Apparently parents in my school district are offended that red oaks are monecious--they have both male and female reproductive organs. Wishtree was assigned to all students and their families to read together. #Wishtree #bookbans #oak #Kettlemoraine #Wisconsin #Waukesha

It is the ecological and ritual season of burning. The most salubrious time to burn. Coarse stems--even seeds--stand. Terricolous lichens and bryophytes survive. Larvae rest cosy in their galls. The stage is set for next season's abundance. #Prairie #Savanna #RxFire #MukwonagoRiverOakBarrens

You mean to tell me that bird friendly certified consumer products aren't cutting it?

So they are getting nothing of substance. The vote on ACA subsidies is theater. We all know it won't pass, and that people will suffer. The calculus is that GOP members will be forced to vote no, but that's not going make any difference in peoples' lives, let alone elections. Weak. Lame. Shameful.

And this is the best prairie research I've seen in a few years. This is exactly how to investigate fire effects, because not all fires are equal. Annual fires are more variable in their effects and generally less intense than less frequent fires. #prairie onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

More evidence dispelling the seed bank myth that falsely leads practioners to believe that it's an insurance policy against distruptive disturbances to old-growth communities--disturbances that often deliberately prescribed. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

From where I stand, beef and dairy production (all or mostly on grass) has basically become the big swinging 🍆 of grassland conservation. There's *almost* no space left that matters for those of us that question it.

I don’t know if people realize that farmers are still receiving crop insurance subsidies, commodity payments, some conservation money, and access to loans & disaster payments, but everyone should know this and act accordingly. Agricultural exceptionalism is alive and well in Amurika still.

Herbicide that breaks down to PFAS may be coming to millions of acres surrounding your water supply.

Very small burns, but if we remove buckthorn (glossy and common here) and there is enough fuel to burn in fall, we do, and then we augmentively seed in late fall with species that were likely once present but extirpated by fire exclusion / shade / litter / past grazing / etc.

My happy place these days. Fall colors and textures. Home to many beings. #MukwonagoRiverOakBarenns #ThePrairieEnthusiasts #Savanna #Prairie

Last Friday during a volunteer work party at the Mukwonago River Oak Barrens we found this blue spotted salamander in a piece of partially burried rotten wood. We were physically pulling invading glossy buckthorn. ...another reason why I favor slower approaches to big machines with grindy bits.

The first hard freeze was last night. We burned some sedge meadow today.

More greenwashing. Cattle have NO business on a savanna preserve in SE Iowa. #prairie nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Photos coming out of Western AK are devastating. Hardest hit are indigenous villages off road system, many miles by air from supplies. Most built on river deltas w/ no high ground to which to escape. Cuts to NASA/NOAA mean worse weather data. Cuts to EPA mean no grants for erosion control. Etc.

Oh well.

This is the kind of greenwashing that people literally eat up.

My native state simply sucks. It’s run by cowards and sell-outs on one hand and sell-outs and bigots on the other.

“How could he amount to anything if he did not use loaded dice? How has he used loaded dice with you? The laws that say he can fire anybody who stands up for the rights of workers—those are loaded dice. The policemen who protect his property rights but not your human rights—those are loaded dice."

Ordered Symphyotrichum ericoides. Received mix of S. erioides and S. pilosum. Booooo. It's a nursury that produces excellent plants that I've had good experience with, so we'll see what they say. #nativeplants

At least the escalator did not comply. ...unlike Congress, university presidents and admins, MSM, corporate executives....

A quick comment on #climate #resilient #landscapes. The #Driftless Area of Wisconsin is considered have some inbuilt resilience owing to its varied aspects, slopes, and soils. Perhaps as it warms more xerophytic vegetation (prairie, oak savanna, oak woods) on S and SW aspects can expand. 1/4

Our words are more powerful than our firearms. That's precisely why they exalt guns and come for our speech. Without speech there can be no coordinated defense of freedom by any means.

BAD photos, but first time for me coming across Bartonia virginica, here in moist, sandy area under white oak...more specifically in a little clearing among royal fern, huckleberry, velvet-leaf blueberry, a bristly dewberry. Not a common thing in SE WI.

