36 Hours on the Prairie: Prairie Grasses & Domestic Sunflowers

[August 17 & 18, 2018: I made a quick dash to the prairies of Western Minnesota in mid August. Much of my time is spent in the boreal forest and bogs of northeast Minnesota, and I was starting to get a bit claustrophobic. So off to the wide open prairies! I started at Otter Tail County’s Maplewood State Park, then on to Wilkin County (Town Hall Prairie, Western Prairie, Rothsay WMA) and continued north to the huge Felton Prairie complex in Clay County. The next day I hit Felton area again and headed north to the Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge in Polk County]

Just outside of Moorhead near Dilworth is a field of domestic sunflowers. It was a foggy gray morning and my camera wanted to shoot the scene in very cool colors where the leaves all turned to blue. When I previewed the images on the back of my camera, I thought it looked ghastly, but upon reflection, I REALLY like the cool blue and yellow look. The “correct” color balance was hard to achieve even in Lightroom.

[All sunflower shots with Canon 7D with Canon 50mm f1.8 lens (shot wide open at f1.8).]

Six-foot tall Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) silhouetted by a hazy sunset caused by smoke in the atmosphere from wildfires in Manitoba and Ontario. Note that this plant is in full bloom. This is the grass that covered thousands of square miles of the Midwest prairies before settlement. Early settlers said that wherever “big blue” grew, corn would thrive…and that was about all of the tallgrass prairie and led to the “de-forb-ization” of the prairie in the upper midwest. [Felton Prairie (Clay County, Minnesota)]

Six-foot tall Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) silhouetted by a hazy sunset caused by smoke in the atmosphere from wildfires in Manitoba and Ontario. Another common name for this grass is “turkey foot” which refers to the 3-branches of the infloresence. [Felton Prairie (Clay County, Minnesota)]

Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) blooms in August and September. Note the tiny flowers of this very tall grass. [Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge (Polk County, Minnesota)]

Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) is not even in the same genus as Big Bluestem; they just share part of their common name. This is a shorter grass than Big Bluestem and in late summer/early fall shows reddish-orange stems and fluffy rachilla hairs on the spikelets. [Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge (Polk County, Minnesota)]