Karen Keninger, Author at Heartland Safari

You might think this an ordinary weed, climbing over the sidewalk, but it’s not. It’s knotweed.

Prostrate Knotweed

Updated July 20, 2025

Last fall we had some cement work done on the sidewalk leading to the deck. The ground had settled significantly in the 20 years since the house was built, and the cement sidewalk settled with it. This project was to correct that. In the process of completing the work, the ground next to the sidewalk […]

Plants

Plate-size umbels of tiny white flowers stand atop canes of Elderberry growing next to an Iowa cornfield. More flowerheads have yet to erupt.

Community Living: Elderberry

Updated July 11, 2025

On a bright, cool morning in early July, the landscape is a vibrant, nearly uniform green. We’ve had lots of rain this year, and everything is lush and growing. Against this backdrop of vibrant green, plate-sized clusters of tiny white flowers buzz with happy pollinators. The flowers are arranged in flat-topped umbrella-shaped clusters ten to […]

A female cardinal rests in Karen’s hand, victim of a lethal encounter with a window.

Lethal Hazard: Window Glass

Updated June 29, 2025

Have you ever watched a bird crash into your window? It’s heartbreaking to see it happen. There’s that thunk against the glass, and then the bird falls to the ground. Maybe it gets up again and flies away, and maybe it doesn’t. 60% of the birds that survive the collision die from it sooner or […]

Birds

A little grey songbird perches atop a bare twig. Eastern Wood Pewee waits to sally forth on its next mission to snag dinner-on-the-wing.

Flycatcher: Eastern Wood Pewee

Updated June 29, 2025

On May 14, 2025, a little olive-gray bird with a big voice joined the chorus on Owl Acres. It’s a voice that’s relatively easy to identify. It features a clear, bright, sliding whistle. It slides down and then up sounding like “pee’a’wee.” He’ll sing to us all summer while he guards his territory, and courts […]

Birds

Iowa’s State Flower is a ditchweed. Flat, open pink flower with five petals and yellow center, it blooms on a stout shrub by a dusty roadside. Wild Prairie Rose is a hardy native, adapted to its sometimes-harsh habitat. Even though the virgin prairie is long gone, the area near the gravel road mimics the wild rose’s preferred conditions, and the plant flourishes here.

State Flower: Wild Prairie Rose

Updated June 9, 2025

On a beautiful spring day in late May, we took Dave and Clancy out for a nice long walk. Along the gravel road, we noticed a variety of little flowers adorning the ditch at the edge of the road in front of Owl Acres. One that caught our attention was the wild prairie rose (Rosa […]

Plants

Winter Ants in a colony chamber. Two have distended abdomens which are filled with liquid food. Another carries a mass of white eggs in her mandibles.

Living Storage Tanks: Winter Ants

Updated June 9, 2025

Entomologists catalog over a thousand species of ants that live in North America, many of which live in Iowa on Owl Acres. Each species has its own fascinating way of doing life. Let’s take another look at the ants that have been crawling all over the peonies. They are called winter ants or false honeypot […]

Insects and Spiders

Large pink flower stands out from dark green foliage. Peony blossom has dense, crepe-paper-like petals that form a soft ball atop a short stalk.

Protection Racket: Peonies

Updated June 9, 2025

Once when I was about eleven, my friend and I were walking to Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church when we realized we had forgotten our chapel veils. These circles of lace were mandatory as head coverings for girls at Mass. What to do? We spied some flowers growing next to the sidewalk and picked […]

Plants

A songbird perches on top of a post, facing the camera. American redstart has a black head and mainly black body, with bright yellow and white patches on his underside, wings and tail.

Warblers: American Redstart

Updated June 2, 2025

May is the busiest month for spring migration. Here on Owl Acres, we’ve been keeping track of our visitors using the Cornell Lab’s Merlin ID. Each morning I stand on the deck overlooking the back yard and woods and let Merlin capture the soundscape and name the birds. A second session from the front porch […]

Birds

The photo is of a sculpture based on a painting. A pair of large cattle with long horns and prominent neck humps, struggles to pull a heavy cart loaded with logs. A shirtless man strains to assist the oxen by pushing on the spokes of the cart’s wooden wheels. The painting and the sculpture are in museum(s) in Bangladesh.

Power on the Prairie Part 1: Oxen

Updated May 26, 2025

At the time that Owl Acres was settled, a source of power beyond the physical manual strength of human beings, was needed to achieve the goal of hauling households across the prairie and then breaking the sod to create farms. The industrial revolution in the 1800s brought a new mindset to people who had hard […]

Dense clusters of tiny white flowers with yellow centers (several hundred individual blossoms) adorn the end of a green leafy twig. Hundreds such twigs on this one shrub, make many thousands of flowers, each a potential fruit. Not all flowers will succeed to produce choke cherries, but for now they all provide an abundance of nectar and pollen for spring insects, especially clouds of tiny bees.

By Any Other Name: Chokecherry

Updated May 19, 2025

A chokecherry by any other name would taste as bad. And it has many other names, including: bird cherry, chuckleyplum, sloe tree, bitterberry, jamcherry, chokeberry, cabinetcherry, rum chokecherry, whisky chokecherry and black or red chokecherry. It also borrows location names like eastern, western, Virginia, and California chokecherry. And then there’s the scientific name Prunus virginiana. […]

Trees