Note: This week we are featuring TWO "Roadside Wildflowers of the Week"

Yellow Sweetclover (Melilotus officinalis) is not a native wildflower, but it has become naturalized and grows wild, and is also planted as a legume to enrich soil nitrogen, in many areas.  It originated in Eurasia.  It is notoriously attractive to Honey Bees and is an important source of nectar for honey production.  It also serves many other pollinating insects, enhancing the biodiversity of roadsides.  Upland gamebirds and songbirds use it for nesting, brood rearing (by attracting insects that are important as food sources for chicks) and year-round cover. 

In addition to its ecological contributions to roadsides, especially in western and northern Kansas, Yellow Sweetclover adds an aesthetic quality to the roadsides along many Great Plains highways during the month of June.  Many of these roadsides were planted to bromegrass originally, so they are otherwise not very valuable as habitat.  As illustrated by the photos below made on Sunday, June 20 along Interstate 70 west of Quinter, Kansas, the clover was nearly four feet high in the outer reaches of the rights-of-way.  Dickcissels were actively calling, indicating that they were actively nesting in this publicly provided habitat, and an occasional meadowlark was viewed on the boundary fence along with numerous Red-winged Blackbirds.

Support your natural roadsides by supporting Audubon of Kansas! Donate Now!

Unfortunately, a few miles farther west, a swather was eliminating all of the habitat, and the nests, along the south side of the Interstate.  As I prepared to make the photo of the swather cutting the roadsides out completely for hay, a hen Pheasant flushed from immediately in front of the machine. It probably flushed from a nest or a brood because the swather had already passed adjacent to this cut and it hadn’t left from that disturbance.  As the swather continued eastward a hundred yards, a family group of Redwing Blackbirds flushed, lucky to have already fledged.  Tragically, KDOT does not effectively restrict or regulate private haying operations, free for the taking, to protect ecological or aesthetic values of public interest on this public land.  By contrast, even when a drought emergency is declared, USDA restricts landowners who own lands enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program and requires payment of a fee and delayed hay harvesting until after July 15 to avoid the primary nesting season.  AOK will continue to advocate administrative changes within KDOT to protect the tremendous public investment, ecological and aesthetic resources represented by the 150,000 acres of vegetated rights-of-way along 10,000 miles of state highways.

To nominate a native wildflower, or to send photos of a native roadside wildflower, click here