Even in winter, the Blackland prairie habitat at the Heard Sanctuary in Texas was beautiful. Sunlight painted the grasses and plants with glowing shades of amber, russet and pale cream. A bird box awaited the arrival of new life.

I wasn’t expecting an ecology lesson when I wandered through the Heard Sanctuary. I was thinking about the variety of habitats and plant communities that I was seeing. I was also wondering where the critters were. But I soon realized that all the elements of a complex ecosystem were observable here, hiding in plain sight.

ECOSYSTEM (noun): a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system. (Wikipedia)

A habitat is the natural environment for an organism. Add a variety of plants and animals, make it interconnected and self-sustaining, and now you’ve got an ecosystem!

An ecosystem is self-sufficient and cyclical; its nutrients go through a series of changes that transport them around the ecosystem in an unending web. Ecosystems need abiotic matter, producers and consumers, scavengers and decomposers. All of these were in evidence on my walk through the Heard Sanctuary.

This is the black soil of the Blackland Prairie. Soil, sediment and organic matter form the abiotic component of an ecosystem. Here the soil is an alkaline clay of chalk, limestone and shale. In dry weather, large deep cracks form in its surface. All the cycles of life – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, water cycles and more – start with the soil and come back to the soil. Abiotic matter, check.

Growing in that rich dark soil were plants. Pretty plants…

… and strange plants. This one has winged stems. Plants are the producers of the ecosystem, taking nutrients from the soil and energy from the sun to grow and reproduce. Their seeds, fruit, stems and leaves become food for the animals. Producers, check.

Walking along the trail through the woodlands, I heard the twitters of small birds – chickadees, nuthatches, a cardinal. While searching in vain for them, the nubby texture of this tree caught my eye. That big hole looked just right for an owl… but alas, no one was home.

These are galls, or they may be burls. The two growths are similar, and there are so many conflicting definitions online that I couldn’t sort out the difference. Insects, bacteria or fungi get under the tree’s skin, and an abnormal swelling of plant tissues forms around the invader. These growths are the result.

Most galls are small and appear on leaves or twigs, but they can be large and woody. Burls seem to be exclusively woody. Inside a burl, the rings of the wood twist into lovely shapes that are prized by woodworkers for their beauty.

I thought the outside was beautiful, too.

Goldenrod.

In this season, my wildflower guide was not a lot of help. Without flowers on the plants, I couldn’t identify much along the trail.

But I could admire everything! Except critters. So few critters to admire…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I came to the swamp, and suddenly there were animals everywhere.

Waterfowl swam placidly past. Coots. Mallards. A Northern Shoveler.

And turtles. Lots of turtles, basking in the 82° sunshine. There was plenty of plant material in the swamp for herbivores like turtles and ducks. Primary consumers, check.

Oh, cool! Snakes!

Yes, that’s actually what I thought when I saw this sign. I’ve never seen either a copperhead or a cottonmouth. I was hoping to see one or both, though preferably at a safe distance. Not this day, though.

I found some droppings on the boardwalk. Why, oh why, you might ask. Why was I interested in this?

Because there was fur and bone in them, the calling card of something carnivorous like a fox or coyote. I never saw the animals themselves. For evidence of this component of the Heard ecosystem, a little scat had to do. Secondary consumers, check.

Wheeling over the prairie, a Turkey Vulture. Even though I see them all the time back East, they somehow seemed appropriate in this dry environment. To our eyes, vultures are ugly birds with an ugly lifestyle – they eat dead animals. Scavengers like vultures play a really important role in consuming and passing on the nutrients that would otherwise remain locked inside an animal’s body after it dies. Scavengers, check.

Nearby, a bracket fungus clung to another tree like the bookshelf of a woodland elf.

Fungi are neither plant nor animal; they make up their own kingdom and play their own part in an ecosystem. Fungi’s role is to decompose organic matter.

The portion we see, the mushroom, is the fruiting body of the fungus.

Decomposers, check.

The variety of plants in the swamp, cedar brake and prairie of the Heard Sanctuary was a marvel to behold. Studying it and photographing it kept me busy and happy on a warm December day.

Animal life was less obvious. Turtles sunned themselves on logs, while birds sang in the trees. Scat revealed the presence of a carnivore, but the critters themselves were tucked away out of sight.

Soil, plants and animals; swamp, woodland and prairie. All the building blocks of an ecosystem were there in the Heard Sanctuary for me to see if I looked hard enough. A walking ecology lesson!