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We're in the Flint Hills of southeastern Kansas, in the prairies with the grasses, and what a grand day.

I'm Jim Welch with naturalist Rudy Mancke.

This is a new feeling for us.

It is, and prairies are very, very special places, and we want to try to get a feeling for the prairie today, the tall-grass prairie this is usually called.

The Flint Hills we've got to talk about a little bit because that gives us an extra added dimension of diversity, Jim.

Prairies usually you think of as kind of flat, but here in Kansas we've got prairies on top of ridges, and then there are some hills that drop down to some water, and the whole world changes.

Prairies you think of as fairly dry places, but of all the prairies in the United States, this is probably the wettest of the prairies, and the grasses get taller here, so the name, tall-grass prairie.

We're not here at a time when these grasses have really exploded.

That happens a little later in the year.

The dominant one of the grasses we're going to be talking about is the bluestem, right there in front of us.

The brown, last year's growth, and then the new green coming up, and grasses and prairies seem to go hand in hand.

A great diversity of grasses here, and they dominate, but that's not surprising when you think of the situation here.

Rain comes, got to get that rain rapidly.

And what type of root system do you have on these grasses?

(Jim) Spread out, short, spread out.

(Rudy) Fibrous root systems run out and interconnect, and when the rain falls, you gather every bit of it that you can.

(Jim) Rudy, when the pioneers came here, 1850s, these grasses were allegedly as tall as horses and riders.

(Rudy) Yeah, and they can get that tall still today in areas that haven't been ranched much or farmed much.

You can see the cattle over there in the distance.

They're coming through this prairie nibbling on the grasses, keeping a lot of other plants out.

You see a few trees in the distance, but the prairies high in the Flint Hills, you don't see lots of trees around there at all, and partly that's because cattle that are coming, nibbling on things, and partly because the water-falls -- trees need a little more water.

[birds calling] These grasses grab most of it before the trees can ever get a chance to get ahold of it.

(Jim) An abundance of wildlife.

Birds calling in the distance!

(Rudy) Well, grasses are flowering plants, but the flowers aren't terribly showy, but look at all of the flowering plants that are so obvious here.

I love the composites, the yellow flowers out there, the prairie coneflowers all over the place, just popping up.

Ray flowers, those yellow things, and then that cone-like projection are what are called disk flowers, composites.

I see another composite that does well in open places, the thistles.

Wow!

Clusters of flowers, bunches of flowers together, and just to make sure that nothing takes away the water that you've stored up, thistles have spines -- (Jim) Built-in protection.

(Rudy) -- all over the leaves.

So that keeps those cattle, or the buffalo that used to be roaming through here, from nibbling on those leaves quite like they would the leaves of the grasses.

(Jim) I mentioned the bird life.

What is that bird off in the distance there?

(Rudy) All right, sitting on pods of one of the false indigos, that is a western meadowlark.

White on the sides of the tail feathers, really yellow on the breast with the dark black "V." Very nice bird, and that's the state bird of Kansas and a number of other western states.

Very obvious bird, very vocal, sits up in an exposed place to call, so it's not a surprise that it is a state bird in a number of states.

(Jim) Common throughout the prairies.

(Rudy) Loves the prairies.

Nests on the ground, finds plenty of food, and probably is taking some food back to young now.

It looks like it may be nibbling on some itself.

There's one other plant here -- look at the purple.

Purple prairie clover all over the place.

(Jim) Does not look at all... (Rudy) See clusters of flowers?

(Jim) Doesn't look like clover.

(Rudy) Not the clover-clover that comes to mind but it's in the same group.

Look at it all over the place in clumps, coming up and doing fairly well.

We're talking about clumps and talking about trees not getting out here much, but there are shrubby things coming.

Look over here at the smooth sumac.

Compound leaves, kind of shiny.

The stem on that would be very smooth, red fruit on it.

The sumacs do come out here fairly well.

The trees don't do as well here.

Maybe it's because not so much moisture, maybe the soils aren't quite as deep here, but if we head on down toward the lower wet area, I'm sure the number of tree species will build up.

Grasses, though, before we head on down a little ways, grasses are the third largest family of flowering plants.

They are found all over the world.

And orchids... (Jim) They are not really showy.

(Rudy) No.

Orchids, which are very showy, and the composites -- we've seen a couple of those -- are more common than grasses, but grasses do so well, and our lives depend on grasses, not only -- (Jim) For food.

(Rudy) -- for food.

(Jim) The animals, yeah.

