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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
WHERE IS HERE?
Prairies are part of the original fabric of the world.
CAROL DAVIT, MISSOURI PRAIRIE FOUNDATION, AT THE NORTH AMERICAN PRAIRIE CONFERENCE, HOUSTON, TEXAS, 2019
THERE ARE PEOPLE who think the prairie is boring, and it is hard not to pity them. We see them on the highways, trapped inside their cars, propelled by a burning desire to be somewhere else. But even as we wonder at their hurry, we have to admit that these disgruntled travelers are following in a grand old North American tradition. On both sides of the Canada–U.S. border, prairie bashing is as old as the written record. In 1803, for example, when the United States was contemplating the acquisition of the lands west of the Mississippi River, the great orator Daniel Webster was moved to object. “What do we want with this vast, worthless area,” he thundered, “this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs?” And even after this supposedly howling wilderness had been annexed to the United States, many observers remained unimpressed. The painter and naturalist John James Audubon was among them. In 1843, we find him traveling up the Missouri River on his first visit to the Great Plains. Forced onto the shore when his steamboat became grounded on a sandbar, he turned a disparaging eye toward the Dakota countryside. “The prairies around us are the most arid and dismal you can conceive of,” he wrote. “In fact these prairies (so called) look more like great deserts.”
Another traveler of the same era, a trader named Rufus Sage, was even more direct: “That this section of the country should ever become inhabited by civilized man except in the vicinity of large water courses, is an idea too preposterous to be entertained for a single moment.” North of the border, Captain John Palliser, who crossed the Saskatchewan prairies in the late 1850s, was of much the same mind. Forget farming, he recommended. This country is just too dry.
It wasn’t until near the end of the nineteenth century that the tide of expert opinion turned, and the Great Plains were opened to agricultural settlement, now touted far and wide as the new Garden of Eden. The fact was, however, that these magnificent grasslands were neither desert nor garden but something completely new to European and Euro-American experience. So new that at first there wasn’t even a name for them in either French or English. Pressed to come up with something, the early French fur traders had extended their term for a woodland meadow—une prairie—as a kind of metaphor for this big, wide, sparsely wooded, windswept world. But the Great Plains were far more than a meadow. What the travelers had encountered was a vast, dynamic ecosystem, a kind of tawny, slowly evolving organism that, in a climate of constant change, had sustained itself ever since the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. In the presence of this strangeness and grandeur, words and vision failed.
When the newcomers looked around them, all they could see was where they weren’t. This was not forest or sea coast or mountains; it was nothing but light and grass, the Big Empty in the middle of the continent. A vacant space, as they saw it, in desperate need of improvement. And this failure of vision—this inability to see and appreciate the Great Plains Grasslands for what they truly are—has continued to plague our perceptions right down to the present. Flat? Boring? Lifeless? Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s time to drop out of the fast lane and give the prairies, our prairies, a second, loving look.
AN EMPIRE OF GRASS
THE KEY TO everything that happens on the prairies lies trampled under our feet. Although grasses may look humble, they are actually versatile and tough, capable of growing under the widest possible range of conditions. Anywhere plants can grow, grasses are likely to be on the scene, whether coexisting with cactuses in a desert, poking up among lichens on the Arctic tundra, or hiding in the leafy understory of a forest. And when circumstances are especially favorable for them—when the climate strikes just the right balance between precipitation and drought—grasses can assert themselves to become the dominant vegetation. (“Dominance,” in this case, refers to the plants that contribute the most living tissue, or biomass, to the ecosystem. As trees to forest, so grasses to grasslands.)
A glance at a map of the world’s major grasslands demonstrates that these conditions are most likely to occur on a broad, landlocked plain, far from any significant body of water, somewhere near the center of a continental landmass. It is in this semiarid environment—too wet to be a desert and too dry for forest—that grasses gain the upper hand, whether in the steppes of central Asia, the Pampas of Argentina, the savannas of Africa, or the broad heartland of North America. See Map 16: The Great Plains; Map 1: Temperate Grasslands of the World.
Globally, grasslands are among the largest of the Earth’s terrestrial biomes, or life zones, with an expanse that covers more than a third of the land area of the planet. (At least, that’s the area over which grasses would hold sway if natural conditions were allowed to prevail.) We’re talking some 18 million square miles (46 million square kilometers)—almost three times the area of Russia. In North America alone, grasslands naturally extend over about 1.1 million square miles (2.9 million square kilometers), an area larger than many of the world’s major nations.
