Oak Savanna / Prairie

Seventeen acres of Valley Grove prairie were put to the torch in April, leaving a blackened landscape as counterpoint to the waving beauty of the adjoining dry thatch of the previous year’s growth. The burn area, a month later, is now a lush field of green with golden alexander already blooming in great profusion.

The shrew was so tiny that the spike that had been used to impale it had nearly passed through its entire body, pushing a bulge of hide out on the opposite side. It was either a pigmy shrew or a masked shrew, the only shrews this small occurring in this area. These are among the smallest mammals on the planet, seldom weighing more than six or seven grams (depending on when they last had dinner), with head and body length less than two and a half inches. For a weight comparison, a nickel weighs five grams, brand new.

There are two species of meadowlarks in Minnesota, the eastern, Sturnella magna and the western, Sturnella neglecta. They are both in the blackbird family of Icteridae, and their ranges overlap in a north/south zone in the western third of the state.

A friend planted a small prairie patch along the boulevard strip between his sidewalk and street. It is a diminutive prairie, but with a richness of forbs and grasses that creates a discontinuity in the block-long stretch of Kentucky-bluegrass boulevard; a riotous non-sequitur of color and form offending the collective aesthetic of block after block of manicured turf. The neighbors, for the most part, were tolerant and polite, but at least one couldn’t resist a head-shaking disapproval and the derisive query, “Attracted any buffalo yet?”

I’m standing on a westerly slope of Valley Grove Prairie, looking at a patch of weedy plants, roughly thirty feet in diameter, which appears as a discontinuity in the surrounding prairie that spreads away in all directions. it was a spot I knew was here, and it only took me a few minutes of searching to locate it.

They all had small wounds consistent with the pellet size of a BB gun, and no apparent exit wounds. I found the half-eaten remains of a meadow vole and a thirteen-lined ground squirrel next to the nest, both of which were very freshly killed. I think the mother was feeding these kills to her young nestlings when the killer scared her off the nest. The motive for this killing is incomprehensible to me, and possibly the intent was irrational to the perpetrator as well. The sadness I felt for the loss was even greater when I considered the dark nature of the act by some of those who walk among us.

Most of my observations of pocket gophers have been while they were dumping dirt from their excavations of new tunnel extensions. Gopher mounds are created when the animal pushes dirt out of a short lateral tunnel off its main tunnel system. The discarded dirt fans out away from the plugged opening at the base of the backside of the mound.