(Rudy) We've come into areas like this in many places and replaced the bluestem with corn, which is a grass, or a wheat, which is in the grass family, or barley, or millet, or oats, and on and on.

(Jim) How did you put that?

The third largest... (Rudy) Third largest family of flowering plants, the grasses.

They are doing very well here.

♪ (Rudy) Just a little bit down slope, and the world begins to change, doesn't it?

(Jim) The grass is higher.

(Rudy) A lot more moisture here, and the cattle haven't been down this far quite yet to nibble.

A beautiful view with the hill on the other side and the little low area between us.

We're looking at tops of trees over there more than anything.

(Jim) Any draw like that will have trees come in because of the moisture.

(Rudy) That's a neat place, that extra moisture and probably deeper soils down there.

(Jim) The Flint Hills are 60 or so miles wide and stretch down through the middle of Kansas.

We're on the western edge of them, but I still haven't seen much flint.

(Rudy) We ought to be able to see some as we go toward the lower area.

It'll probably be outcropping.

Speaking of things sticking out, there are some flowers on that plant that we saw the meadowlark on a little bit earlier, the false indigo.

(Jim) Beautiful flowers.

(Rudy) Blue flowers, it's clear just looking at the flowers that it's in the pea family, and, of course, the fruit looks pea- and bean-like.

Interesting leaves there.

I think I see some movement on the flower.

Look at the little -- (Jim) Tiny!

(Rudy) -- beetle, looks like one of the blister beetles, nibbling on the petals of the flower.

Plants trapping energy from the sun, all these animals have to get that energy that's been trapped from green plants directly or indirectly.

(Jim) Will cattle eat the indigo?

(Rudy) Sometimes they will.

A number of that family are poisonous, though, and they would want to be careful about what they are eating.

I see something else here, the little shrubs that are coming out over here.

Buckbrush is the common name for that.

Little shrubby things doing fairly well on the slope here.

We didn't see so much of that up higher.

(Jim) Why the common name buckbrush?

(Rudy) I imagine when you see a good bit of this on sloping hillsides, you might see some deer coming out, and they feed in areas like this fairly well.

That might be the reason for the common name.

One other one over here -- look at the Mimosa -like flowers, those pink, puffy flowers on the sensitive briar.

(Jim) More color for the prairie.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Great diversity of plants here.

(Jim) Rudy, what's the plant that looks like Queen Anne's lace somewhat?

(Rudy) It's one of the composites.

The common name for that is yarrow -- really interesting dissected leaves on it and white flowers at the top.

Those flowering plants trap energy from the sun.

Here's something down here that takes that energy directly.

Look at the size of that grasshopper.

Hold that net just a moment.

Let me get him in position so we can look at him.

This is the one usually called the lubber grasshopper.

(Jim) That's the largest grasshopper I've ever seen.

(Rudy) Clearly one of the insects.

Look at the front end with the pair of antennae, really long; compound eyes there on the head; and all of those modified mouth parts for processing grass and kind of changing grass into grasshopper.

Then six legs, four of them pretty obvious, and I'm holding the back two, and then that long pulsating abdomen as it's breathing.

Look at the small wings.

See those pinkish wings with the dark spots on them?

That's as large as those wings get now.

(Jim) Attractive.

(Rudy) They don't get extremely long.

This is not ever going to be flying out here like so many of the other species.

They stay relatively small.

(Jim) Not a lot of those out.

That's the first one we've seen.

(Rudy) They're not extremely common, but look at the exoskeleton.

You can see the armor feeling, and that exoskeleton really protects this animal, but when it is time to grow, it has to shed its skin to gain some size.

(Jim) He's saying, "Let me go back down to the grasslands."

(Rudy) We'll do that.

There's plenty of food here for him.

I'm sure he'll be happy in this prairie.

There's one plant that's come up with a way to protect its investment.

Water is so important out here.

You need to store it, and that cactus stores it in that thickened stem which looks like a leaf, really a stem, spines on it to keep many animals from taking the store of water and food away from it, and then I see a little bit of fruit on the side.

Cactus is growing right around that clump of grass on the rock.

Maybe it's time to take a good look at that rock, and let's go to the low area and see what else is down there.

♪ (Rudy) It is nice and cool down here.

The world has changed.

(Jim) So exciting to be out on a western prairie, too.

(Rudy) Yeah, and now we've got trees, hackberry back there, big American elm here, and right where the water washes a good bit of rocky material, and that's something we have to stop and talk about eventually.

I saw some movement.

Look, Jim.

(Jim) Some kind of lizard.

(Rudy) Collared lizard.