The first European known to have set foot on this great domain of grass was a soldier and sometime explorer named Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. Dispatched from Mexico City in 1540, he was supposed to investigate rumors about a kingdom called Cibola, somewhere to the north, and to plunder its Seven Cities of Gold. When these glittering mirages turned out to be sunbaked Zuni pueblos in what is now New Mexico, he turned his attention to the uncharted Great Plains, where the fish were as big as horses, the people ate off golden plates, and the king was lulled to sleep at night by a tree full of golden bells. At least that’s what people told him and what he chose to believe. And so off set Coronado, with a party of armed men, in the vague direction of present-day Kansas. In the end the promised golden city turned out to be a town of some ten thousand people who lived in grass-thatched homes and sustained themselves by hunting bison and growing gardens, each in their season.
At every step of their journey, Coronado and his party were astonished by what they encountered along their route. Here lay “a wilderness in which nothing grew, except for very small plants,” but which nonetheless was teeming with millions upon millions of strange humpbacked cattle. “I found such a quantity of cows [bison],” Coronado reported, “that it is impossible to number them, for while I was journeying through these plains, until I returned to where I first found them, there was not a day that I lost sight of them.” Following these apparently endless herds were parties of hunting people who dressed in bison-skin clothing (sewn with bison sinew, drawn through a bison-bone awl), slept in bison-hide tipis, and subsisted on a diet of bison blood and bison muscle. Even the grass in this new world was cause for amazement, as it rebounded from the conquistadors’ steps and erased the trace of their presence. In this great round world, all that glittered was grass and an ecosystem of such richness and diversity that it could scarcely be credited.
But think how amazed Coronado would have been if he had somehow been able to sense the true extent and variety of North America’s grasslands. Little did he know that he had set foot on a vast prairie heartland—a continent of grass—that was flanked on every side by smaller islands of grassland and prairie-to-forest transitions, or savannas. To the north, beyond his farthest imaginings, lay the Peace River Parkland, a region of rolling grass and poplars that marked the frontier between the Great Plains Grasslands and the boreal forest. To the east, the Prairie-and-Oak Transition zone—a tongue of prairie interspersed with groves of hardwoods—extended to the Great Lakes and beyond, marking the interface between the grasslands and the eastern deciduous forest. To the south, the prairies merged and melted into sultry, soupy marshlands to produce the semitropical vistas of the Western Gulf Coastal Grasslands. And to the west, in the broad valleys of the western Cordillera, lay the California Grasslands—spangled in spring by lupines and yellow-orange poppies—and the arid Palouse Grasslands of the Great Basin. Dominated by scraggly stands of sagebrush and spiky, sparse grasses, the Palouse, or bunchgrass, prairie stretched along the drainage of the Columbia and Snake rivers to intergrade with the shrubby growth of the Montana Valley Grasslands. See Map 2: Temperate Grasslands and Savannas of Canada and the United States.
BUFFALO DANCE SONGS
Buffalo were not only a life-giving material resource to the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. They were also a spiritual presence. These songs were recorded around 1920 by a Pawnee man named Wicita Blain. Both had been passed down from previous generations and were inspired by dreams. The “waves of dust” in the first song seemed at first to hide a crowd of people, but the figures were soon revealed to be a herd of buffalo.
The Waves of Dust
Listen, he said,
There the buffalo are coming in a great herd,
These are his sayings.
There the buffalo are coming in a great herd,
The waves of dust roll downward.
There the buffalo are coming in a great herd.
They mark the place of the buffalo wallow.
The Buffalo Are Coming
Listen, he said, yonder the buffalo are coming,
These are his sayings, yonder the buffalo are coming,
They walk, they stand, they are coming,
Yonder the buffalo are coming.
Plains bison, Bison bison
And in the center of everything there lay the main attraction, the Great Plains Grasslands themselves, a landscape that even today invites wonderment. This truly is big sky country, with horizons that extend from the boreal forests of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba to the deserts of the American Southwest and from the foothills of the Rockies to the Mississippi drainage. The numbers speak for themselves. Length: 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers). Width: between 400 and 700 miles (between 600 and 1,100 kilometers). Vaguely triangular in outline, the region is broadest toward the north and narrows to its apex in the Hill Country of central Texas. Total area: 1 million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers), or roughly 14 percent of the entire landmass of Canada, Alaska, and the Lower Forty-Eight States.
