Rim Country Land Blog

Rim Country Land Institute ceased operations in Billings in July 2011. Read the letter from the board at www.rimcountry.org. As this blog had been hosted at the Rim Country website, it will also cease publication.

I will continue publishing field notes and naturalist information about the Billings area and beyond at www.billingsnaturalist.wordpress.com. Please join me there, and thanks for your interest!

-Carolyn Sevier

On the way home this evening I spotted 4-5 bluebirds near the road. I even stopped the car to get out and check, as the pinyon jays have also reappeared in the last few weeks and both birds are blue. But based on their size, flight pattern, and pure saturated color, I think these were the first bluebirds of Spring. I’ll keep an eye out for the next week, for sure.

A note on robins: while it is conventional wisdom that they are harbingers of the season, changing habitats have led some robins to over-winter in colder climates, including Billings. I’ve been watching a flock of robins out at Cove Canyon all winter. I did spy a robin with a particularly brilliant red breast this last weekend, though, so perhaps that was Springtime plumage?

From our February Newsletter. For photos, check out “winter burrows” set on http://www.flickr.com/photos/rclimontana.

Prairie Soils in Winter

Winter is a tricky time for hiking on the prairie; it seems like the soil is either covered in snow and ice or the surface has melted into a sloppy prairie gumbo. Voles and pocket gophers and any number of other species in the subnivean zone make the ground even more treacherous, the ground uneven and pock-marked as a result of their digging. But these activities, both of weather and of animal species, are an important part of prairie ecology, especially when it comes to aerating the soil.

As for weather, you may remember learning in school about erosion of rocks caused by physical weathering. (For those who don’t, physical weathering is the action of physical forces, i.e. pressure, on rocks over time, which leads to erosion, i.e. the breakdown of bigger rocks into smaller rocks). Moisture is a big component of this erosion, as water seeps into cracks in rocks and then expands when it freezes, widening the crack and eventually breaking the rock. This same freeze-thaw cycle breaks up soils, as well, breaking them apart to making space for pockets of air and water that are needed for plants to grow. In fact, this freeze-thaw impact is one of the primary ways soils are aerated.

The small mammals that burrow into the soil are a more visible disturbance in the winter soil. When the snow starts to melt, as it does multiple times in a single winter, you can see the remains of these “vole highways” and pocket gopher casts. The small mammals take advantage of the insulating snow above and dig tunnels at the edge between the soil and the snow, which is often warmer than either the air above or the ground below. When the snow melts, these trails act as low points and collect water. Pocket gopher casts are clearly a way for soil to be churned up. They burrow underground for food and pack the dug-up soil into snow tunnels. When the snow melts, a negative of the tunnels remains in the form of dirt.

Especially on overgrazed rangelands, these actions are important to breaking up soil compaction and helping in the return of native plant species.

I took a walk this week to both test out the baby backpack (success!) and celebrate the sunshine and above zero temperatures. The prairie dogs were out doing the same, at least the latter, and I got to watch one of them doing the “jump-yip” motion/call before they all started to run and bark and crouch in the entrances to their burrows as they usually do when a human approaches. In the town itself was plenty of evidence of other species taking advantage of the shelter of old burrows, plenty of small mammal tracks leading to the older holes. Snow covered the entrances of these almost completely but for a hole just large enough for a mouse or vole.

I walked across the town to check a gully where for the previous two Februaries I have seen a pair of owls. While there were no owls in sight, there was plenty of evidence. Thick white drips of scat like dried plaster coated and hung from the underbrush beneath two old, gnarled Ponderosa, perfect for perching. An oddly-colored stick turned out to be a piece of broken bone, maybe 1.5 inches long and split lengthwise, a bit of red left in the exposed cavity. At the second perching tree, burned at the roots but still green on top, the scat was splattered across rocks. And here were a few cough pellets! I stuck them in my coat pocket for later dissection but was surprised at how big they were and also how fragile and lightweight. I also readied myself for smart comments from the husband about always bringing home pockets full of animal scat All of this could also be from a hawk, and I’ll have to learn more about the differences, but at the moment I’m going to stick with owl.

