Prairie

by Candace Savage

  { PRAIRIE }

  CANDACE SAVAGE

  PRAIRIE

  A NATURAL HISTORY

  { updated, with a new preface }

  PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES R. PAGE

  ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOAN A. WILLIAMS

  ADVISORY PANEL

  RICHARD CANNINGS

  Consulting Biologist

  Penticton, British Columbia

  SYDNEY CANNINGS

  Coordinator

  NatureServe Yukon

  Yukon Territorial Government

  Whitehorse, Yukon

  DR. KENNETH F. HIGGINS

  Professor emeritus

  Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences

  South Dakota State University

  Brookings, South Dakota

  DR. JOHN JANOVY

  Varner Professor of Biological Sciences

  University of Nebraska

  Lincoln, Nebraska

  DR. DAN JOHNSON

  Professor of Environmental Science Department of Geography

  University of Lethbridge

  Lethbridge, Alberta

  DR. DOUGLAS H. JOHNSON

  Research Statistician and Senior Scientist

  Grasslands Ecosystem Initiative

  Northern Prairie Wildlife

  Research Center

  United States Geological Survey

  Jamestown, North Dakota

  DR. HENRY MURKIN

  National Director Conservation

  Ducks Unlimited Canada

  Oak Hammock Marsh

  Conservation Centre

  Stonewall, Manitoba

  DR. PAUL G. RISSER

  Chair

  University of Oklahoma

  Research Cabinet

  Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

  JOAN A. WILLIAMS

  Consulting Biologist

  Calgary, Alberta

  Copyright © 2004, 2011 by Candace Savage

  Photographs copyright © 2004, 2011

  by James R. Page or by photographers credited

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books

  An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7

  www.greystonebooks.com

  David Suzuki Foundation

  2211 West 4th Avenue, Suite 201

  Vancouver BC Canada V6K 4S2

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-588-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-55365-899-3 (ebook)

  Editing by Nancy Flight

  Copy editing by Barbara Tomlin and Lara Kordic

  Cover design by Naomi MacDougall

  Front cover photograph by Joel Sartore/National Geographic/Getty Images

  Cartography by the Canadian Plains Research Center

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  To the memory of my parents Harry Sherk, 1920–2003, and Edna Sherk, 1919–2008

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE: Where Is Here?

  TWO: Digging into the Past

  THREE: The Geography of Grass

  FOUR: Secrets of the Soil

  FIVE: Home on the Range

  SIX: Water of Life

  SEVEN: Prairie Woodlands

  EIGHT: The Nature of Farming

  NINE: Long-Range Forecast

  FOR MORE INFORMATION

  APPENDICES

  MAP CREDITS

  {

  PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION }

  There is no way to hold back the future. But we can shape the course of events by engaging—fully, deeply, and passionately— with the present. . . This approach is sometimes referred to as a strategy of “no regrets,” because the work is worth doing now, no matter what happens next.

  EVEN NOW, SEVEN years after the fact, I can vividly recall the moment when I wrote those words, read them back to myself, and realized that I was done. My book on grassland ecology and conservation, the impossible project that had occupied me night and day for so many years, was finally finished. At the time, my main emotion was not so much elation—the satisfaction of a job well done—as giddy relief that I had managed to get the thing completed, somehow. It hadn’t been easy. Just as I sat down to write the concluding chapter, my partner, Keith, was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. (Don’t worry: he’s alive and well.) A couple of weeks later, my father suffered a stroke and died in hospital.

  No matter what happens next. Being alive is a risky business, and the inevitable conclusion of our life stories is not what, given our druthers, most of us would choose. We’re born; we die. And between the time when the lights switch on and the lights switch off, what are we to do? Let’s assume that you and I number among the fortunate minority of humanity who enjoy reasonable access to the basic necessities: food, clothing, shelter, and community. With our survival needs met, how do we “improve each shining hour” so that our brief lives are not a flash in the pan but a flash of brilliance? How do we craft lives of purpose and significance?