THE GRAND GEOGRAPHICAL TOUR
BUT LENGTH AND breadth are not the only descriptors of the Great Plains. The prairies also have a vertical rise and run that add a whole other dimension of interest. Formed primarily by sediments that washed out of the Rocky Mountains millions of years ago, the landscape slopes away from west to east, stepping down from an elevation of about 1 mile (roughly 1,600 meters) above sea level at the base of the foothills to a few hundred yards above sea level on the banks of the lower Missouri River. Often, the change happens so gently that you hardly notice it. Who would have imagined, for example, that the drive across Kansas, from west to east, following in Coronado’s path, would be downhill all the way and that you’d lose more than half a mile (a kilometer) in elevation while traversing that seemingly level state?
Overlain on this gently sloping plain are a surprising diversity of landforms. The geography of the Great Plains offers something for every taste, from fantastically sculpted badlands to craggy mountains to some of the flattest expanses of country anywhere on the planet. “I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went,” our old friend Coronado exclaimed in a letter to the king of Spain in 1541, “with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea . . . not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.” The landscape to which he was referring is now known to geographers as the High Plains, an elevated and sometimes spectacularly featureless tableland that extends from Nebraska and Colorado into northern Oklahoma and Texas. An erosional remnant of a high-and-wide landscape that once extended over much of the Great Plains, the region is bounded on three sides by dramatic cliffs, including the upthrusting wall of the Mescalero Escarpment in the west, the tree-clad Pine Ridge Escarpment to the north, and the amazingly convoluted and striated Caprock Escarpment in the east. See Map 3: Geography of the Great Plains.
To the south of the High Plains lie the limestone hills of the Edwards Plateau, or Texas Hill Country—a world in itself—where the rolling countryside is broken by domed upwellings of rock, deeply cut by streams, and eaten away underground to form a honeycomb of sinkholes and caves. The Edwards Plateau, in turn, is bounded on the south by the terraced ridges and eroded canyons of the Balcones Escarpment, which slashes across Texas at the southern limits of the Great Plains Grasslands.
To the northwest of the Edwards Plateau lies the broad Pecos Valley and a landscape of spectacularly eroded caverns, sinkholes, and steep-walled limestone cuts. And north of the Pecos are the shadowed moonscapes of the Raton Section, where mesas capped with lava compete for attention with contorted badlands and the burned-out cones of Capulin Mountain and other long-extinguished volcanoes. From there, it is on to the broad, terraced valleys of the Colorado Piedmont, literally “foot of the mountains,” where the waters of the Arkansas and South Platte rivers have, over millions of years, stripped away layer after layer from the original High Plains surface. (This dramatic, if localized, lowering of the surface explains, for example, why the road heading east out of Denver tracks steadily upward for the first half hour or so, as it climbs out of the South Platte floodplain and onto the surrounding High Plains benches.) The effects of water erosion can also be seen on the rugged Missouri Plateau and the deeply dissected valleys of the Plains Border region.
If water has cut into these landscapes, wind has smoothed them out. For example, the southeastern edge of the Platte River valley is softened by a broad belt of curving, undulating sand dunes that were deposited by dust storms sometime during the Ice Age. Similar formations, shaped by similar forces, are also to be found strewn up and down the drier, western side of the Great Plains, from the Great Sandhills of southwestern Saskatchewan in the north to the Mescalero Sands of the Pecos Valley. And right in the middle of the map lies one of the prairies’ little-known natural wonders—the Nebraska Sandhills, a region of whale-backed, grassy rises and prairie wetlands that, at an area of almost 24,000 square miles (61,000 square kilometers), ranks as the largest field of sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere. These sandscapes were put in place by the relentless northwest winds that have been coursing across the landscape for millions of years.
With so few barriers to stand in their way, these same winds have had the run of the entire Great Plains region. Although their influence can be seen in many parts of the country—for example, as ridges of windblown silt along both the South Saskatchewan and Upper Missouri rivers—their influence is most obvious in the eastern and southern regions of the Great Plains. These include not only areas of the Colorado Piedmont and the High Plains but also the “low plains” to the east, notably the rolling hills of the Plains Border country, the Osage Plains, and the Glaciated Central Lowlands. Much of this sweep of country is blanketed in deep, contoured drifts of fine silt, or loess—pronounced “luss”—another gritty, wind-borne by-product of glaciation. The result is a gently undulating landscape of soft, rolling hills and, in places, extraordinary bluffs, like the delightfully eroded and unexpected Loess Hills of western Iowa.