It seems that once something catches you and you begin to look, the whole world opens up and every broken branch and shadow in the snow starts to speak to you. Such was the case with the owl sign, as all of the sudden I was seeing patches of hair stuck among juniper branches, pine boughs whittled to sharp points by a wandering porcupine, sumac bushes bashed apart by frustrated buck mule deer in rut (I can just imagine the scene: an amorous young buck is in the mood for a challenge, any challenge, and spies a suspicious-looking shrub. Predictable, bar-room dialogue ensues–”what are you looking at, shrub? Hah, you’re not even half the size of that chokecherry over there. And it’s no wonder they call you ‘skunkbush’ with the way you smell. Take that! And so on…) And the tracks, of course, everywhere: deer, voles, elk, magpie, coyote. The underside of a sandstone slab had tracks of another kind, those of minerals left behind by seeping water and the minerals collected on the way, a green cast to the white salts.

A good February walk, returning just as the sun and the temperature began to drop.

Note: we are now putting prairie photos on flickr! Go to www.flickr.com/photos/rclimontana. Enjoy!

While on a wildflower walk last evening, we found a bit of porcupine scat, easily identifiable from its reddish color (from the color of the pine tree bark) and beads-on-a-string appearance. I had noticed that other rodent scat, especially from prairie dogs, also sometimes has this beaded look, and I had wondered about other differences that would make porcupine scat more distinct. Now that I have had a chance to really look after forming the question, both the size (similar to mule deer) and color made it obvious. What really struck me, though, was that when I tried to break one of the “beads” in half I found that the “string” extended all the way through the line instead of being just a series of tails on the end of each bead. The broken halves of each bead could be drawn back and forth along the center string. One of our walk participants wondered how the digestive system of the porcupine must work to produce this effect. A fun discovery, for sure. In other scat news, a dissected bit of coyote scat revealed a rather large claw, which gave me a bit more appreciation for the defenses of prey animals and what predators have to face even with small prey.

Another particularly striking experience on the same day left me both in awe and, I admit, a bit frightened. As I was following the fireline taking pictures for the photo-documentation record of post-fire succession, I came over the top of a hill (which seems to be always how these things happen) and saw…a herd of bison! I know that our neighbors to the North have had them for a while and have even seen them from Molt Road around the stock pond, but this encounter, where I had been expecting (and observing) nothing more than a grunting pronghorn and a few rabbits, gave me a shock. The prairie seemed a bit less benign and a lot more wild all in one moment. I looked around for the fence, wondering if I had ended up on the wrong side of it, and even when I found the orange-tipped fenceposts I wasn’t much reassured. I calmed down and was able to take a few photos of a scene far more common in the past than it is now. Of course, the bison themselves were both aware of my presence and remained as calm and non-plussed as if I had been a pronghorn or rabbit myself. It was really the unexpected-ness, the spontaneity, of the encounter that made the most difference, far different than a zoo or even watching bison in Yellowstone. It certainly gave me a lot to think about.

Lots of other activity, as well. I flushed a great horned owl in the middle of the day last week; it flew out from a ledge beneath me and I got a rare top-view of it soaring and then watched it land (and watch me) from a nearby tree, its ear tufts and yellow eyes clearly visible. Also, a few weeks ago, two cow-calf pairs of elk were spotted on the west end of the property. The elk have been overwintering for a few years now, so we’ll certainly be watching to see if they have started to calve here. That would be pretty exciting.

Flowers out right now include lots of purple fleabane, white and purple prairie clover, hairy goldaster, Rocky Mountain beeplant, and prairie coneflower (see photos). The berries on the sumac bushes are bright and abundant, reminding me of Christmas holly with dark, shiny green leaves and candy-apple red clumps of fruit (wouldn’t it be great if we referred to candied apples as sumac-berry red instead of the other way around…).

After a few days of rain, the prairie was slick and vibrant. The best part of the morning came early, when the dew still coated every exposed surface.  At the base of the grasses was suspended a puddle of rainbow, water trapped in a tight-woven net of silk. Each strand refracted sunlight, like in the spray of a waterfall, and together the whole image was as a washed watercolor palate. Just below, a single quaternary river pebble was visible, appearing like the oblong spider-hole entryway one might suspect from such a web. But here there was no break or entrance, only the net. Like a puddle blue sky in sandstone-captured rainwater or vermillion drops of wildfire and sunset in the distant lakes of a late-summer mountain range (in this case I’m thinking of a day at Medicine Wheel in the Bighorns). An image held (not painted) just for a moment by a particular set of circumstances, including my own position and point of view. It was pretty amazing. I didn’t try to take a photo.

The water has also popped up more mushrooms than I have ever seen, and everywhere, including a tan cup-shaped fungus at the edge of the fireline. And flowers are still blooming–waterleaf, primrose, and fleabane .

