on his dark body is short and velvety.

This bee's long antennae caught my eye. They're thick and long, curling over its head. And that glassy eyeball! He's a member of the "Chap Leg Bees" group, probably a Long-horned bee (Melissodes) of some sort.

A bee almost as long as the flower is tall, with a big head, shiny black legs, and short golden-yellow fuzz with a black spot in the middle of the thorax.

Another angle of the same bee, but its naked shiny black butt is more visible.

The Eastern Carpenter Bees are so huge compared to the other bees that they are hard to miss. Look at that big head and the shiny abdomen.

The screen is full of pinkish purple bee balm flower clusters, and in the front a fuzzy bumble bee explores one.

A garden bed of native plants with tall bee balm spilling over into the sidewalk. A park entrance of limestone guards the sidewalk.

It's crazy how much bee diversity one urban garden can see! This garden of #nativeplants our Bee City Wichita team installed a year ago exploded with bee balm recently. Let's use Xerces' Bee Monitoring Tools to meet some of them. @xercessociety.bsky.social

This month on Filthy Animals, Nicole explains the nature of sexually transmissible cancer, a disease so strange it may have given one good boy a scooch of immortality. Listen now! https://www.grasslandgroupies.org/filthy-animals/

Nature journal with us this Sunday!

When we journaled last month, you said it felt nice to sit and stay a while, to notice the small things, to feel connected to nature. Experiencing wonder and creativity is a failproof way to bust burnout and recharge, and boy do we need that. 

Swanson Park, 9am.

The senate’s version of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" reintroduces provisions that enable the largest sale of national public land in history. Public backlash to the House version of this selloff worked. Our immediate action is required. Contact your senators. More: http://bit.ly/4kaQer0