Exploring Hidden Connections of the Prairie

For Chris Helzer, a prescribed burn isn’t simply about managing grass.

It’s about influencing where bison graze, where mice feel safe, where owls hunt, which flowers bloom, which insects survive and, ultimately, whether an entire prairie ecosystem remains resilient for generations to come.

Speaking during the Grain Place Foundation Field Day July 18 near Aurora, the longtime Nature Conservancy ecologist challenged producers to see every land management decision as part of a much larger web of connections stretching across Nebraska’s grasslands.

Helzer, who has worked for The Nature Conservancy in Aurora for nearly 30 years as a land manager, photographer and naturalist, said Nebraska remains one of the world’s great grassland regions. From the Sandhills to the mixed-grass prairies of central Nebraska, those landscapes support thousands of plant species and countless birds, insects, reptiles and mammals.

Maintaining that diversity, he said, requires an understanding that no species exists in isolation. Every plant, insect and animal is connected to dozens of others, he explained in a detailed presentation highlighted by close-up photos taken on the prairie, creating the resilience that allows prairies to recover from drought, fire and grazing.

Helzer shared that one of his favorite things to do is go out to a site with his camera in the morning, where he will look through his lens as an artist or an explorer. Then he puts his camera away and spends the rest of the day thinking like a scientist and land manager, looking at the land in multiple ways.

Through his research, Helzer has helped document that the Sandhills represent one of the largest intact grassland ecosystems on earth. The land features extraordinary diversity of plants and wildlife, which he described in detail.

He reported that there are nearly 2,000 plant species in the state, as well as more than 400 bee species alone. Diversity, he said, means something is always blooming, which helps different pollinators that depend on different flowers.

“Most bees rely on the diversity of flowers,” he explained during his 45-minute presentation at The Leadership Center. “Each flower generally blooms for a few weeks at a time and then it’s done, so you have to have it replaced with something else. So, if you just have a few species of plants, you can have gaps during the season where there’s nothing blooming and then your bees and other pollinators are out of luck. So plant diversity is incredibly important for bees.”

While Helzer and others have spent years studying how all the different pieces of the biosystem puzzle are connected, he said some mysteries remain.

“Bill Whitney (co-founder of the Prairie Plains Resource Institute) and I do restoration in the middle of corn country, where we make a prairie where there hasn’t been a prairie for a long time,” he said. “There’s no prairies there and as soon as that flower blooms the bee shows up. We have no idea how they do it.”

Ecological resilience

Helzer then got into the heart of his message, which focused on a concept he called ecological resilience.

“If you have a prairie and you imagine that prairie as a little marble, it rolls around inside a bowl,” he said. “The bowl is like the range of stability. As long as it’s within the bowl, it will remain the same kind of prairie, maintaining the same functions.”

“It can support the same kind of species,” he continued. “It can get pushed around inside that bowl by things like fire or grazing or drought, or all of those things combined, and it’ll look very different as it rolls around that bowl. But, as long as it stays within that bowl it maintains its integrity and identity and it can support the same sort of soil microbes and butterflies and plants and everything else.”

When pushed too hard, however, Helzer said the land can turn into something different.

“It will have resilience in its new state, but it’s not the same thing that it was before,” he said. “And more importantly, we can go from one bowl to another bowl, but it’s not going to go back to the bowl that it was before.”

As an example, Helzer said a prairie can be turned into a soybean field, but once it’s no longer being farmed it will not revert to its former prairie status.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “We can do a lot of restoration work and we can do the best we can to create a new prairie, but it’s in a new bowl, so we have crossed that threshold... As a land manager, this is where I live, trying to make sure that we don’t cross the threshold and move into a bowl that we can’t recover from.”

To do that, Helzer said, requires two pillars of ecological resilience. The first involves species diversity and the second is habitat size and connectivity. He spoke in great detail about both pillars, then brought it all together by noting that people play a key role in managing the state’s ecosystems.

Rather than arguing that people should stay out of nature, Helzer suggested people have shaped Nebraska’s grasslands for thousands of years.

As glaciers receded some 12,000 years ago, he explained, people started using fire to manage the landscape. That fire pushed trees back and created grasslands that still exist today.

“We would not be living in a grassland state if 10,000 years ago people had been managing the land differently,” he said. “And that responsibility is still with us now. The fire we do now is similar to the fire we did 10,000 years ago in that it creates this lush green growth. That lush green growth attracts animals that like that growth, like buffalo, but it also works with cattle. Because of that, those animals are grazing in some places more than they’re grazing in others and that creates these different types of habitat structure.”

Invisible connections

Helzer concluded his presentation by sharing a story involving a Nature Conservancy plot of land that was burned in places in the spring, while some of the land was left unburned. Crews returned weeks later to harvest seed in the burned areas, but when they examined the unburned areas they found little seed where lots of prairie clover was seen just two weeks prior.

“We got down on our hands and knees to investigate and here’s what we found,” he said. “There were little piles of seed and prairie clover heads scattered on the ground in little piles.”

As it turns out, mice don’t spend much time foraging at night when there’s a full moon, and the reason is that there are owls. Owls, he noted, are much more effective hunters when there’s a little bit of light to work with.

“I’m going to tie all this together now,” he said. “So we made a decision to burn. We burned a part of the prairie and because we did that the cows grazed it harder, and because they grazed it harder they got rid of all the grass cover, which meant that mice were afraid to go out there and forage because there wasn’t any place to hide. So burning, grazing, cover for the mice, owls and moon working together, all of these things connected decisions that we made as human managers.”

Helzer said those invisible connections are what make Nebraska’s prairies both remarkably complex and remarkably resilient. Whether producers are using prescribed fire, adjusting grazing pressure or restoring native habitat, the choices they make ripple through the landscape in ways that may not be obvious at first glance.

“The point of all of this is that there are all these interactions out there in nature, caused by the diversity of species that are out there and the habitat contiguity that we have,” he concluded. “Our job really is to keep the ball rolling and to maintain the role that we’ve had for thousands and thousands of years as managers of the life on this planet.”