Cool video from the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission:
Two rare butterflies, arogos skippers, rest on a pale purple coneflower while eastern meadowlarks and dickcissels sing in the background. These butterflies and birds are representative of many species that have declined due to development of their grassland habitat.
What can we do to help?
Go native! Using native plants in our gardens and community landscapes is fundamental to helping birds, butterflies, and other wildlife.
The video from H.E. Flanagan Prairie Natural Area by ANHC Grants Coordinator/Field Assistant Samantha Scheiman.
Steve: Flanagan Prairie is a really special place, one of the first, perhaps the very first, native hay meadows acquired and protected by the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission. For those of you old enough to remember Flanagan was the maiden name of Betty Bumpers, wife of Dale, Arkansas governor and US Senator from 1975 to 1999. Betty grew up in Franklin County and Flanagan natural area is named for her father H.E. “Babe” Flanagan who once owned the land.
“The prairie was the childhood playground of my wife Betty,” Bumpers remembered once in an interview. “Her father…owned this meadow for six decades and in all that time, the land was never plowed.”
Flanagan Prairie was also the first prairie that I visited as an undergrad ecology student. That visit started me thinking in a whole new way about local tallgrass prairies. I came back to the Poteau Valley and was seeing hay meadows and roadside native prairie plants in a whole new light.Today it is one of the few remnants of the more extensive Cherokee Prairie Complex that formerly occupied approximately 135,000 acres of the western portion of the Arkansas Valley.
Pale purple coneflower is a very neat plant in itself. (Purple is one of my favorite colors, anyway.) Reupping below a photo I posted back in 2018.