The two sort of dark bands, or collars, there on the neck gives it the name collared lizard.

Pretty common here.

This is the right place for it.

Feeding on insects mainly, although it'll even take other lizards sometimes.

Living under these rocks, sunning a little bit there.

Look at the markings along the back and the way he sits up.

That lizard -- look at those big back legs -- can actually stand up on its hind legs and run for short distances, almost like a dinosaur.

(Jim) It's not full grown?

(Rudy) No, it gets larger, but that is an interesting animal.

(Jim) It's about 6 or 7 inches.

Do they get much longer?

(Rudy) About twice that for a maximum length.

(Jim) So many rocks.

(Rudy) A lot of interesting stuff to see.

(Jim) Here's a turtle!

(Rudy) Oh, yeah!

(Jim) A box turtle!

(Rudy) That is the turtle that you would expect to see on a prairie situation, one of the box turtles; common name, the ornate box turtle.

(Jim) The turtle moves faster than I thought it would.

(Rudy) It can stand up on those legs and get the shell off the ground and move pretty rapidly.

Not terribly happy about being handled.

Let's take a look at the back of the shell because the name ornate box turtle does make a lot of sense.

It is more ornately marked than most of the relatives in the East.

Those markings allow it to camouflage in prairie grass and elsewhere.

(Jim) Yellow markings.

(Rudy) Yeah, and then the underside, if I can ease it around here, has that typical single hinge of the box turtles, and it can close most of the way up in its shell, and that is a little bit of protection.

The bony shell really is the skin in this turtle.

A common animal in Kansas and now is the state reptile in the state of Kansas.

(Jim) He will grow much larger, and he eats what, insects?

(Rudy) Yeah, mainly invertebrates.

It's attracted to areas like this because cows also are attracted here, leave their dropping behind, insects fly to that, and this thing feeds on the insects that are attracted to the cow dropping.

A neat way to recycle insects.

That's a nice turtle, beautiful thing.

Look at the rocks.

(Jim) Are these flints?

(Rudy) Yeah.

(Jim) Pieces of flint?

(Rudy) Let's look at a couple of pieces because this is typical material that you find here and what makes the hills, the hills.

(Jim) The rock is underneath the rolling hills out here?

(Rudy) Nodules are found throughout the limestone, that's fairly common.

Listen to the sounds here.

[tapping] (Rudy) That is a metallic sound.

Flint is silicon dioxide, just like quartz is silicon dioxide, but the crystals are very tiny.

When you strike this against metal, you make a spark.

Very hard material, not easily eroded away, so we've got hills here.

(Jim) What period?

(Rudy) Permian, 250 million or so years ago.

(Jim) Does flint usually break with a sharp edge?

(Rudy) That's right, and Indians took advantage of that to make knives and scrapers and projectile points and such.

When you find this, usually you find fossils associated with this and the limestone which tell us of days long ago before prairies were here when there was a shallow ocean in this part of the United States.

There's a pond down here, pool of water.

Why don't we take a look at that next.

(Rudy) It's interesting knowing the geological past of an area, to think there was once ocean, and the world has changed that much.

With water like this, the world changes again.

(Jim) Is this rainwater, rain or drain-off?

(Rudy) Probably.

Look in the water!

(Jim) A snake!

(Rudy) A little snake!

You don't usually use an insect net for that, but look at that water snake!

(Jim) Let me hold the net.

(Rudy) Let me reach in.

This is a non-poisonous water snake, but I don't want to be bitten.

(Jim) He's going to defend himself.

(Rudy) He might.

He looks pretty quiet, though.

He's a young one.

Let's see if I can get in here.

It's probably going to be a northern water snake, that would be my best guess.

Ease the net off.

I think I've got him.

Yeah, there we go.

Ease the net back around and underneath.

Kind of an interesting animal.

This would be about the only place in this area of Kansas where this thing could do terribly well, and that is standing water like this pond.

Probably lets the cattle come down and get a drink.

Bands up at the front of the body, blotches down the center of the back and blotches down the sides.

This one isn't terribly old, probably just a couple of years old, feeding on frogs and tadpoles and toads and other small vertebrates that come down to this pool.

Non-poisonous snake.

These things get fairly large and look kind of tough, but they're not poisonous at all.

(Jim) Not many poisonous snakes out here.

(Rudy) No, not many, and this is not one.

Let's see if he will swim out in the water -- diving down.

(Jim) Very quickly.

(Rudy) Gone very rapidly, good place to hide, as well as find food.

(Jim) Look by the rock.

There's a big turtle!

