Summer Vacation Reprise: Flora and Fauna

In early June, we visited Garden City, Kansas, and spent a little time on the sand sage prairie looking for buffalo, which was a story in an earlier post. This photo above was in that post but I have repeated it here, to set the stage for the photos that follow. If you click in the image, it will enlarge and you'll see individual dots of orange in the foreground. This was a field of Gallardias in bloom.

Also called Indian Blanket, several species of gallardia bloom in the plains states. They are particular in that they like dry soil and sand or alkaline conditions. The ones in my native Oklahoma are a little taller than these. They wilt if you pick them and they die if you try to transplant them. The prairie is their home, and they fill it with blazing color for a couple of weeks every June.

Another signature plant of the prairie is the mallow, or Kansas Beauty as my mother-in-law always called them. They form a bright magenta carpet in early June, blooming when the gallardias do. We saw these near the spot where we began the ride on the buffalo preserve. These flowers were beloved by the pioneers and they spell "high plains" to me.

There is more sand sage prairie behind Don and Kay's house, and I climbed up their retaining wall to see what kinds of flowers were blooming on top, since it had been impossible to shoot photos of most flowers from the moving wagon on the buffalo expedition. I found many of these prickly pear cacti with golden blooms. In Oklahoma, prickly pears have a pink flower.

These looked like little sunflowers. I'm not sure of their exact species or name. But at this season, most of the plants in bloom had yellow or orange flowers, with white or shades of pink to purple being a distant second.





But the prairie was home to feathered friends as well as flowers. As I was preparing to climb up this garden wall to get the above flower photos, I looked up and saw a bird walking toward me...it is a western quail, larger and obviously more curious than our eastern bobwhites.

I just kept taking photos as the quail trotted closer and closer. It seemed almost curious to find out what kind of bird I was.

Finally the quail approached the end of the wall and just stopped and gave me another long look. Then I must have shifted position and it finally flew away.


And no, I wasn't making this up. Unbeknown to me, brother Don on his back porch was taking pictures of me taking pictures of the quail, and after the reunion, he e-mailed this one to me!