(upbeat music) -[Carlee] Up next on Conservation Works.

The tiny but essential life that powers our prairie ecosystems.

Field notes with Chris Helzer and how one church turned its lawn into a thriving native plant park.

I'm Carlee Moates.

Welcome to Conservation Works.

(no audio) (water running) (gentle music) (gentle music) (birds cawing) (gentle music) (car door dinging) -[Chris] I've been working in prairies and around prairies for more than 30 years.

Almost every time I go out, I see something I haven't seen before.

Prairies for most people, which is a place that people don't think about very often, or they just walk past them, or mostly drive past them without thinking twice.

(birds chirping) Close-up photography lets me take pictures of the things that are hidden in those prairies.

It helps me get people excited about prairies, or interested in an ecosystem that they wouldn't think about.

(insects chirping) Also, it helps me tell the story of what they need from a conservation standpoint, whether that's land management or just making sure that a prairie doesn't get plowed up, or making sure that we take care of the landscape around it.

(bee buzzing) (birds chirping) (birds chirping) (camera clicking) My name is Chris Helzer.

I'm the director of science and stewardship here in Nebraska for The Nature Conservancy.

(birds chirping) I do a lot of things.

I'm an ecologist and land manager.

In addition to that, I'm a photographer and a writer, both for The Nature Conservancy, but also on my own.

(birds chirping) The Niobrara Valley Preserve is 56,000 acres of land that the Nature Conservancy owns along the Niobrara River.

It is mostly grassland.

There's a lot of sandhills grassland, but it also includes about 25 miles of river frontage.

(birds chirping) So there's a lot of different things here all in one place.

(birds chirping) (gentle music) As a scientist, when I walk around, I'm looking at things that I can quantify.

(gentle music) I'm measuring how many flowers I see or counting the species of plants or insects, or I'm looking at the way that our land management, like fire or grazing, is affecting the ecosystem or the plant communities.

(gentle music) And then as a photographer, as soon as I pick up a camera.

(gentle music) It opens up kind of a different world.

(gentle music) There's a switch in my brain that flips, and now I'm exploring.

I'm looking more artistically.

I'm looking at light.

I'm looking at composition.

(gentle music) I see flies on a flower or I'll see grasshopper hiding behind a stem of grass.

(gentle music) A grasshopper right here is called the Sagewort grasshopper because its favorite food is sagewort, (gentle music) and it's the exact same color as the sage plant.

In fact, even the texture of the plant and the grasshopper patterning is really, really similar.

(gentle music) So you hardly ever see them when they're on their plant because they just blend in so well.

But if you walk through a patch of the plant, then you can see them jump.

That's the best chance to see them.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) All right.

I either got it or I didn't.

(birds chirping) (grass crunching) Thank you for being accommodating, little friend.

(birds chirping) When you see someone's face, you relate to it in a very different way.

And it gives insects and other small animals like that a personality.

It makes them a character that you can relate to.

(insects chirping) Hopefully, if I can show them face to face in their environment, that'll change the way people think about them.

(buzzing) I don't think we even know how many insects you can find in a prairie.

There are so many that we haven't discovered yet and named, and the populations go up and down so much year to year.

They're really hard to study.

(insects chirping) (wings flapping) People who never really stop and walk around the prairie are missing most of what's in there, and especially if you stop and pause pause and watch.

You see all these things that start to move.

You see changes through time, whether that's through a day or across seasons.

(gentle music) (clicking) I've lived in Nebraska most of my life.

I grew up in Western Nebraska and then Lincoln.

It wasn't until I was a sophomore in college that the idea of prairies in Nebraska really hit me.

(gentle music) I was surrounded by prairies in my childhood.

Even when I was in high school in Lincoln, I went fishing and I would drive through prairies.

I would walk through prairies to get to the lakes that I was fishing in, and I just never paid any attention to them.

So it sort of became a mission of mine to get them into the mindset of Nebraskans.

Help Nebraskans feel proud about the prairies we have.

Half of our state is basically prairie or some kind of grassland.

We are known for some of our grasslands internationally, the livestock production we get out of them, (gentle music) the species that we are providing habitat for.

I mean, that's part of who we are in Nebraska.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) I really hope that when people look at my photos, they'll see (gentle music) what lives in a prairie.

I hope that when they see a prairie or they think about a prairie, they're thinking about the photos that they've seen of mine that show grasshoppers, spiders, katydids, bison, and prairie dogs.

They'll see what lives there.

And then when they think about prairie, they'll think about all of those things.

I'm really lucky that I get to work in places that are really beautiful.

What keeps me up at night is all the things that I haven't found yet.

I'm sure I'll be really excited about photographing and I get to find new ones every day, which means there's a long list out there still waiting for me to find them.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) (no audio) - Hi, I'm Carlee Moates and welcome to Conservation Works, a series exploring the creative and inspiring ways Nebraskans are helping people, wildlife and the land thrive together.