(Rudy) Oh, my goodness.

Let me see if I can get close to that.

I'd better hurry up before he gets away!

Oh, my goodness, look at this thing!

(Jim) What kind is it?

(Rudy) Common snapping turtle.

Wow!

A good-sized one, too!

(Jim) Does snapping turtle mean what I think it means?

(Rudy) Absolutely.

Look at the size of that head.

Tremendously large head, the nostrils and the eyes are way forward in the skull so this animal can keep all of that big body underwater and still see and smell the world outside.

It loves little ditches and pools like this and feeds on almost any animal that can come down here that's small enough to get inside.

A heavy shell on the top -- the shell on the bottom is not terribly large -- but look at the claws on that thing.

It can do a lot of grabbing, digging down, and even when the water's almost gone here, it can dig down in the mud and last a long time.

One of the large reptiles that does well here.

Look on the tail that I'm holding -- you see I'm supporting him by the tail -- those large spines, dinosaur-like projections on the back.

(Jim) Prehistoric looking!

(Rudy) Absolutely.

One of the large reptiles that does well in Kansas and elsewhere.

(Jim) Perhaps you better put him down before you do get bitten.

(Rudy) He's a little heavy.

They get to be much larger than this.

Ease him down here.

This is an interesting area, but there's another place we need to take a look at that's quite different from this.

Why don't we head out in this direction.

♪ (Rudy) This is a much flatter area now than the Flint Hills.

Look at it sloping down toward El Dorado Lake in the distance there.

(Jim) Nice warm day, but not as hot as it might be in the summer.

(Rudy) Right, right.

Flint all along the road -- quarried elsewhere, brought here, I guess, as gravel material.

Hard, that's why the hills are still there.

That's why it's used to pave roads like this.

(Jim) What kind of tree is this?

(Rudy) This is one we haven't seen that's so typical of this area.

Common name is Osage orange.

It has thorns on it, spines on it, so it's used a lot of times as a hedge.

Look at the fruit.

(Jim) Is that an orange you could eat?

(Rudy) You see why the name Osage orange.

No, this is not something that's edible.

An aggregate fruit it's called.

It's lots of individual fruit packed together.

Sometimes horses eat it.

Another name for this tree is hedge apple.

You plant it as a hedge because of the spines and then that apple-looking or orange-looking fruit on it.

Now there's something else, look at the widow dragonfly.

See the male right there?

Black on all four wings at the base, and on the male a little extra white on either side of the black, and a whitish or bluish abdomen that tells you it's a male.

They find each other by sight, so something looking at that, if it was a dragonfly, would know it was a male.

Abdomen pulsating.

Look at the compound eyes on that thing.

(Jim) That's why they are so hard to catch.

(Rudy) Beautiful animal.

Yeah, really tough.

Perching there, warming up in the sun, probably flying up to get a meal and coming back.

Long legs, longer in the back than in the front.

They use those as a basket to catch insects.

That's really a nice animal.

Doing well right on the edge.

Look at the flowers right here.

Look at them there.

(Jim) What kind of flowers are these?

(Rudy) One of the common names is bee balm, and look at the bee working his way, a whole cluster of flowers there!

It's in the mint family, doing very well this time of year.

Horsemint is another name for it, but bee balm makes sense with that bee working.

Different flowers here -- (Jim) So many kinds!

(Rudy) -- than we've seen earlier.

A lot of diversity.

We don't have to go far to see more diversity.

(Jim) Is that milkweed?

(Rudy) That is a plant that's pretty widespread.

That's called common milkweed.

It comes up -- the flowers are past prime, coming up at the base of the leaves.

(Jim) Find it across the country?

(Rudy) Yeah, and there is one butterfly you always associate with that, the monarch butterfly, laying eggs on it -- the larvae feeds on the leaves -- and then also coming to get nectar from the flowers.

One of those interesting plants.

You probably knew about milkweeds as a kid.

Break off milkweed... (Jim) You break the leaf and out comes milk, or the pod itself, if you peel one of those back.

(Rudy) Let's just break a leaf and see if we can see that milk.

This is one of the poisonous plants, and if you break a leaf or any part of this plant, look at that.

It does look like milk.

(Jim) Milky substance.

(Rudy) It feels like you ought to be able to lick that.

This is a poisonous plant, so you wouldn't want to be doing that.

That poison makes the caterpillar of the monarch and the adult distasteful to birds and gives it some protection.

(Jim) Lots of it in Vermont.

When I was a kid, I used to break that open.

(Rudy) Pretty wide range, all the way up into Canada from here.

