Right down the street from the Air Force museum is another great place to visit, the Lee G. Simmons Conservation Park and Wildlife Safari. The park is essentially a self-drive safari where you’re guaranteed to get up close to some of the animals, like the elk above. I was worried the elk might be hidden somewhere in the woods and I wouldn’t be able to see them, but there were around a dozen male elk in the first section of the safari. They seemed completely indifferent to my car since they see so many vehicles every day. I had always thought the idea of driving your car through a fenced wildlife area sounded a little lame, but this place ended up being one of the highlights of my trip to Nebraska.
Another section of the park had a large pond covered in duckweed. There were dozens of large birds here, including the pelicans above and geese below. I also saw a few cranes among the pelicans. The turtle above was making its way through the duckweed. In another section were several enclosed birds, including the owl below, along with birds of prey such as hawks and bald eagles.
I spotted two black bears and two small deer while exploring the park. Black bears are always interesting animals to see, while deer are so common that I usually think of them more as something I don’t want running in front of my car. The park also had a wolf section. I went looking for them but couldn’t find any, so either they were hiding somewhere or they had escaped and were already halfway to Omaha.
This was probably the closest I had ever been to bison. There was a group of around 20 of them right along the road, and at first I wasn’t sure if I should drive past because I’d have to get so close. I figured people must do it every day, so the bison were probably used to cars passing through.
One of them walked right up near me and started scratching his chin against the ground. Then he dropped down, rolled around in the dirt, got back up, and shook himself off like a dog. I had never seen a bison do anything like that before, and I was lucky enough to watch it from only a few feet away.
Historically much of Nebraska was prairie grassland, but today enormous areas have been converted to farmland. Nebraska is famous for its cornfields, and several of my friends joked that I should watch the Stephen King movie Children of the Corn before visiting. I never watched the movie, but I did see a guy wearing a Children of the Corn shirt in Lincoln, so apparently Nebraska embraces the reputation.
I originally mistook the plant in the photo above left for young corn. Anyone who knows anything about corn would probably laugh at me for thinking that. It is actually a milkweed pod, something I had never seen before. On the right is something I could identify without any help: one of Nebraska’s enormous cornfields.
One night in Nebraska I parked near a hotel and decided to be cheap and sleep in my car. I had some partial success before eventually giving up and getting a room. I used to sleep in my car all the time while traveling about ten years earlier, but apparently I wasn’t feeling it anymore.
I left the car where it was overnight, and when I returned the next morning I realized I had parked beside an entire field of yellow flowers. There were several goldfinches flying through them. I wish I had gotten a better photo of the one above, but he didn’t seem interested in staying in one place long enough for me to photograph him.
The fields were filled with insects pollinating the flowers. Bees were an obvious sight, but I also came across several species that were new to me, including the beetles photographed above. The one on the right had managed to completely cover itself in pollen. I wondered what would happen to a person with severe allergies if they somehow managed to get that much pollen on their face. It reminded me of a kid with his face covered in chocolate after getting caught breaking into the cookie jar.