Joining me in the studio is Chris Helzer, director of science and stewardship for The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska.

And as you saw in our first story, his talents extend well beyond prairie conservation.

So, Chris, you've been working in prairies for more than 30 years.

When did you start incorporating photography alongside your ecology?

-[Chris] You know, I started playing around with photography in college.

Um, there were probably some college classes I didn't pay much attention to because I was reading photography books.

(giggling) And for me at the beginning, it was really about a different way to explore the prairie.

And over time, I think it's become something that feeds both into my science and conservation work, but also is like a release from those things.

I can use it for for science, but also use it just for fun.

-[Carlee] So how do those two play together when you're doing science?

That's more quantitative, maybe more analytical versus perhaps it's more artistic exploration with photography, is your mind in the same place for each of those, or do they?

It's no, it's like I have two halves of my brain.

-[Carlee] Okay.

- People say that all the time, right?

Sometimes I'm using the camera to document something.

That is, I want to show people what the habitat looks like, or I want to show people what a species looks like.

And I'm doing it with a practical purpose.

But the more fun photography is going out just because the light is nice.

And I want to just see what see what I can find in good light.

And that's the artistic side of my brain, I guess.

But I like exploring a prairie from both of those perspectives, because I think I see it very differently.

And then I have more to talk about, talk to people about prairies.

-[Carlee] And I found that showing your photographs, that opens a portal into this miniature world in a way.

Do you have any particular species that you've seen people respond to when you're showing the little faces of these creatures in the grasses?

-[Chris] Yeah.

I mean, the star of the show for me is, and I usually end with it is the it's a little caterpillar.

It's called the camouflaged looper.

And a looper is another name for an inchworm.

So there's a little inchworm that feeds on flowers, but as it feeds on the flowers, it bites pieces of the flower off and sticks it to its back, and it camouflages itself.

It decorates itself like the flower that it's eating to protect itself so that nobody can see it.

It's such a cute little caterpillar, and every time I see it, it looks different because it'll be on a different flower and it's matched whatever flower it is.

And then there's a story that I talk about where I found one at our Niobrara Valley Preserve, and it was feeding on a sunflower.

And after I took pictures of it, I cut the sunflower and took it back to headquarters and put it in a jar of water.

And then I put a different flower in the same jar to see if it would switch costumes overnight.

But then I was worried it was going to fall into the jar of water and drown.

So I put a little paper towel underneath it, and the next morning I woke up to come out and see if it had changed costume.

And it had.

But what it did is it.

It went and got pieces of the paper towel and decorated itself like a paper towel.

(laughing) - That's cute.

-[Chris] And it's just such a fun story and such a fun creature.

And it, it creates this like, connection between people and this little caterpillar they've never heard about.

- Have you seen that revealing these creatures to people elicits a particular response?

-[Chris] Yeah, I think so.

I mean, part of the reason I use photography for more of an artistic standpoint is to get people to think about prairies as a place where things live.

Years ago, I remember thinking about there was a major storm disaster over in Indonesia.

And it's one of those things where I wouldn't have paid much attention to it, except that I had just met a guy from Indonesia and that storm, that disaster became much more real because I knew somebody who lived in that general area.

And so what I hope is with my photography, if I take a picture of a creature and introduce it to somebody and tell them about how it lives in a prairie, and prairies are really important for it.

The next time they hear about a prairie that was going to be plowed up, or a prairie that was going to be destroyed, or they just see a prairie, they'll make that connection in their head, and that prairie becomes more tangible, more real, more important.

So I hope that's what happens.

That's what I'm trying to do.

- Something that I really admire about The Nature Conservancy is being a cheerleader for species of all different sizes.

- The biggest reason I went to work for The Nature Conservancy almost 30 years ago now was at the time, they were the only organization I had found who really focused on that sort of the whole suite of species and what they need, and how do we help all of them.

So yeah, when we do our prescribed fire or grazing work, the main focus usually is trying to create a range of different habitat types around a particular part of a prairie, so that we have some areas that are really short, where there's a lot of short structure and bare ground exposed.

There are other places that are sort of tall and dense vegetation, because that is really good habitat for some animals.

And then there's a lot of sort of in between that are patchy or, you know, some areas that are tall or short or mixed.

And we do that because it's good for birds.

We do it because it's good for deer and turkeys and a lot of species that people are familiar with.

But it also is really important for all that whole range of insects and even plants, because plants respond to different types of light availability or shade competition from other plants.

I think it's more fun to think about land management that way, rather than just managing for pheasants or deer or not that those are bad things to manage for, but it makes it much more complex.

And you think about all these other interactions that are happening and when we when we burn an area, knowing that that's where the bison or the cattle that we have are going to focus their grazing.

