Tallgrass Prairie, Kansas
On our way to visit our grandkids in Minnesota this summer, we stopped at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, about 15 miles west of Emporia, Kansas. Prairie lands such as these once covered more than 170 million acres in the United States. But in recent generations they have all but disappeared due to advancing development. Tallgrass Prairie protects a piece of this once robust ecosystem.
I think one of the main reasons people visit is to see the bison, which were reintroduced to the preserve in 2009 by The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service. These are the first bison to roam here in more than 100 years. From its 13 original immigrants, the herd has since grown substantially.
In order to get an early start viewing bison, we stayed at Summer Dreams B&B in Marion, KS, a beautiful 320-acre spot not far from the preserve with a private lake. Since the preserve is pretty far from any hotels and restaurants, the folks at the B&B offer dinner as an option so you don’t have to go trekking into town. As a bonus, I found many things to photograph on their grounds.
On this trip I basically carried just one lens–the light and versatile Olympus 150-300mm zoom. Good thing too, because the next day at the Tallgrass Preserve we found out that if we wanted to see the bison we would have to walk three miles uphill to the pasture where they were grazing.
But along the way there were some colorful birds to photograph and some surprisingly intriguing dung beetles on the way back down.
This Eastern Collared Lizard was sunning itself right behind the B&B. I didn’t want to scare it away by getting too close, so for this shot I used full zoom plus the 2x digital zoom on the camera. This gave me an effective focal length of 1200 mm.
There were several of these guys hanging about, and I had a lot of fun taking pictures of them because their facial expressions were so striking. There a few more in the gallery below.
There was a lot of rain in Kansas in the weeks before we arrived, and the dragonflies were out in force. So I was able to practice trying to capture them in the act. For these shots I had my camera set for a very high shutter speed of 1/3200 of a second. Even then I was unable to freeze all of the wing motion. However, I am happy with what I got. I put more dragonfly shots in the gallery below.
On our three-mile hike to see the bison, we saw–and heard–many dickcissels perched in among the grasses and branches in the prairie. Because we visited in the early summer, we probably saw birds that recently returned from their migration in the southern U.S. or Central America. We saw many lone dickcissels flitting around. However, in the fall they assemble in huge flocks that can reach into the thousands. When they reach their wintering grounds, these flocks can number in the millions of birds. There are more photos in the gallery below.
You may not consider a photo of dung beetles the most attractive thing to include in this post. However, we were quite taken with watching them perform their amazing task. These two had shaped their dung ball and then toiled together to roll it across the road. Belying their name and occupation, dung beetles are amazing insects. In fact, they are said to be the strongest creatures on earth! They can pull almost 1,500 times their body weight.
Of course, one of the main attractions at Tallgrass Prairie is the bison. These are truly huge impressive animals. You are hiking right in their pasture, and the rangers warn to keep a distance of 100 yards because one could suddenly decide to charge. Plus, we were visiting soon after spring calving. So needless to say, I kept my distance, used my lens at full zoom of 600 mm equivalent, and turned on the Olympus 2x digital zoom for these shots. I was surprised at the excellent quality of the digital zoom. I shot all of the bison photos at EV+1 in order to pick up their darker features. Despite using spot metering, the camera exposed the animals too dark in the bright ambient light that surrounded them. More shots below.
The evening when we arrived at our B&B, we were greeted by this gorgeous sunset over the lake.
