European settlers likened the American prairie to a boundless “sea of grass.” If you zoom in to the perspective of the thousands of species that inhabit this under-appreciated landscape, however, it’s nothing like the vast, lonely ocean — more like a raucous festival crowd, buzzing with life.
Wisconsin’s Schurch-Thomson Prairie is a pointillist painting in early August, dotted with the golden coronas of black-eyed Susans, the Doctor Seussian spires of blazing star, and almost-fluorescent pops of purple coneflowers. That palette is in constant flux, as new plants bloom from April through October.
“It’s always different, it’s always exciting,” says Britta Petersen of the conservation group Pheasants Forever. “You don’t know how diverse it is until you get in there.”
Prairie ecosystems once stretched from the Rocky Mountains to east of the Mississippi River. Today, just a tiny fraction of that remains. This part of Wisconsin was once a great swath of prairie and oak savanna before it was transformed by farms, patchy forests and small towns.
The result of that encroachment is fewer pollinating bugs, a huge loss of birds that nest in grass, and growing problems with runoff and erosion because of degraded soil.
Restoration projects are resurrecting grasslands, but it will take time to roll back the environmental damage, Rich Henderson says. He is the site steward at Schurch-Thomson, which is part of the 95,000-acre Military Ridge Prairie Heritage Area.
“This was in crop until the mid-1980s. So you got all the soil disturbance. Then they put it into grass–it wasn’t native grass, but it was grass. So we had 30 years of sod redeveloping, redeveloping the soil, kind of prepping it, and now we bring in the prairie plants and they’re just continuing the development,” he says. “In 200 years, we might have something that’s going to look like the original prairie.”
Smell the prairie
Looking is only one way to experience the prairie. This is a landscape you can inhale. Red and purple tufts of Bee Balm waft a minty scent. Purple prairie clover has a citrusy aroma. Then there’s Prairie dropseed, whose odor could be called earthy.
“To a lot of people it smells like buttered popcorn,” Henderson says. “As this ripens and the seeds get hard, the smell gets a little stronger and different.”
“It smells like dirty socks,” counters The Nature Conservancy’s Ann Calhoun.
Henderson is with The Prairie Enthusiasts, part of a coalition called the Southern Driftless Grasslands partnership. Along with The Nature Conservancy, Pheasants Forever and several government agencies, their mission is to restore grasslands across the upper Midwest.
“Grassland conservation is a team sport,” says Andy Bingle, Southern Driftless Grasslands Partnership Coordinator. That’s because in southwest Wisconsin, 95% of the land is privately owned, held mostly in small parcels of 20 to 200 acres.
“You have to work with thousands of landowners,” Bingle says.
Once they’ve identified land for conservation efforts, volunteers plant prairie seeds and pull invasive weeds so native grass can regain a foothold.
“Some species move easily, the wind carries them, and others don’t,” Henderson says. “It’s going to take a long time, so we’re accelerating the recovery process.”
That recovery also helps rare grassland birds, whose populations have declined by 43% since the 1970s, more than any other group of birds. Fortunately, most birds can thrive in grassland that isn’t pristine native prairie, and many are returning.
Amid the buzz of crickets and the chittering song of indigo buntings, we hear the curious portamento of a bobwhite quail. Whoever named that bird thought its call sounded like someone saying “Bob White?”
“I don’t believe it’s actually named after Bob White,” says The Nature Conservancy’s Ann Calhoun.
We stride deeper into the tall grass, the prairie gradually swallowing us up. Dozens of species of grass scramble for light and resources. Thistles and compass plants erupt six feet into the air, while other plants creep horizontally like jungle vines, weaving themselves into miniature thickets. This is a rowdy crowd of life, a dense neighborhood for chattering insects.
For all their diversity, however, many bugs eat exclusively one type of plant. That’s the case with monarch butterflies, whose yellow-striped caterpillars are busy fattening up on milkweed before they metamorphose and attempt to flutter almost two thousand miles to Mexico.
But beneath the riot of life above ground, the prairie conceals another world.
“Many prairie grasses are two to four times deeper in the soil, if you have that much soil, than what you might see growing above ground,” Calhoun says. “So well-managed grasslands can be incredible reserves for carbon.”
Fires of rebirth
For thousands of years Indigenous people have known that in the prairie, fire is an agent of rebirth. Some grasses produce more seeds after they’re burned. Fire stimulates many plants to put down deeper roots. Blazes also prevent the creep of brush and trees, a process known as woody encroachment that is a serious threat to grasslands around the world.
But fire was suppressed for much of the 20th century, hastening the loss of grasslands. Conservationists including The Prairie Enthusiasts have resumed prescribed burns to encourage the natural cycle of regeneration.
“It stimulates the native plants that are used to the fire and gives them a competitive edge,” says Henderson.
They’re giving the land a hand in other ways, too. In the basement of a big red barn beside Schurch-Thomson prairie, volunteers sift through piles of seedpods gathered from the field.
Jan Ketelle shakes a handful of seeds through a series of sieves, including a kitchen colander.
“We use whatever we can find,” she says. “I’m a specialist in handwork.”
A colander won’t suffice for a plant called New Jersey tea–its clusters of tiny seeds are encased in hard, black pods, so volunteer Eric Preston feeds a bucketful into a machine called a hammer mill.
“It wasn’t designed for prairie plants, but it’s designed for agriculture. We’re basically doing agriculture, we’re just not eating the proceeds,” Preston says. “We let the birds eat the proceeds.”
Preston says he’s been “killin’ weeds and collectin’ seeds” with The Prairie Enthusiasts for 16 years, and his work is starting to pay off.
“We do a lot of brush and tree control as well,” he says, “and you can just see the prairie opening up and rebuilding.”
The sun’s getting low, and it’s time to leave the prairie. Soon it’ll be a different landscape: fall flowers blooming and summer plants fading, the colorful waves on that sea of grass changing hue, the chorus of birds and bugs singing a different tune, and grasses growing back from dormant seeds into something new.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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