  . . . because the work is worth doing . . . These questions lurk, like ephemeral companions, at the edge of our field of vision. For me, the answers have often turned out to be comically understated: growing carrots in my garden, playing fiddle tunes on my accordion, or stringing words one after another to form sentences. But none of these activities can compare with the simple, animal pleasure of scuffing across a dusty stretch of half-wild prairie somewhere in the back of beyond, with hot licks of meadowlark song filling the air. Enveloped in the sounds and scents of the grasslands, I am a child again, holding my mother’s hand, as memories of her own sage-scented prairie childhood rise up to meet her. The Great Plains grasslands are old, older than memory. For visitants like us, this ancient land offers a grounding in continuance.

  Something kindles inside me when I sit on a lichen-covered boulder and realize that it has sat there for ten thousand years, ever since the retreat of the glaciers. Or when I lie on my back in the grass, soaking up the sun, and feel the Earth pressing against me as if it were holding me up. Whatever it was that lit the spark of life in the beginning of time is still present here, in the grass, wind, sunshine, and rain, in the birds and animals. Working to preserve and restore grassland ecosystems is an act of reverence for the crazy caper of life, which gave birth to us and all our flying, walking, swimming, and slithering relations. It is an expression of gratitude for the mundane gift of being here.

  There is no point in pretending that everything is hunky-dory for the wildlife and wild places of the Great Plains. In my home region of the Canadian prairies alone, more than two dozen species have been added to the at-risk list since this book was first released seven years ago, and another dozen have been “uplisted” to a more critical status. Only two listed species appear to have made significant gains during the same span of years: a tiny fish called the bigmouth shiner, which has been found in new locations and is no longer thought to be at risk, and the swift fox, a cat-sized canid that went from Extirpated to merely Endangered, thanks to a long-term reintroduction effort. Meanwhile, the status of prairie birds as a group con
tinues to worsen year by year, as formerly abundant species, like the Common (now uncommon) Nighthawk, become the focus of concern.

  The fundamental problem for most prairie species is loss of habitat. To this day, we continue to lose wetlands to drainage, river-flow to dams, and both native and tame grasslands to cultivation. In the Great Plains states, for example, millions of acres of marginal cropland that were seeded to hay in the 1980s and 1990s under the Conservation Reserve Program—and that have provided living space for wildlife ever since—are currently being ploughed up for the production of biofuels. As for the surviving wild prairie, it is in declining health due to the incursions of invasive plants and the relentless, dendritic expansion of oil-and-gas exploration and other human demands. If you are looking for a place where the conservation needs are urgent and your help is required now, look no further.

  . . . a strategy of “no regrets,”. . . I can’t promise you that a united force of grass-huggers will succeed in striking a happy balance between prairie people and the more-than-human world. It’s pretty clear, however, what will happen if we do not make the attempt. From my own small experience of engagement (as board member for the Nature Conservancy of Canada and a partner in a restoration project, among other things), I can tell you that, even though the context is often disheartening, the work of conservation can be exciting, inspiring, and fun. The prairie ecosystem is battered, but it is also adaptable and tough. Repeat after me: Things can change for the better.

  There is no way to hold back the future. But we can shape the course of events by engaging— fully, deeply, and passionately—with the present. And so we begin again.

  Eastend, Saskatchewan

  April 2010

  {

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS }

  THE AUTHOR IS deeply indebted to the dedicated and creative people who contributed their talents to this project, in particular photographer James R. Page, artist Joan A. Williams, editor Nancy Flight, designers George Vaitkunas and Naomi MacDougall, and cartographers Lorena Patino and Diane Perrick. This book owes much of its beauty and merit to their efforts.

