Midwest Nature Quote of the Week

Within the prairies were many landscapes…. There were hanging bogs with strange calcareous flora, “walled” lakes with cobble beaches and orderly shorelines of glacial boulders, waves of flowers advancing with each stage of the growing season, and myriad patterns and textures of grasses that varied moment by moment with sun and wind and the cloud shadows that drove across the land. There were a thousand worlds within this one world of grass. Some men sensed that at once; others never did.

John Madson, Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie

Biographical Dictionary of Iowa: Cora Call Whitley

Cora Call Whitley
(May 7, 1862-December 30, 1937)
--clubwoman and conservationist--was born in Rowelsburg, West Virginia, to the Reverend L. N. Call and Mary (Guyon) Call. Her family moved to Pennsylvania when she was three years old, and to Iowa in 1867, when her father was sent there as a missionary by the Baptist church. As an adult, she recalled the perilous walk across the frozen--but thawing--Mississippi River with her mother and young siblings that took them to Iowa and their waiting father.


The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa, edited by David Hudson, Marvin Bergman, and Loren Horton

Chris Helzer presentation

This evening Chris Helzer, author of The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States, will be giving a lecture titled "The Complexity and Resilience of Nebraska Prairies" as part of the 2013 Joseph and Dorothy Young Memorial Lectures in Horticulture. An expert naturalist and program director for the Nature Conservancy, Helzer will begin his presentation at 7:00 PM at the Hardin Hall Auditorium, located on the East Campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Doors will open at 6:00 PM, with tickets priced at $10 for Nebraska Statewide Arboretum members, $14 for the general public, and free for UNL students. Advance tickets are available online. For more information on Chris Helzer's presentation, please click here.

Praise for The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States
"Chris Helzer's book is the first I've seen that plainly defines the contents of prairies and then tells you how to care for them. Smart, well researched, practical, and to the point, this book is one-stop shopping for anyone who cares about grasslands, now or in the future."—Joel Sartore, contributing photographer, National Geographic Magazine, and author, Rare: America's Endangered Species

The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States, by Chris Helzer

Raptors of the Week: Gyrfalcon

Gyrfalcon
Falco rusticolus

The largest of the North American falcons lives mainly in the Arctic; it is of accidental occurrence in Iowa, with fewer than ten documented reports. The first acceptable records, from 1992 and 1993, were of gray-phase immature birds.

The Raptors of Iowa, paintings by James F. Landenberger