March 2022 • Nebraskaland 51
a small rattlesnake in a coff ee can in his offi ce for when
visitors entered? Or walk in front of a colleague's middle-of-
Nebraska-nowhere trail camera and make obscene gestures
toward the lens?
His ability to tell a story extended to his work. He was a
master with the keyboard and the camera. "His work is the
standard by which everything else can be measured," said
Forsberg.
A few years before his passing, he bestowed this advice on
me. "Grind out the stuff you need to do to buy groceries, but
once or twice a year knock their socks off . When you look
back, should you live so long, those will be the ones you're
glad you did. The ones that last — that some snot-nosed kid
will quote in his Ph.D. dissertation 50 years from now. Yeah, I
know, you're dead and won't know, but it would be good now
if you saw you were doing something signifi cant in the long-
haul."
That was Jon Farrar.
N
Visit Nebraskalandmagazine.com to read Farrar's articles
mentioned in this story.
A Love of Wildfl owers
"The number of snow geese staging on Rainwater Basin wetlands during spring migration has increased dramatically since the
1970s," wrote Farrar in 2004. "Nearly fi ve million snow geese are estimated to pause in these wetlands each spring in recent
years. Large numbers of snow geese migrate through Nebraska on their way to breeding grounds in Canada during late winter
and early spring."
Jon Farrar
approached his Field
Guide to Wildflowers
of Nebraska and the
Great Plains, originally
published in 1990
with a second edition
in 2011, with the
same conviction and
care for the species
as the rest of his
projects.
"There is no way
I could pick just
one wildflower as a
favorite," he wrote.
"Each is special in
its own way, especially when you consider how it
evolved to prosper in its own niche in the world."