I wonder who made these galls on Symphyotrichum ericoides? #nativeplants #prairie

I MISS MY FRIEND! Damn it.

At 16.5 or 17 years of age it's come time to say goodbye to Thistle. With us always through good and bad, milestones, transitions, and the mundane. A very good dog, friend, member of the family. Lots of short sunny walks today and tomorrow, and the best bits, which are all she'll eat.

This led me to Parks et al. (2025, www.nature.com/articles/s41...). which in turn led me to this figure, which is brilliant and on the money.

Looks like a great paper, & by two good friends at Brown. Plant centered, botany first herbivore research, not the same old story! Classic ANOVA. Turns out there's often more variation within species than between species. Congrats to Tyler, Rebecca & Hannah et al. scitechdaily.com/dna-evidence...

Cute that the Senator is posting about antitrust enforcement now that we’re 500 miles over the border into fascistfuckistan.

Miles of burn piles below, around, and above Taos Ski Valley in the Carson National Forest in the wake of 2021's massive blowdown event. In some areas the piles have been burned. The scale of the effort is pretty unfathomable. The high country looks nothing like it did last time I was up there...

Parry's mountain gentians (Gentiana parryi) and felwort (Gentianella amarella)...I think...are going full tilt in the high meadows of the Sangre de Cristos in N. New Mexico.

The California press conference to unvail their redisticting response is on it's sixth speaker before getting to the point. Apparently everyone has to get a chance to be on camera and dilute the message! This is just a classic example of how messaging on the left often falls short.

Another way industry and green orgs put lipstick on this pig is to compare "sustainable" practices to the egregious industry norm versus the potential of impacted lands absent exploitation for meat or industrial row-crop production. They focus on benefits to species that were doing well...

There are so many stories like that have been, are being, and will be told in North America and around the world, and we should be listening...and not only when they are published in journals like PNAS. Ndee culture stabilized its ecosystem with 🔥 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

It's an epidemic. www.gmtoday.com/oconomowoc_e...

Blue states should redraw their maps first. Now. Stop standing there dumb and waiting for the punch we all know is coming. Throw the first goddamn punch. I've been waiting my whole life. I'm not convinced I'll live to see it.

"It’s a little bit sad, and a little bit of an indictment of our society, that until the tree rings verified those oral histories, there was resistance from our dominant colonial culture to believe that Indigenous people used fire to steward the land." e360.yale.edu/features/lor...

Hole in tall prairie vegetation where rope dodder (Cuscuta glomerata) is hammering tall goldenrod (Solidago altissima) & sawtooth sunflower (Helianthus grosseserratus). Rope dodder favors composites, esp. long-rhizomatous goldenrods (tall, Canada, giant) & sunflowers. #nativeplants #prairie

Check out the dewpoints in NW Illinois. Low to middle 80s Fahrenheit. Dewpoints! The effect of well-watered corn and peak evapotranspiration. At the NWS office near where I live (SE WI), the peak dewpoint so far today is 80.2F.

empurpled

Minuartia michauxii growing out of a bitching soil biological crust of terricolous lichen (need to try and figure out which) on a dry, dolomite gravel hill prairie in SE WI. This prairie is frequently burned, so thatch doesn't smother the crust, and fire intensity is low (low fuel loads)...

The Baltimore checkerspots are out in my neck of the woods. I saw this one this morning while doing some work to keep hybrid cattail at bay from the sedge meadow their local host plant, Chelone glabra, depends on.

Quite indeed.

Been working on a site for two years, and still finding remnant populations species that should be conspicuous AND that I've been looking for. Today #293 and #294 were Cleland's evening primrose (pictured, Oenothera clelandii) and stiff goldenrod (Oligoneuron rigidum)...

Wheat ethanol coming in 3...2...1...

The new neighbors up at the lake are drunk and obnoxious at dawn, but the sky is pretty.

The center of this area (August, 1956 photo) are Chelsea sand, which conditions on the ground line up with, but this photo appears to show much of the area farmed, planted with an August-ripening cereal crop, and differential ripening patterns caused maybe by an underlying alluvial fan? 1/