It's really fun to think about, okay, how is that going to affect things like tiger beetles, right?

Or this is going to be a place now where toads come to feed, which means that's where the, the hognose snakes are going to come in, and that's going to attract hawks to come.

I mean, there's just these, this whole cascade of impacts that happen.

-[Carlee] Absolutely.

How can that be applied to, for landowners that are also managing their own land?

- I mean, I think the simple, the simplest way to think about it, if you're a landowner and you want to manage for, again, birds, butterflies, pollinators in general, you know as many things as you can.

The more different types of habitat you can provide, the better.

And then the second key, I think, is making sure that each of those habitat types moves around the landscape.

In other words, if you have an area that you graze really hard one year, making sure you don't graze it hard again, the next year is important and you graze a different place hard.

So that has a chance to kind of grow back and recover.

And as long as you have that kind of shifting mosaic of these different patches around the landscape.

Everything else falls into place pretty well.

That shifting mosaic is really the key, and you can do that on a five-acre parcel.

You can do that on a 10,000-acre parcel.

The concept is really the same in both.

- Shifting mosaic.

That's something... - Shifting mosaic.

- I always hear Chris's voice shifting mosaic in the back of my mind.

-[Chris] It's working.

- Yes, it's working.

-[Chris] Great and that's the thing.

I mean, all of the all of the different approaches we're experimenting with were, we start out thinking about how do we do it in the best way possible for wildlife and the diversity of plants and all that.

But we always have in our mind, what's the profitability of this?

Or how does this relate to productivity?

You know, we have grasslands in Nebraska primarily because they can support people's livelihood, right?

That's why they still exist.

And so anything we do has to still relate to being able to make money off of that land and pay the taxes and get your family fed and, you know, to school or and all those other things.

And I would also say, I mean, a lot of what we're doing, I don't expect other people to do exactly what we're doing.

I mean, we're trying to be weird.

We're trying to sort of push the boundaries and - Yes.

- And see like, how - Find the limits?

- broad is the range of possibilities that you could play in?

And then if we can find those edges, that just gives people a lot of room to play in the middle and be creative.

And so I hope what we're doing is we're allowing ranchers, for example, a little bit more freedom to think about, oh, I have this whole space I could play around with as I think about how to be both productive and to help conservation.

-[Carkee] So then those ranchers, maybe if they feel like they can't take the risk themselves just to find out they can learn from you.

- I hope so.

Yeah, we are trying to take those risks so that other people don't have to.

Yeah, exactly.

-[Carlee] I'm thinking about your more recent project, The Square Meter Project.

Can you just talk about what your vision was for that?

-[Chris] Yes.

I kind of stumbled on to it.

Obviously, I like to take pictures of small things.

And I had this idea that I'm always trying to show people how much is in prairies, right?

How much diversity is there, how complex they are at a small scale as well as a large scale.

And I just sort of came up with this idea that, what if I looked at a very small plot of land over the course of a year and see how much, see how much I could find?

And so I put four flags in the ground in Aurora, Nebraska, where I live at Lincoln Creek Prairie, which is just right on the edge of town.

And I spent a year in 2018 basically going out there.

And whenever I had a chance, I would go out there and just sit and stare into this little space and take pictures of everything that I found.

And it was way more fun than I thought.

And it resonated with people way better than I thought it would.

It turned into a book.

It turned into a museum exhibit at Morrill Hall.

I give presentations on it all the time, and then I was done until six years later, I sort of, on the spur of the moment, chose to do it again, and I ended up capturing three times as many species in 2024 as I did in 2018.

-[Carlee] Wow.

-[Chris] The second time I did it, I found 320 different species that I that I was able to photograph, right.

There were more species than that that came in and out of the plot, but I was able to photograph 320 species in a square meter.

You know, the size of the chair that I'm sitting in, and that blows people's minds.

That's not something I think most people would have expected.

-[Carlee] That's a great example of how people can discover all this, this wonder of nature just in their backyard too.

I got to visit that square meter, and it's not in the middle of wilderness.

It's behind a line of trees and a dog park or dog pound or something.

The the local, the local adopt a pet center right there.

The city waste site is right across the road from it.

There's a trailer park right... It's it's not.

Yeah, it's not wilderness by most people's definitions, the point of the project really, is that you could find similar diversity in a place close to you.

And so hopefully people will take advantage of that and not necessarily spend a year looking at a small area, but maybe spend a little bit more time getting to know a place that's close to them, even if it's their backyard or the local park or something, and just sink in a little bit and, you know, study what you find.

- Absolutely.

So the wonders are there.

We just need to go discover them.

- Yeah.

- Well, it was great to talk to you today.

Chris, good to see you again.

Thanks for joining us today.

- Thank you very much.

That was fun.

