In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Heart Stays Country: Meditations from the Southern Flint Hills by Gary Lantz
  • Jim Hoy
Gary Lantz, Heart Stays Country: Meditations from the Southern Flint Hills. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2017. 193 pp. Paper, $25.

One band of the Osage tribe was known as the Heart Stays People because they weren't given much to roaming around. I've just finished reading Heart Stays Country, a fine collection of essays by Gary Lantz, or, as he terms them in the subtitle of his book, meditations. Lantz was reared in the southern Flint Hills, or the Osage Hills, as they're called in Oklahoma, and although he has lived elsewhere for much of his life, his heart has obviously stayed in the tallgrass prairie.

My own heart-stays country is in the central Flint Hills of northeast Butler County, Kansas, where my Ohio great-grandparents settled in 1877. Most people refer to this area, and the Great Plains in general, as fly-over country, but I find the tallgrass prairie a wondrous place, as does Lantz. His well-written meditations convey that wonder with heartfelt feeling.

The Flint Hills, the largest expanse of tallgrass prairie in North America, run north-south in a thirty-to-forty-mile-wide band from Marshall County down into Oklahoma. Because their five million acres of native grass comprise only about four percent of a tallgrass prairie that once stretched from Manitoba to Texas, from Indiana [End Page 216] to central Kansas, Lantz considers it a landscape to be cherished and preserved (as do I). In 1806 Zebulon Pike, in crossing what is now western Chase County, Kansas, gave the region its name: "Passed very ruff flint hills. My feet blistered and very sore," and also noted the abundance of wildlife: "I stood on a hill, and in one view below me saw buffalo, elk, deer, cabrie [pronghorn antelope], and panthers" (198). All these animals once were abundant in the Flint Hills, although today only deer (still abundant) and an occasional panther still roam freely here. There are, however, some three thousand buffalo running on The Nature Conservancy's 39,000 acre Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County, both of which Lantz movingly describes.

Lantz is a dedicated naturalist, and his meditations delve deeply into the plant and animal life of the southern Flint Hills. His knowledge and appreciation of the birds that fly above and nest on the ground of the tallgrass prairie are especially impressive. I was particularly affected by his account of the Eskimo curlew, a bird that once blackened the skies over the Central Plains but is now, like the passenger pigeon, only a memory. He also laments the decline of the greater prairie chicken.

I know that brown-headed cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, where the chicks are hatched by a foster mother and often outcompete their step brothers and sisters for food, thus earning condemnation from bird lovers. I did not know, however, that the reproductive success rate of birds whose nests have been parasitized are essentially equal to those whose nests have not. Nor had I ever thought to question why female cowbirds take what seems to be an unmotherly approach to reproduction. Lantz points out that cowbirds (who, in his mind, should rightly be called buffalo birds), like many other animals, were the companions of the huge herds of bison that once roamed the Plains, thriving on the insects that also accompanied those herds. Bison were always on the move; thus, a mother cowbird would never have been able to stay on her eggs long enough to hatch them and raise her young without being left far behind by the bison on which her own existence depended.

Lantz's contemplations on the grasses, forbs, flowers, reptiles, amphibians, crustaceans, fish, birds, and mammals of the tallgrass [End Page 217] prairie are often poignant but always clear-eyed and clear-headed, never sentimental. He can describe a whitetail buck literally belly crawling up a hill to avoid two rifle-carrying hunters without seeming anthropomorphic. He obviously loves this prairie flora and fauna, but his meditations never cloy.

This is not the kind...

pdf

Share