A particular flower in abundance right now is the prairie spiderwort (Tradescantia occidentalis), referenced in love songs by Dakota men. The flowers are as striking in purple as larkspur are in royal blue, with a simple geometry and yellow anthers. Leaves are long and narrow, their clean curves reaching outward like elegant stick figures or calligraphy from a thin brush. The whole plant is edible. I could imagine a beautiful salad of greens with spiderworts and star lilies as garnish (if only they bloomed at the same time). The ‘spider’ in the name comes from the stretchy ‘sap’ that emerges when the plant is broken.

Yucca are also in bloom on the high ridges, flowers open for the mutually dependent yucca moth. And the prairie dogs added a particular wheezing/wimpering sound to their regular warning barks when I walked by. A single pronghorn buck was the only hoofed visitor, but it did grunt at me as it paused to look back.

I suppose I had known that bull snakes can climb trees, using their scales to grasp the bark, but this is the first time I had seen or heard of one climbing a wall.  In this case, the wall of the barn. Using the rough stucco surface and winding back and forth across a corner of the building, a medium-sized bull snake climbed up and into one of the woodpecker holes. I don’t think that particular hole was occupied, though I might think that the technique would work for finding eggs in a bird nest. I only got my camera in time to catch the tail. Pretty amazing stuff.

And in plant news, the prairie is carpeted right now with pink starburst blossoms of bitterroot. With all of the rain, the flowers are bursting out and taking over. Every color from deep magenta to pure white, and some forming a living bouquet with nearby asters and cactus. A few parasitic broomrape flowers are also appearing in more open areas than usual.

The nighthawks have also returned in the last week or so, clearly identified by their high, angular silhouettes, bright flashes of white on their wings, and unmistakable sounds.

After a winter of chickadees, magpies, crows, and pinyon jays, the abundance of birds in the Springtime comes as almost a shock.  I have never been a “bird person” in the sense of a life-list or an ever-ready set of binoculars  (though I did just pick up a nice new pair of them). But if the songs and colors of the prairie sky in Spring don’t inspire a sense of wonder, I don’t know what would.  Over a few weeks, I’ve practiced copying the word-phrases of house wrens and song sparrows, watched the hovering behavior of kestrels over the grasses and bluebirds over the prairie dog town (lots of bugs there!), and learned the patches of rust color on a chipping sparrow and a spotted towhee. In an impossible crack of sandstone I discovered a bluebird nest, six small eggs (blue, of course) hidden from every angle but one with enough space for single adult to move in. A very unconcerned crossbill let me take several photos, almost as if it were posing.

The other excitement has been with a few pronghorn fawns discovered in the grass. I learned a lesson in camouflage from a prairie Easter Egg hunt this Spring, having been unable to find even brightly colored plastic eggs after I hid them out in a field just an hour earlier. This lesson was well confirmed by these fawns, looking exactly like chunks of ruddy brown sandstone and so impossibly still that it would be easy to step right next to them and not know it. Not even their fur was moving in the wind, hunkered down as they were below the tops of the grasses. I took a few photos and avoided the area for the rest of the day. This was a bit early in the season, but each fawn has only two weeks between birth and running with the rest of the herd.

If I could draw you a bell curve, skewed to the left, it would approximate the arrival frequency of wildflowers. Starting out in March and early April there are a few–chickweed, white milkvetch, sand lilies. Then, after a few days of the kind of glorious Spring weather that makes everyone want to get outside, the flowers explode. From April until early June, every walk has more color and every square yard more blooms. There’s a threshold of elevation and aspect for each individual plant, and you can watch seeds of Springtime spread across the landscape like watching the snowline move up the side of a mountain or the shadows of morning melt into the day. Yellow violets start on canyon-sheltered, south-facing slopes two weeks before they move to the open plateau. Orange globemallow start at the top of the ridge and move down. Tiny yellow flowers and dark oak-shaped leaves trade places on each sumac bush on a slightly different schedule. Even the sand lilies show the change in reverse, blooming longer in the cool and shadows when no longer able to stand the heat of the open prairie. And as the weather in late June sets in to a three-month pattern of dry heat, the flowers give way to grasses and the burst of color slows down, gradually, to a few holdouts of curlycup gumweed and spotted gayfeather, visible even toward October.

The photos here are from April and May.

[caption id="attachment_73" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Sand Lilies, April"][/caption][caption id="attachment_75" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Gumbo Evening Primrose, May"][/caption][caption id="attachment_79" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Prairie Chickweed, May"][/caption]