Prairie Wanderings: A hike up Butterfly Hill
By PAUL G. JANTZEN
Contributing writer
It was a beautiful day for a hike in the Kansas Flint Hills. Reaching from Oklahoma nearly to Nebraska, and averaging about 70 km in width, the Flint Hills exhibit rolling hills, the slopes of which expose horizontal layers of flint-bearing limestone alternating with more erodible shale.
Herb Bartel and I headed for Konza Prairie, a natural area near Manhattan owned by The Nature Conservancy. It consists of 8,600 acres of Flint Hills grassland dissected by the Kings Creek watershed and dedicated to preservation, research, and education. In the fall of even years, the public is invited for a day of exhibits, field tours, and hikes.
Herb and I began the day on a hike up Butterfly Hill. Our volunteer docent was Clyde Ferguson, retired professor of history. Another hiker was a geologist who knew about the single-celled fusilinids fossilized on the surface of the Cottonwood limestone rocks exposed along our path up the hill. Looking back we could see this layer as it reached horizontal across the slope on the other side of the creek. It had been deposited at sea bottom some 250 million years ago and was the source of building stone for the ranch house and the 100-foot barn built on this property in 1911-1912.
Clyde led his group of five at a leisurely pace, allowing us to appreciate the hills at a distance and individual plants up close. We dealt mostly with plants in bloom on this fall day. Of the 25 species of blooming plants we observed, five were grasses: big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass, and Indian grass (the big four of the tallgrass prairie) plus Caucasian bluestem, an introduced species that has become invasive.
Eleven of the blooming or fruiting species were composites. The common sunflower displayed its yellow ray florets and red- or purplish-brown disk florets. The Maximilian sunflower's ray and disk florets are both yellow. Its leaves are lance-shaped and somewhat folded lengthwise. The dotted gayfeather blossoms were past their most handsome stage, with their blazing blue spikes. Canada goldenrods were still a bright gold. Some of the drought-resistant western ironweeds were still exhibiting their reddish-purple blossoms. Their bitter taste discourages their being eaten which results in their increase in overgrazed pastures.
Curly-top gumweed also is bitter to cattle and sheep. It is drought-resistant and provides several compounds of medicinal value. Small whitish flowers drew our attention to the tall jo-pye-weed. And most of us recognized the horse-weed. A few wavyleaf thistles continue to show their rosy-lavender flowers and a few still have their gray leaves with prominent prickles on their lobes and on outer flower parts. Heath asters still showed their white rays reaching out from the yellow disk and the aromatic asters surrounded their yellow disks with blue-purple rays, a bit larger than those on heath asters.
Other plant families were represented by single species. The stenosiphon is common in limestone soils. The prairie wild rose already had converted its flowers into bright red hips. The whorled milkweed presented its erect follicles and its small pine-needle-like leaves. Fringeleaf ruellia had its petunia-like blossom already lying flat on the prairie floor. The hoary vervain's blue flowers were crowded on its upright stem. The narrow leaf bluets presented their tiny white flowers, each with four fused petals. And the blue sage were still sky-blue.
We saw three species that often are found in disturbed places: buffalo bur was seen, fittingly, near the bison pens; showy partridge peas were in the parking area; and puncture vines were common near the big barn frequented by vehicle and foot traffic.
Those are the 25 species we saw blooming or fruiting on Sept. 28, out of the more than 500 flowering plant species found on Konza Prairie.
We only saw two butterflies but a picture exhibited back at ranch headquarters showed a summer view of Butterfly Hill with the butterfly milkweed in full bloom. That would attract many butterflies.
While public access to Konza Prairie is closely limited, the public is allowed on certain hiking trails (three, five, and six miles long) all year from sunrise to sunset.
