Karen Keninger, Author at Heartland Safari

Fleshy, cone-shape fruiting body of a morel mushroom stands atop a short, hollow stem, amid green foliage on a forest floor. Reproductive spores are produced and dispersed from the hollows and folds of the flesh.

The Best of Things: Morel Mushrooms

Updated April 27, 2023

I’ve always associated lilacs, peonies, and Mother’s Day with morel mushrooms. Hunting them each spring was a family ritual. Dad would gather all us kids and we’d troop out to the woods. He knew just where to look for them. Some years we’d come home triumphant with a bag full. Other years we’d find only […]

Fungus

A tightly curled, wormlike millipede lies expired on a concrete floor.

Recyclers: Millipedes

Updated April 24, 2023

Imagine that you had 50 pairs of legs. Not two legs like a human, not four legs like a dog, or six legs like an insect, and not eight legs like a spider, but one hundred. When you move, a ripple runs along them, propelling you forward in search of the same things all creatures […]

Invertebrates

A pair of nightcrawlers aligned side-to-side and front-to-back. Earthworm sex.

Intestines of the Earth: Night Crawlers

Updated April 20, 2023

Last summer, we decided to build a new shop. That meant cleaning out a bunch of old junk in the fence row and digging down to make a foundation. in the process, we disturbed legions of night crawlers (Lumbricus terrestris). They had made their homes in and around all the debris that had been dumped […]

Invertebrates

A grey critter with huge “hands” bearing long claws, pokes out from the top of a mound of dirt. Common mole has a short, tapered snout and tiny eyes that aren’t even visible in this head-on view.

Earth Thrower: Moles

Updated April 17, 2023

When I was a little girl, I wore Coke-bottle-lens glasses. They were heavy, and often made my nose sore where they rested on the nose pieces. To make them more comfortable, my father put moleskin pads on the nose pieces to cushion them. This helped until the little pads inevitably fell off and had to […]

Mammals

Action photo of a Northern Flicker boosting itself out of a hole in a dead tree. Bright yellow flashes from the underside of its unfurling wing, as it shows its white breast with black dots.

Another Drummer: Northern Flicker

Updated April 13, 2023

There’s a lot of drumming going on in the trees on Owl Acres. Woodpeckers are staking out their territory and calling to potential mates. One of the drummers is a northern flicker (Colaptes auratus). Unlike Woody Woodpecker and all his cousins, the northern flicker is brown, not black. He does have a profusion of black […]

Birds

Photo of Dave, a Yellow Labrador Retriever, and Clancy, a Golden Retriever pup, catching some zzz’s on a mat on a sunlit tile floor. Favorite toys lie strewn on the floor next to the mat.

A New Member of the Household: Clancy

Updated March 26, 2025

I have gained a heightened appreciation of the 500 or more families who take on the task of raising puppies for the Seeing Eye each year. It takes a lot of focus, attention and work just to get them housetrained, let alone all the other things that a new puppy needs to learn. And the […]

A European Starling takes flight. Wings spread, showing the tapered tips that give the bird its name. Brown bird with white mottling and a long, tapered beak.

Thank You, Shakespeare: Starlings

Updated April 6, 2023

There’s a racket going on inside the fireplace. This is the second time this spring. A bird has mistaken the chimney for a home, and, once it tumbled down that pipe, it can’t go back up. So it’s fluttering and bumping around in there trying to get out. After some attempts that sound like they’d […]

Birds

Old black and white photo of a prairie farmstead. Small, rude frame house and large wooden windmill and small livestock building and wagon in the background. Man and woman seated in the foreground and another man stands with his hand on a fence near the windmill.

Settlement Part 4: The Reeves Family

Updated April 3, 2023

Records indicate that Jesse Reeves bought the quarter section of land that today contains Owl Acres. He bought it from the Government for $1.25 per acre. How Jesse and his family fared over the next 15 or 20 years is uncertain, but records do exist of a Jesse Reeves of Elkhorn, Douglas County, Nebraska who […]

History

Red Tail Hawk in full flight, carrying a gray rat in its talons

The Hawkeye State: Red-Tailed Hawk

Updated March 30, 2023

On a bright sunny day, a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) sits surveying his domain from the top of the cupola on the barn. We see them everywhere—on top of utility poles, high up in trees, sitting on fence posts, even sitting on the cable barriers that run down the median on the interstate. They hunt […]

Birds

Karen stands behind a replica of John Deere’s sod-busting plow he invented in 1837. A stout wooden beam supports a curved, diamond-shaped plowshare, made from a sawmill blade. The point cuts the sod and starts it curving up and across the face of the plowshare. As the sod slides across the steel, it continually scours the surface clean so the plow doesn’t get clogged by the sticky prairie soil.

Settlement Part 3: Jesse Plows the Prairie

Updated March 27, 2023

In the 1850s, a massive campaign to recruit settlers to the prairies was underway. Land speculators bought up land to resell at a profit. Soldiers from the Mexican-American war were granted land warrants for 160 acres of land, which many sold for cash. Thousands of farmers and their families from Pennsylvania, Ohio and other eastern […]

History