The northern plains region, by contrast—north and east of the Missouri River, from Alberta to Manitoba and south through the Dakotas—is less apt to be buried in loess, but it nonetheless bears the imprint of the Ice Age. Here the terrain is an unmade bed of glacial rubble, or till, lying exactly where it dropped when the ice sheets retreated from the landscape thousands of years ago. And protruding above this jumble of knobs and kettles is an assortment of sprawling, flat-topped uplands, including Turtle Mountain, Wood Mountain, and the Cypress Hills, which straddle the boundary between past and present. Like miniature versions of the High Plains, they are the last surviving remnants of an ancient, preglacial landscape that has otherwise been lost to erosion.
Finally, and most surprising of all, are the honest-to-goodness mountains that jut out of the northern plains, particularly on the unglaciated reach of country south and east of the Missouri River. From the glowering Black Hills to the jagged Crazy Mountains, they stand as a peak experience (if you’ll forgive the pun) for anyone who has been led to believe that the prairies are monotonous.
THEN AND NOW
IT IS ONE thing to send our minds running across the contours of the Great Plains Grasslands and their unexpectedly varied landforms. It is quite another to bring these spaces to life, to try to perceive them in their full, natural vitality and splendor. What would it have been like to step out onto the round bowl of the southern grasslands with Coronado in 1541, aware that at any moment our progress might be blocked by a dusty, pawing, milling herd of bison? Or, precisely 150 years later, in 1691, to have traveled with Henry Kelsey and his Nēhiyaw and Nakota guides from Hudson Bay through the northern forest and onto the prairies of the Saskatchewan River country? What emotion would have seized us when a blocky, hunched shadow gradually resolved into the form of a massive and potentially lethal grizzly bear? Or what if we could slip back in time to 1804–6 (little more than two hundred years ago) and join Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition up the Missouri River?
Plains grizzly bear
Imagine: Bison beyond counting. (“I do not think I exaggerate,” Lewis wrote as he crossed the Dakota plains in 1804, “when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be compre[hend]ed at one view to amount to 3000.”) Flights of pronghorns at every turn. Elk coming up out of misty valleys to graze on the prairie at dawn. Bighorn sheep perched on the steep, crumbling walls of the Little Missouri badlands. Wolves threading across the prairies, trailing the herds.
Two hundred years isn’t very long on the geologic timescales of planet Earth. These memories lie at the very threshold of the present, so close that we half expect to be able to walk into a fold in the landscape and encounter them. And something like this still occasionally happens when we stumble across a physical trace of the past, whether it’s a flaked stone tool that once belonged to a bison hunter or a shallow, saucer-shaped hollow that was worn into the dirt by generations of rolling, grunting bison. The animals have vanished, but the imprint of their flesh and blood is still on the land. It is all so mind-bogglingly recent.
There are not many places where the wild is as close at hand as it is on the Great Plains. In Europe and Asia, no one can quite remember what “natural” looked like, because the land has been successively shaped and reshaped to meet human needs for hundreds or thousands of years. But on the prairies—right up to the moment when agricultural settlement began—humans had lived off the natural productivity of this vast, sun-swept expanse of grass. The First Peoples drew their sustenance from the animals and plants, experiencing both feast and famine as hunters and gatherers. This is not to say that they sat back passively and let nature take its course. They were active participants in the ecosystem, ready and willing to use whatever technologies they could command to improve their chances of survival. For example, they had no qualms about setting the prairies on fire, to green up the grass and draw bison in for the hunt. They tilled the soil of fertile river valleys and planted gardens of sunflowers, corn, and squash. They eagerly adapted to the new culture of firearms and horses.
Yet despite these human innovations, the underlying dynamic of the ecosystem—the interplay between climate and grasses, grazers and predators—remained robust. A landscape that had evolved to support large herds of grazing animals was still doing exactly that, as life ebbed and flowed in time with the seasons. Then, in the early to mid-1800s, the pace of change accelerated. In far-off Washington and Ottawa, ambitious governments began to assert their claim to the land and resources of the Great Plains. As a prelude to agricultural settlement, Indigenous people were confined on reserves and reservations, whether by persuasion or by brute force, and the bison on which they depended—the multitudes of “humpbacked cattle” that had darkened the plains—were virtually wiped out in a bloody orgy of killing. Tellingly, the final stages of this slaughter were motivated by the discovery that bison hides could be cut and sewn into leather belts and used to power machines in the burgeoning industrial complex in the East. (The last free-roaming bison were killed in Canada in 1883 and in the United States in 1891.) Modern times had arrived on the prairies.
