[To see photos and stories of this prairie in other years, go to the links on the main Narrows Prairie page.]

This year we mowed for aspen sprouts, as usual.  Next year we’re going to try some other ways of treating the aspens – in small areas as experiments.  It would be nice to eliminate them rather than having to mow so much of the prairie every fall.

3/13/2022

 

5/9/2022

 

5/9/2022

 

5/24/2022  Lupine and Golden Alexanders

 

5/27/2022

 

6/2/2022

 

6/2/2022  This Lupine patch gets bigger and more beautiful every year.  This year the blister beetles (Lytta sayi) arrived early and polished off most of the flowers and seeds of the lupine before they started on the White Wild Indigo.  But we got to see the early flowering, at least.

 

6/2/2022

 

6/2/2022

 

6/8/2022

 

7/15/2022

 

7/16/2022  This prairie has lots of Culver’s Root.

 

7/19/2022

 

8/6/2022  I didn’t plant Prairie Blazing Star (Liatris pycnostachya) – the seeds were probably mixed in with other seeds I bought.  But it’s thriving.  There are 3 or 4 clumps growing in this prairie.

 

8/21/2022

 

9/28/2022  Frost on the grasses but melting in the sun

 

10/3/2022  New England Aster

 

10/3/2022  Trac-dor spent the night in the prairie – waiting to mow more aspen sprouts.

 

10/3/2022  Aspen sprouts mowing

 

10/5/2022  Mike leaves areas that don’t have aspens unmowed – as refuges for insects and other creatures.

 

10/11/2022

 

11/14/2022

 

11/28/2022  Every night from fall until spring, the crows fly north over our ridge in huge flocks.  We think they have a night roosting place in the next valley – maybe along the Buffalo River.  They make stops along the way, and one day one of the stops was the Narrows Prairie and the trees surrounding it.  We discovered them on our afternoon walk.  There were crows everywhere.

 

11/28/2022

 

11/28/2022

 

11/28/2022  Heading north over the ridge

Here’s a link to a video of the crows – no sound.