  The information presented here is based on scientific research conducted by biologists at universities, research institutes, and other publicly supported agencies in every province and state across the Great Plains. Although there are too many of them to mention individually, they have each earned a vote of thanks from everyone who loves the grasslands. The experts who served on the advisory panel for this project deserve special acknowledgment, since they found time in their busy schedules not only to read all or part of the manuscript but also to offer many invaluable corrections and clarifications. Many others generously shared their time and knowledge, notably: Steve Adair, Ducks Unlimited; M.G. Anderson, Brian Gray, and Rhonda McDougall, Ducks Unlimited Canada; James Bassinger and Brian Pratt, Geology Department, University of Saskatchewan; Barrie Bonsal, National Hydrology Research Centre; Jan Bednarski, Benoit Beauchamp, and Arthur Sweet, Geological Survey of Canada; Louis B. Best, Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, Iowa State University; Dean Biggins and Mike Lockhart, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Peter Blancher, Bird Studies Canada; Don Buckle, arachnologist, Saskatoon; Bonnie Chasteen, Missouri Department of Conservation Grow Native! Program; Bob Clark and Dean Nurnberg, Canadian Wildlife Service; Meredith Cornett, Minnesota Chapter of the Nature Conservancy; Robert R. Cox, Jr., and Gary L. Krapu, U.S. Geological Survey; Sarah Davies, American Prairie Foundation; Art Davis, Cedric Gillott and Robert Randell, Department of Biology, University of Saskatchewan; Cyndi Evans and colleagues, Prairie State Park, Missouri; Gene Fortney, Nature Conservancy of Canada; Curtis Freese, World Wildlife Fund U.S.; David A. Gauthier, Canadian Plains Research Center; Rob Gardner, Society of Grassland Naturalists; Robert Gordon, Northern Plains Entomology; Robert Graf and Owen Olfert, Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada; Grant Harper, geologist, Thornhill; John A. Harrington, Department of Geography, Kansas State University; Kirk Henderson, Iowa Native Roadside Vegetation Center; E.H. Hogg, Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada; Sam James, Department of Biology, Maharishi University of Management; Kris Kendell, Alberta Environment; Anna Leighton, Saskatchewan Native Plant Society; Steve Malins, Banff National Park; Richard Manning, author and board member of the American Prairie Foundation; Mary Ann McLean, Department of Life Sciences, Indiana State University; Sue Michalsky, range ecologist, Eastend, Saskatchewan; Russ Miller, general manager of the Turner ranches; Wendell Morrill, Department of Entomology, Montana State University; Heather Musgrove, Saskatoon; Dave Naugle and Thomas M. Power, University of Montana; Kevin Murphy, Saskatchewan Environment; Mike Phillips, Turner Endangered Species Fund; Keith Roney and Ron Tillie, Royal Saskatchewan Museum; John Sidle, U.S. National Grasslands; James C. Trager, Shaw Nature Reserve, Missouri; Elaine Wheaton, Saskatchewan Research Council; and David and Lynn Zahrt of the Country Homestead Bed and Breakfast in the Loess Hills of Iowa. I am grateful to you all.

  Finally, it is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the day-in-and-day-out contribution of Keith Bell, whose generosity and love of life have sustained this endeavor at every step.

  {

  one }

  WHERE IS HERE?

  “You cannot take care of what you cannot see”.

  DR. GEROULD WILHELM, SPEAKING AT THE NORTH AMERICAN PRAIRIE CONFERENCE, KIRKSVILLE, MISSOURI, 2002

  THERE ARE PEOPLE who think of the prairie as 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 from the French, through the Louisiana Purchase, 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 U.S., 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.”

  One of the special beauties of the prairie is the cycle of four distinct seasons, each of which remakes the landscape in its own image.

  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 thousands of years before. 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.

  * * *

  > NOTES FROM THE FIELD

  The prairies have often been described as a landscape reduced to the barest essentials of land and sky—a place where the eye is lost to distant horizons and nothing much happens. But what this depiction misses is the color and excitement of the prairies seen close-up and the rewards that come with a little knowledge and observation. As evidence, here are a few brief excerpts from my notes:

  Aspen Cut, November 11: “A bright blue sky, fresh snow, sparkling and mild. We are standing at the edge of a wooded draw, looking across it to choose our route down. My companion says, ‘A coyote!’ and points to the opposite slope. But it’s not a coyote. It’s a cougar: reddish-brown, stocky, rounded head, long heavy tail, smooth, smooth movements. It flows up the slope—pauses to look back several times— then over the ridge and out of sight. On a snow-covered log at the bottom of the draw, we find large round tracks with pin-prick claw marks above the central toes.”

  Chimney Coulee, June 29: “Last night, we stood on a hillside, ankle deep in prairie wool, and heard a whispered quivering sound that seemed to come out of nowhere. And again, like a sudden sigh. Finally we saw them, high up over our heads, a pair of nighthawks that sometimes interrupted their insect-hunting maneuvers to plunge head-long down the sky and rasp the air with their wing feathers. In that moment, the whole place was shot with silver.”