And then came the settlers, an onrush of humanity that reached full flood in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Determined to make a stand in this challenging country, the incomers quickly progressed from temporary shacks and shanties into substantial homes, making them the first people ever to establish permanent, year-round dwellings on the open plains. This was a bold experiment, occasioned with far more risk than anyone at the time seemed to recognize or, at least, was prepared to admit. But whatever the hazards, the way forward was clear. The object was to assert control over the ecosystem and redirect its natural vitality into the production of commodities that could be bought and sold on the world market. Beef, not bison. Wheat and corn instead of prairie wool.
The result of this revolution is the landscape that we see today, a colorful patchwork of fields and rangelands, where geese feed in the stubble, foxes hunt in farmyards, and meadowlarks sing their hearts out on fence posts. These are the prairies that our generation was born to, and they are beautiful in their own right.
Yet the more we love this place as it is, the more we feel the pain of what it so recently was. The wild prairie ecosystem is gone. And this tragedy is compounded by the realization that we don’t even know exactly what it is that we have lost. “Civilization” and “progress” overran the grasslands with such an urgent rush that the ecosystem was disrupted before anyone had a chance to make a systematic study of exactly what was here or to figure out how all the pieces interacted with each other. The people who might have had the most to teach us—the last generation of hunters and gatherers—went to their graves largely unheeded by the newcomers, taking their knowledge of the prairie and its life ways with them. We are left with little to guide us except for knowledge handed down by Elders and fragments of written descriptions in the journals of explorers and early settlers—partial lists of species, brief sightings, and offhand remarks—that leave many basic questions unanswered.
The depth of our ignorance is startling. Question: How many bison were there on the plains before the slaughter began? Answer: No one can tell us with any assurance. By working and reworking the available strands of evidence, experts have estimated the precontact population at anywhere from 12 million to 125 million animals, a variance that leaves more than 100 million bison in limbo. These days, experts acknowledge that bison once numbered in the millions and probably tens of millions, but that’s as far as they’re prepared to go. And if we cannot account for big things like bison, how much less do we know about the smaller and less conspicuous organisms—little things like insects and spiders, fish and frogs, rodents and songbirds—that lived and died in their untold variety and interest and abundance? Yet if the wild past is lost to us, we can still look ahead. Despite everything that has happened, it is not too late to acknowledge the natural forces that continue to animate the prairie world and that, even today, shape the lives of all its creatures.
ECOREGIONS OF THE GREAT PLAINS
“ECOLOGICAL LAND CLASSIFICATION” is an attempt to see beyond the human impacts of the last few centuries and uncover the enduring components of the environment (climate, soils, landforms, vegetation, and so on) that make one part of the world biologically different from the next. While we cannot go back in time and view the wild prairies in full bloom, we still have a chance to identify and assess the fundamental factors that define them.
Over the last decade, the ecological regions of the Great Plains have been mapped in different ways by different agencies, whether in broad strokes as part of continentwide research or more minutely, state by state and province by province. One result of this effort is a set of maps created under the joint authorship of the World Wildlife Fund Canada and its counterpart in the United States, the WWF–U.S. Seen through the lens of these organizations, the Great Plains Grasslands come into focus as a mosaic of fifteen ecoregions. See Map 4: Ecoregions of the Great Plains.
For example, the Aspen Parkland ecoregion lies across the midriff of the Prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) and provides an interface between the boreal forest and the open plains. Rising in the north as a closed poplar woodland with occasional stands of spruce, it gradually unfolds into a rolling grassland dotted with aspen groves and dominated by various speargrasses, wheat-grasses, and most notably, fescues.
Rough fescue
Because of the predominance of fescues in the Aspen Parkland, the region is sometimes known as a fescue grassland. The same term is also applied, for the same reason, to the community of plants found in the Foothills Grasslands. Located on the undulating slopes at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, this ecoregion is dominated by rough fescue, together with lesser quantities of June grass, speargrass, wheatgrass, and various flowers and shrubs.
