Natural North Dakota

You might be surprised to know that John James Audubon spent a goodly part of the summer of 1843 in North Dakota in and around Fort Union Trading Post. As you might expect he and his associates spent much of their time documenting the flora and fauna of the area.

While walking across a grassland or turfgrass in the early parts of the growing season a person may occasionally observe some dead patches of grass. Some of these patches of dead grass even appear to have been dug up by some animal. What is going on here?

We all have various connections with nature. And some of those connections are etched in our minds and take us back in time to a particular experience. Now with the Covid-19 on our minds, perhaps we have had more time to wax nostalgic with nature. I certainly have. We have a few wren houses in our yard. And when I heard the first house wren singing a few weeks ago I was transported back in time to my youth and my grandma’s backyard. She had a wren house at each end of her clothesline and a

I was looking at the North Dakota map recently, and Pembina and Cavalier Counties caught my eye. The distance between Cavalier and Walhalla is only around 30 miles, but this area contains a wealth of biological diversity. Species of the forests, grasslands, wetlands, and more can be found here. And to top it off, there are over 8,000 acres of public land to explore a little Natural North Dakota.

While walking across some North Dakota prairie during the early parts of the summer there always seems to be a variety of interesting plants to see. But twogrooved poisonvetch, also known as twogrooved milkvetch, or silver-leafed milkvetch produces an odor that gives itself away. It is a member of the pea family or Fabaceae and is known to botanists as Astragalus bisulcatus .

If garter snakes are not the most widely recognized and distributed snake in North America, they are certainly near the top of the list. They can be found across the state in a variety of habitats where they feed on prey such as insects, earthworms, frogs, etc.. Some of you may have noticed that the color seems to vary quite a bit. It might help to know that there are two species of garter snakes native to North Dakota, the common garter snake and the plains garter snake.

Take a walk across the mixed grass prairies of North Dakota during the spring and summer and you are likely to hear a series of short buzzing sounds emanating from a patch of western snowberry (what some people call buckbrush) or perhaps a thicket of some other shrubs. You may associate the buzzing with some type of insect, but it isn’t. It is the call of the clay colored sparrow. There it is again ... "Song of clay colored sparrow."

I looked out our window one morning recently and saw a mink along the shoreline of Lake Metigoshe. It scurried around for a few minutes before disappearing in the water near some cattails.

As I record this, I have yet to see a Wilson’s phalarope this year, and I am getting impatient to do so. Phalaropes must be our smallest shorebird. They are a rather thin shorebird with long legs, long neck, and long, thin, and straight bill. They are much smaller than a killdeer, and even a sandpiper. They are an interesting bird, and also great entertainment.

I remember many years ago a friend and I were walking a tract of prairie in the spring and came upon a duck nest with a couple dozen or so eggs it. “Dump nest’ my friend exclaimed.