Heartland Safari

Spring Is Here

Updated March 31, 2025

Spring is here. Along with the winter-hardy cardinals, finches, house sparrows, downy woodpeckers and blue jays, new voices are joining the dawn chorus. We hear red-wing blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, and northern flickers. The juncos haven’t left yet but will soon. Robins have arrived, but they’re being quiet. The life on Owl Acres is waking up. […]

About

Ring Billed Gull in flight. White body, blue grey wings with black tips. Its bill is encircled by a distinctive black ring. The bird has the long, narrow wings of an active soarer.

Population Explosion: Ring-Billed Gulls

Updated March 24, 2025

When I think of gulls, I think of standing on the beach in North Carolina tossing bread to the seagulls and watching them compete for it. I don’t think of gulls on Owl Acres. In fact, there are 17 species of gulls that visit Iowa, the most common being the ring-billed gull (Larus delawarensis). They […]

Birds

View out the front door at Owl Acres. The morning sun lights up a House Finch on the porch railing and a Canada Goose standing out in the yard. The Finch does not migrate. The Canada Goose migrates only as far as needed to find food and habitat.

Migration

Updated March 17, 2025

About a week ago, the wind was howling at up to 60 miles an hour, blowing snow and causing hundreds of car accidents. The juncos who usually hold forth under the bird feeder scurried to the porch where they sheltered out of the wind. An opossum found a protected corner of the porch and curled […]

Birds

A century-old, two row corn planter in the woods behind the house on Owl Acres. The derriere-shaped metal seat pan and frame emerge from the underbrush each fall. The implement is drawn by horses. The farmer rides on the metal seat and has a full workload, controlling the machine with levers and foot pedals, while also driving the team.

More Innovation on the Prairie: Corn Planters

Updated March 10, 2025

Back in grade school, I learned that the native Americans took pity on the starving colonists and taught them how to plant and harvest corn. The instructions included making little hills of dirt with a digging stick, placing four kernels of corn in the hill so they were not touching, adding a fish for fertilizer […]

History

Image attribution: 5 Bird wing types as described in the text. Each wing type equips its bird for its specialized flight regime e.g. soaring, maneuvering, fast flight, hovering etc.

Icarus Envy: Wings

Updated March 3, 2025

It’s cold outside! The dark-eyed juncos shelter on the porch when they’re not cleaning up under the bird feeder. They flap and flutter in consternation and fly away when I step out on the porch. Out there in the quiet day, sparrows and chickadees send their occasional calls into the winter air. They flit from […]

Birds

Asian lady beetle wintering inside the house on a sunny window sash frame. The insect’s shape is an almost perfect hemisphere, with black spots adorning its orange elytra (forewings adapted as wing-cases). On its pronotum (the hard plate covering its thorax), it sports an M-shape mark, typical of this species.

Aphid Eaters: Multi-Colored Asian Lady Beetles

Updated February 24, 2025

Every so often throughout the winter, I become aware of a lady beetle waking up from her diapause to see if it’s spring yet. She’s been sleeping with her friends in odd corners of the house, with a few holing up in the can lights in the kitchen. They fall on the floor. The dogs […]

Insects and Spiders

More archaeology behind the house. The winnowing body of a threshing machine lies on its side, discarded but not forgotten, in the woods on Owl Acres. At its most basic, the threshing machine is a wind box. It blows air upward though an agitated mass of plant materials: straw, chaff, and grain. The grain falls to the bottom and the lighter materials are carried up and away, to be blown into a straw stack on the ground. Moving arms called straw walkers, visible in the photo, work the stems toward the back where they’re blown out. The “shoe,” a shaking frame which carries the sieves, is also visible below the straw walkers. Barely visible through the tangle of brush is the drum-shaped blower housing, source of the wind that makes it all happen. The grain is collected at the bottom of the machine and fed into an elevator for loading to a wagon.

Labor Saver: Threshing Machine

Updated February 17, 2025

Out in the woods on Owl Acres, along with several other pieces of once-valuable farm equipment, lies part of a threshing machine. The inhabitants of Owl Acres most likely used it to thresh oats which were then fed to the cattle and horses. The first step in harvesting the grain—oats or wheat or barley—was to […]

History

Steel cut oats in a white glass dish shine in the afternoon sun. Cook ‘em. Yum.

Food for All: Oats

Updated February 10, 2025

Just about my favorite breakfast is oatmeal. Steel-cut oats cooked on the stove with sorghum, raisins, black walnuts and maybe an apple mixed in. Add a pat of butter and a few sprinkles of salt for that little extra. I make up a batch on the weekend and then warm up servings throughout the week. […]

Unlovely photo of a derelict piece of farm machinery, discarded into the woods. A tree limb fell across it years ago and is there today. It emerges from the dense understory each fall. Called a “section of harrow” by old timers, it’s a frame holding four parallel bars, each studded with 5-inch-long teeth, spaced every 8 inches along its length and staggered. Bars are pivoted like axles to bring their teeth into more or less aggressive contact with the soil following primary and secondary tillage (plowing and disking). Pulled behind a team or a tractor to break up clods and prepare a smooth seedbed for planting.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Harrows

Updated February 3, 2025

What do you do with a piece of farm equipment when you have no more use for it? The ideal answer is probably to load it up and take it to a disposal site such as a landfill or a recycling center. That’s not what farmers have done for generations though. The standard practice, carried […]

History

A discarded, ground-driven manure spreader emerges from the tangle of forest floor vegetation every fall. The implement is a horse- or tractor-drawn wagon with a moving floor and whirling beaters attached at the rear. When operating, chains and bars scrape along the bottom of the wagon box and deliver material to the spinning spreaders, which pulverize the manure and fling it wide and far onto the ground behind. Power comes from the team (or tractor) through gears driven by the rear wheels. Angled lugs stud the wheel rims. The lugs grip the soil and transfer power to run the machinery.

Innovation in the Heartland: Manure spreader

Updated January 27, 2025

When I was about ten years old, I had a vacation from school that my sisters didn’t have. So I was home with Mom and Dad without competition for attention. I wanted to help Dad outside instead of practicing my ironing, which I hated. It was spring, and Dad’s job for the day was cleaning […]

History

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