East of the foothills and south of the Aspen Parkland lie two ecoregions with subtly different characteristics. The Northern Mixed Grasslands take their name both from their northerly location and from their characteristic mixed-height cover of grasses. Here, the sparse, tufted vegetation of the foothills gives way to a groundcover of ankle-high grasses, notably blue grama, intermixed with an overarching canopy of knee-high stands, including various spear- and wheatgrasses. As this mixed grassland flows southward, the canopy of taller, midheight grasses gradually thins out, and the overall height of the vegetation diminishes. This transition from mixed- to short-grass prairie continues to the south in the Northwestern Short/Mixed Grasslands ecoregion.
The trend to shorter grasses culminates in the Southern Short Grasslands of the High Plains. Here, in an area once memorialized by Coronado as a land of “very small plants,” the vegetation is dominated by a ground-hugging mat of grama and buffalo grass. Yet here, too, there are subtle transitions. For if the grasslands diminish in height from north to south, they shoot up from west to east as they escape from the rain shadow of the Rockies. This trend is reflected in the shift from the short-grass prairies of the west, with their carpet of stunted plants, to the multilayered, knee-high vegetation of the Nebraska Sandhills and the Southern Mixed Grasslands.
On the eastern flank of the plains lies the tall-grass-prairie region, so named for the luxuriant stands of big bluestem and Indian grass that once flourished there. “The grass is so very high that a man is lost amongst it,” one early traveler reported from southern Wisconsin in 1761. Bright with brown-eyed susans and other flowers, these magnificent prairies extended from the Northern and Central Tall Grasslands south through the Flint Hills to the Blackland Prairies of east-central Texas. Many of the same species of grasses are also found, as an understory, in the juniper breaks of the Edwards Plateau Savannas and in the hickory-and-oak woodlands of the Cross Timbers Forest and the Southern Prairie-and-Oak Transition.
And finally, right out in the middle of everything, stand the lonely, displaced islands of ponderosa pine, white spruce, and paper birch that make up the Black Hills Coniferous Forest.
The ecological interactions that find expression in these varying landscapes have been at work for thousands of years. Even today, characteristics such as average temperatures, precipitation, length of growing season, and drainage patterns provide the physical framework or, one could say, the loom on which the fabric of the Great Plains ecosystem is woven. Yet for all their continuing importance, these long-term physical features are no longer the only powers in the land. Other interests have taken over; other hands are pulling threads. Those hands, of course, are human.
Over the last two hundred years, human beings have hit the prairies with the force of a major geological crisis, triggering not only extinctions and extirpations—of plains wolves, plains grizzlies, plains elk, plains bighorn sheep, free-ranging plains bison—but also dramatic shifts in the vegetation. Taken as a whole, the Great Plains Grasslands now rank as one of the most extensively altered ecosystems on Earth. There is scarcely a patch of ground where we have not left our footprints. The southernmost Short Grasslands, for instance, are as sun-frazzled and arid a country as you could ever expect to see, yet even there an estimated 27 percent of the ecoregion has been brought under cultivation. The surviving native prairie in the region is now devoted to livestock or converted to ranchettes, on the advancing front of urbanization. In the mixed grasslands, by contrast, the percentage of land under cultivation rises from 15 percent (in districts with scant precipitation) to over 96 percent (where conditions are most conducive to crop production). And in the tall grasslands, with their relatively generous climate and deep, black earth, fully 99 percent of the native grasses have been plowed under to make way for farming.
Largely as a result of this destruction of natural habitat, at least 464 prairie species have declined to such rarity that their long-term survival is in question, and more names are added to the list with every passing year. (This tabulation includes only species that have been officially designated as at risk of extinction, either locally or nationally.) Of this total, a majority are unique organisms found exclusively, or almost exclusively, on the Great Plains Grasslands. Last chance to see the Dakota skipper butterfly, the Colorado checkered whiptail lizard, Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, the black-footed ferret.