(Jim) There's the fruit, the pod, over there.

(Rudy) Yeah, on another species of milkweed, fruit on it.

Fuzzy kind of fruit, blown by the wind here.

Let's head on down the road.

(Rudy) Even areas like this that have been pretty heavily modified with man have lots of interesting things.

Nature just keeps coming up with surprises.

(Jim) So beautiful out here, so many things, I should say, so many birds.

There goes a dove right now, and so close!

(Rudy) Out of the tree here.

(Jim) Must be a nest.

When they are that close and they take off, doesn't that mean... (Rudy) Yeah.

(Jim) Two eggs.

(Rudy) There's the nest.

Notice on the shell, no dark markings, which is typical of mourning dove.

They build pretty flimsy nests, and that is better built than I would have expected.

(Jim) If that was a dove, two eggs would be what a dove would leave.

(Rudy) Yeah, what you would expect.

They don't have many places to choose from in an open prairie.

They take advantage of the opportunities when they have them.

I see something else down here on the fence line.

(Jim) A small bird.

(Rudy) Look at the bird.

(Jim) What is it?

(Rudy) That is a young scissor-tailed flycatcher.

Usually the tails are longer than that, but in the young they are short, and that one probably hasn't been out of the egg for very long.

If we looked hard, we could find the nest along the road.

There's the female coming, see the -- (Jim) With food.

(Rudy) -- yeah, the long tail.

The little bird hops up and opens its mouth, and the adult flies away.

That is a fantastic bird, perching along here because they feed on insects out in the fields.

There's a male on the telephone line, and real long tails, and they spread them in sort of a "V," or scissor shape, when they fly out to get insects.

(Jim) A bird to look out for.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Finding food in the prairie.

I see on the flowers something else looking for food, variegated fritillary butterfly.

See it?

The white flower there is known as narrowleafed bluet, even though the flower is white -- (Jim) Appears white, yeah.

(Rudy) -- or sometimes pink.

Four parts to the flower.

That's kind of an interesting plant.

Then the one just beyond it is another one of the composites, another one of the coneflowers -- not the yellow prairie coneflower we saw earlier, but the pale purple coneflower is the common name for that.

So typical of prairies.

(Jim) So many butterflies today, and there's another kind, a white butterfly.

(Rudy) See the dark-checkered pattern on the wing, and checkered white is the common name for that.

Getting nectar from one of the plants known as vervain.

I think that's hoary vervain.

Lots of flowers, you see, so a great deal of nectar for the little butterfly.

(Jim) Such a pretty picture, and there are two butterflies on the milkweed.

(Rudy) Monarch butterflies, two, and mating.

See, the male is hanging onto the leaf there with the female attached to him, hanging down.

They sometimes fly together like that, with the male flying and the female just holding her wings together like a keel on a boat as they fly.

(Jim) Is it seasonal or all summer?

(Rudy) All summer long she'll be laying eggs, as we said earlier, on milkweed leaves exclusively.

Look, scissor-tailed flycatcher over the field, out over the prairie!

See the way it flutters its wings as it flies, spreads its tails a bit?

Golly, what a magnificent animal!

(Jim) Something very different to see, and something to look for in Kansas.

(Rudy) Well, that's a magnificent bird in the air, isn't it?

There's no question about it.

(Jim) Scissor-tailed flycatcher.

Well, what is this bush with the little balls on it, Rudy?

(Rudy) That's one of the shrubs that does well in the prairies.

It's really one of the prairie roses, and that is fruit.

You would really refer to that, probably, as rose hips.

If you use your imagination a little, it looks like an apple, the fruit, an apple, and apples are in the rose family.

Then that thistle, another thistle right here, doing well in open areas, and look at the little butterfly that's coming to those flowers.

(Jim) What kind of butterfly?

(Rudy) One of the golden-winged skippers.

That's a cluster of flowers, and it's sampling every flower.

There's lots of nectar to be had there.

Interesting relationships, and this has been a good day to see lots and lots of relationships on a tall-grass prairie.

Hundreds of different things to look at, if you take the time to take a look.

The high-grass prairie there at the top of the Flint Hills was exciting.

It hasn't been tampered with quite as much as this around us, except by cattle.

Then that low draw area with the extra moisture and cooler temperatures, and all the reptiles out taking advantage of those opportunities.

Then these wide-open spaces with the birds and the flowers and the butterflies.

It has been nice.

It has been great.

Very special.

We hope you enjoyed this visit to Butler County, Kansas, and join us again on the next "NatureScene."

Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 803.988.8438 ♪