Benjamin Vogt's Blog, page 27

It's Time

As the air warms I fall in love again with a new season. It's unlike fall, which is my deepest, most passionate affair every year. Spring is more a delirious spark of temptation. Yesterday I sat on a stone in my garden, about twenty feet from the bird feeder. Juncos, grackles, finches, sparrows, mourning doves, blue jays -- everyone was there. They darted from the feeder to the last cover in the garden I've not yet cut down. One junco would call and suddenly the rest joined in, a loud crescen...

Milk the Weed -- Create a Wildlife Refuge

I'm not a glass is half full kind of guy -- if you've been visiting me here for a while you've figured that out. I know I'm fighting a tide that will overwhelm and consume me. The push for more ethanol, the high commodity prices, the farm subsidies, the nation of lawns... I know we're losing biodiversity at a pace that will mean we wake up one day and a switch has been flipped in our evolutionarily-unique brains: "How'd that happen? Boy, I wish I had something to eat, or at least clean water....

Snow Geese, Sandhill Cranes, Sunset

I've lived in Nebraska since 2003, but only during the last three springs have my wife and I driven 90 minutes west to a choke point on the Platte River. Here, millions upon millions of birds migrate through each year. The first year it was a cloudy, cold day, and we were just floored by the number, size, and haunting call of the cranes in the corn fields -- these are here, in NEBRASKA? The following year, it was sunny and the cranes seemed restless and sparse. This year we set out in the lat...

Brought to You by the Letter M

I was on the tv last week for the first time ever, talking monarch butterflies. You can see my grey hair below.







A lot is going on in my world: gave a talk on butterfly gardening this past weekend, giving one on native wildflowers next. Then it's the Nebraska Book Festival and more events -- including a slew of grading coming up for the English classes I teach. Busy, good work. In the background of all this noise I'm planning a research trip, working on two books, and assuming I have to do...

Birds on Radar

Today area radar returns showed storms moving north in central Nebraska -- but these are storms of birds, perhaps millions of geese, cranes, ducks, you name it. I am honored to be near this flyway along the Platte River as life cycles thousands of miles north. Every day if I stand outside my back door and wait a few moments, a flock of something flies overhead, sprinting to this meeting ground 90 minutes west of Lincoln. Can you imagine standing under one of these radar returns? Maybe if you...

Nebraska Prairie Land Owners -- I Need You!

I've posted the below call on all my social media, and the last stop is here. Can you help me?



I'm looking for a Nebraska land owner who
lives within an hour or two of Lincoln who is fighting to have prairie
-- flora and fauna. I need to find someone who's been threatened in some
way by neighbors or government (prairie dog poisoning, chemical over
spray with bird / bug kills, pressure to corn it up, evil stares at the
cafe, etc), someone who believes to the core in prairie ecosystems, and
so...

Giveaways, Book Party, Die Lawn Die

So many of my recent posts have been, well, you know, serious -- so I'm happy to lighten the atmosphere and celebrate the release of Lawn Gone by Pam Penick. I contributed some lawn alternative choices for the northern Great Plains, and I am pleased as punch to be part of a book that advocates more sustainable, cheaper, and just plain exciting examples on lessening our typical lawns.







Lawn Gone is full of encouragement and advice -- the section I think is particularly neat is on tips for d...

Snippets

I've been posting some "wisdom" on my facebook page lately, and I know not everyone who reads the blog follows TDM on facebook. So here you are -- nuggets of thought from your prairie sage (if only I smelled half as good):



I believe that gardens are wildlife preserves.
Gardens are moral acts of civil disobedience, the same as if we chained
ourselves to tractors digging pipelines or tearing down forests or
unzipping last vestiges of prairie. Gardens (native perennial and veg)
say no to big ag...

Farming Away Our Future

I'm enraged. I'm just so angry. I want to blow up tractors and burn cornfields. When I read articles like this, showing images of the last vestiges of northern prairie being converted to corn and soybeans, I just can't take it. Millions of acres in just a few years? My god. My god.



Why is prairie important? Water filtration. Prevents erosion. A nursery for native insects which do the core of pollinating 70% of our food and are the base of the wildlife food chain. Grasslands also used to be...

Bald Eagles in Lincoln

My wife and I were coming home from the grocery store, zipping along at 50 on an interstate off ramp, and she says, "Are those eagles? Yes, yes, those are eagles!" She was just like Tweety Bird. So we went home, emptied the car, turned around with camera and binoculars, ran into an eagle by some houses and parked while another couple pulled up, got out, and the man shook his binoculars in the air like we'd just won the World Series. All of this action was within 1/2 mile of Capitol Beach Lake...