Where The Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie

10. People Pastures

10 People Pastures THISCHAPTER TITLEbelongs to Jim Wilson, a seed grower out in Polk, Nebraska, who specializedin native grasses and preached a gospel of grasslands for livestock and people, extolling tallgrass prairie as prime pasturage for the human spirit. Being a good salesman, Jim was all for planting as much prairie grass as possible-and there's no denyingthat big is beautiful where prairie is concerned. Still, he advocated prairies of any size, whether original stuff that had never known cow or plow, old pasture being returned to bluestem by thoughtful farmers , or just a clump of native ornamentals in the backyard. Jim's retired now and we don't know if he quit rich or not, but we hope he did. He deserved to. A prairie-seed salesman ought to make out pretty well these days. Interest in tallgrass prairie is steadily growing, part of the environmental concern for all original American landscapes. Tall prairie is of historical and cultural interest and high biological worth-but above all, it is tragically rare. As an endangered American biome, it has a certain underdog appeal as well as curiosity value. For any or all of these reasons, a surprising number of prairie restorations are being made by park boards, aboretums, colleges, universities, and backyard naturalists. Some are simply people pastures; others exist for basic and advanced research and as outdoor classrooms. A patch of genuine prairie-an unshorn, unbroken, uncurried 258 THE PEOPLE piece of the Old Original-has special significance to the soil physicist, agronomist, plant geneticist, and taxonomist. Such workers see native prairie as a unique and valuable baseline for a whole array of esoteric studies that are more than just exercises in pure science; they have some highly practical applications. There is considerable risk in our blithe dependence on a few crops that are adapted to broad regions. All crops are vulnerable to constantly evolving diseases with devastating potential, and plant breeders often return to the wild ancestors of our modem crops in the search for disease-resistantgenes. However, the destruction of originalbiomes and the discarding of primitive crops have seriously depleted the diverse and irreplaceable genetic resources found in nature. Native prairie is one; it constitutes a germ-plasm pool of wild grasses that can be vital to agronomists and botanists-and it is being drained by biological impoverishment. The Smithsonian Institution, in early 1978, listed almost 10 percent of the 22,000 plant speciesnative to the continentalUnited States as being endangered or threatened. An alarming number of these are characteristic tallgrass prairie species. Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, has said that a vanishing plant species can take with it 10 to 30 dependent species of insects, higher animals, and even other plants. No scientist appreciates native prairie more than the wildlife biologist who views it as an oasis in the desert of corn and soybeans -harboring not only common game species, but many unique prairie species as well. In Iowa, study plots of native grasses have shown high nesting use by pheasants, bobwhite quail, and songbirds. For example, switch grass study plots produced 12.4 successful pheasant nests per hundred acres. Not that switch grass stands are all that much greater for nesting than fields of alfalfa and orchard grass-but switch grass is one of the native "warm season" grasses that are not mowed or grazed as early as pastures of "cool season" forage, and pheasants have time to bring off their broods. In meadows of People Pastures such cool-season forage crops as alfalfaand orchard grass, mowing operationsin early June wrecked all of the pheasant nests and killed 73 percent of the pheasant hens. Then, too, native prairie grasses stand up well through all kinds of weather while most introduced grasses tend to "go down." A substantialclump of native prairie grass can be a good winter roost and a nesting site the following spring, enduring heavy rain, snow, and ice with equanimity.Don Christisen of the Missouri Department of Conservation tells of a little three-acre patch of switch grass amid seventy acres of corn and soybeans that provided a hunter harvest of over 200 cottontail rabbits in one hunting season. That patch was also home to a large covey of quail, and such a place is ideal for white-tailed deer. Small birds and mammals flourish in a native grass stand, which tends to have a rather closed...