These trends are deeply troubling, and we could easily get lost in the dark. To find our way forward we will have to be sure-footed, willing and able to move quickly from sorrow to hope, from past to present, from celebrating wildness to accepting and honoring our own accident-prone presence. We will need to see both the splendor of the life that has faded away and the abundance that still extends across the whole wide world of the prairie in every direction. For however diminished, the Great Plains are blooming and buzzing and wriggling and squirming with wildlife wherever we look. In the Northern Mixed Grasslands ecoregion, for example—where as much as three-quarters of the natural habitat has been lost to the plow—there are currently no fewer than 13 species of amphibians, 18 reptiles, 72 mammals, at least 160 butterflies, 222 birds, and 1,595 species of grasses, sedges, and wildflowers. This gives the region a total “species richness index,” on the books of the World Wildlife Fund, of 2,095, much higher than many areas that are typically thought of as biodiversity hot spots. (By comparison, the rain forests of northern California have a richness index of only 1,710, while the Everglades come in at 1,855.)
FIELD NOTES
Chimney Coulee, June 29: “Last night, we stood on a hillside, ankle-deep in prairie wool, and heard a quavering whisper that seemed to come out of nowhere. And again, like a sudden sigh. Finally we saw them, high above our heads, a pair of nighthawks that sometimes interrupted their insect-hunting maneuvers to plunge headlong down the sky and rasp the air with their wing feathers. In that moment, the whole place was shot with silver.”
Grasslands National Park, July 9: “In just two days we have seen meadowlarks, horned larks, Sprague’s pipits with their surprising pink feet, phalaropes spinning and dipping like wind-up birds in a dugout, sharp-tailed grouse, golden eagles (nestlings and mature), jackrabbits—huge, hallucinatory—cottontails crouching in the shade of boulders in a prairie dog colony, mule deer, white-tails, pronghorns (bucks, cows with calves), monarch butterflies, showy milkweed in full bloom, prickly pear cactus with waxy yellow flowers, jumping cactus stuck to our dogs, purple prairie clover, silverleaf psoralea, brown-eyed susans, skeleton weed, blue Missouri milkvetch against bone-white clay, needle-and-thread grass, awned wheatgrass shining in the wind. The cold white glare of a full moon.”
Aspen Cut, November 11: “A bright blue sky, fresh snow, sparkling and mild. We are standing at the edge of a wooded draw when my companion says, ‘A coyote!’ and points to the opposite slope. But it’s not a coyote. It’s a cougar: reddish-brown, stocky, long heavy tail. It flows up the slope—looks back over its shoulder—then over the ridge and gone. On a snow-covered log, we find large round tracks with pinprick claw marks.”
On the Southern Short Grasslands, where significant areas of natural grasslands remain intact as grazing land, the picture is brighter yet, with 17 species of amphibians, 61 reptiles, 86 mammals, 230 butterflies, 245 birds, and an astonishing 2,359 species of grasses and other nonwoody plants, for a richness index of 3,011. Although this book can’t introduce you to all those species—you’ll need the appropriate local field guides for that—it will explain how this abundance of life is sustained and renewed, season after season. Far from being a sacrifice on the altar of progress that we can dismiss from our thoughts, the prairies are still very much alive and worth caring about.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
IN THE RIOTOUS interactions of nature, everything happens at once—sun, wind, rain, growth, birth, death—and change ripples organically through the ecosystem. For the purposes of discussion, however, it has been necessary to isolate aspects of this holistic system and discuss them one by one, each in a separate chapter. Although the subject matter is tightly interrelated, each section has been designed to stand on its own, so the chapters can be read individually and in any order. Chapter 3, “The Geography of Grass,” for instance, provides a detailed look at the prairie grasses and their dynamic relationship with the extremes of a midcontinental climate. Chapter 4, “Secrets of the Soil,” ventures into the dirt—a life zone all its own—and introduces a few of the strange little creatures that live beneath the ground. In Chapter 5, “Home on the Range,” we come back out into the sunshine to ride through cattle country and find out how life is lived on the surviving expanses of native prairie. Chapter 6, “Water of Life,” by contrast, takes us knee-deep into the nearest prairie river or pond to look into the lives of ducks, shorebirds, fish, and other aquatic organisms. Chapter 7, “Prairie Woodlands,” examines the unexpectedly important role of trees in grassland ecology and asks what difference it makes that woody growth is now invading the prairies. Chapter 8, “The Nature of Farming,” studies the potential of croplands to provide wildlife habitat. And finally, Chapter 9, “Long-Range Forecast,” reconsiders the conservation status of the Great Plains—is this really the most endangered ecosystem on the continent?—and discusses a range of options for protecting and restoring its wildness.
But before we look to the future, Chapter 2, “Digging into the Past,” will take us back to the very beginnings of time and the great adventure of life on Earth.