- Next, we'll discover a remarkable patch of prairie tucked alongside one of Lincoln's busiest corridors.

It's proof that even in unexpected places, nature can still find room to flourish.

(no audio) (gentle music) -[Carlee] In recent years, there's been a growing trend of replacing turf grass with native plants.

It conserves water and eliminates chemical usage, which saves money while creating a biodiverse habitat that supports pollinators and wildlife.

It also involves less yard maintenance.

(gentle music) Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Lincoln turned its two acre lot into a prairie garden.

Church member and garden curator Steve Schafer spoke with me about this amazing transformation.

(gentle music) -[Steve] I just love this place.

-[Carlee] What sparked the idea for this?

(birds cawing) -[Steve] It was really somewhat accidental.

The church had a little bit of money set aside to do some landscaping, and at that time the concept was probably more the traditional foundation plantings.

But I happened to attend a seminar put on by then it was called the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum.

Now it's Plant Nebraska that was focused on sustainable landscaping.

It just seemed like an intriguing concept.

(birds chirping) - Had you had any prior experience with landscaping?

- Not beyond just a normal landscaping a person does around their house.

-[Carlee] Can you tell me how long has this garden been in the works and how has it changed over time?

-[Steve] The first major planting was the spring of 2017, (birds chirping) and over that time, we've eliminated 80% of the grass and replaced it with landscaped areas.

But I think we've planted 135 trees.

(gentle music) 5 or 600 shrubs and a few thousand perennials.

(gentle music) And those numbers change every year.

-[Carlee] What has been the biggest challenge, transforming from a lawn of grass into more of these native prairie plants?

- For me, the biggest challenge is understanding what plant would work best in a location.

But what really started was we purchased a bloom box from the statewide arboretum.

And that's a program where you describe your situation, the lighting conditions, the moisture, the soil, and the statewide arboretum will recommend a collection of plants that will be well suited for that spot and for a relative pittance.

(bird squawk) -[Carlee] And you've got trails, trees, little wetlands and drainage areas and prairie plants all over the place.

-[Steve] We've tried to put in native plants as much as possible, since they're the best suited to be a food source for birds and pollinators.

-[Carlee] Do you recommend that other people try something like this with their lawns?

- I think it's worth considering.

If one is concerned about, you know, declining habitat for wildlife.

(gentle music) Everybody who owns property can play a role in addressing that.

-[Carlee] Plant Nebraska formally, the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum helped Aldersgate Gardens take root with expertise, plants and funding.

Bob Henrickson, horticulture program coordinator with Plant Nebraska explains why more Nebraskans are choosing to go native.

(gentle music) - I've been noticing a movement to transform lawns into these native prairie plantings.

What do you think is inspiring that.

Why are people interested in that?

- You know, I think people are hearing about, you know, wildlife being in trouble, right.

They're hearing about the decline in bee populations.

They're hearing about the decline in bird populations.

And everybody's like, what can I do on a on a personal level?

And I think that's really what's inspired the movement.

I think other times too, it's like people are looking for maybe less input into their yard, meaning I don't want to have to spray chemicals.

I don't want to have to spray, you know, insecticides and put down fertilizer and, and water all the time.

(gentle music) -[Carlee] Beyond saving resources, what else do you think people are interested in incorporating into their lawns with these new native prairies?

-[Bob] Well, first of all, they want easy.

They want plants that are going to do well without, you know, having to water them all the time.

And, you know, baby them, if you will.

And I think one thing people learn with this type of gardening is it takes a little more patience.

You know, like 2 or 3 years.

I call it the garden of anticipation.

(gentle music) You know, you're always anticipating for next year.

(gentle music) -[Carlee] Aldersgate is a very diverse garden too, because when somebody walks through here, they can walk through this tunnel of trees, kind of leading them through a path.

There's rain gardens here and little wetland species that show up with that.

And there's a natural materials playground for kids.

-[Bob] Yeah, it's definitely a community garden.

It's the type of thing where you could, if you live nearby, certainly walk here.

But I think it's a destination.

If you create a landscape that's inviting more nature based landscape, you'll find yourself hanging out outside more often.

(gentle music) Yeah, it's very inviting, -[Carlee] Very inviting.

I keep hearing that word inviting.

- I like that word.

- Yeah.

Encouraging people to come visit this place.

- Yeah, exactly.

(gentle music) (gentle wind blowing) (no audio) (gentle music) -[Carlee] Thank you for joining us on this edition of Conservation Works.

We leave you now with images from Fort Robinson, one of Nebraska's most treasured landscapes, where history, wildlife and natural beauty continue to thrive.

(gentle music) -[Announcer] Support for Conservation Works provided by the Clare M. Hubbard Foundation, Ken and Pat Cheloha, the Carol Gendler estate and Larry and Pat Ruth.

(gentle music)