KIOWA ELDER AND U.S. ARMY SERGEANT I-SEE-O, AMARILLO, TEXAS, 1924
IN A CENTURY when the natural world is slowly dying all around us—when wildness has been pushed to the margins—the wide open spaces of the Great Plains are a landscape of hope. Here is an ecosystem that has experienced the full onslaught of modernization in one brief historical instant and that, though battered and torn, still inspires us with its splendor. This is a country filled with light. It is a place where city streets flow out onto the prairie and draw us along until, almost before we know it, we find ourselves rolling down a dusty gravel road, with warm gusts of meadowlark song blowing in through the open window. It is a land where the seasons surge over us like tides, from the sudden upwelling of spring to the languid heat of summer and from the rushing retreat of autumn to the great sparkling silence of winter.
Look up into the darkness of a prairie night and you will see the universe streaming with stars. Suddenly, it becomes possible to picture yourself on the third planet out from the sun, traveling through the mystery and wonder of whatever is out there.
The prairie opens us to the immensities of space and time. Like few other places on Earth, it reminds us that life operates within broad horizons, with sight lines that extend from the past through the present and into the future. Just as the buffalo prairie is gone, though not forgotten, the countryside that we see before us is even now being transformed into the living landscape of tomorrow. As we look at the world that we have inherited from our ancestors, it is impossible not to think of the generations who will come after us. The wild prairie that we leave to them will be our legacy.
The raucous call of the yellow-headed blackbird is fading from parts of the prairies because of regional declines in the population of this species. Loss of wetland habitat, intensified by drought, may be the root of the problem. Overall, the species is secure.
Admittedly, the trends of recent decades have not been encouraging. Although the big plow-down of the settlement era is behind us, native prairie is still being lost year by year and bit by bit, whether to cropland, wind farms, strip malls or rural subdivisions. According to a recent assessment, about 425,000 square miles (1.1 million square kilometers) of natural grassland have been destroyed in the western United States in the last 150 years. Of these losses, almost 10 percent—42,000 square miles (110,000 square kilometers), an area nearly half the size of Wyoming—were incurred between 1950 and 1990. Although current statistics are not readily available, the destruction has clearly not stopped. We can rip up 10,000-year-old grassland in an instant, but it is beyond our powers to create it.
Almost as worrying as the outright disappearance of native prairie is the degradation of what is left, whether through overgrazing, fragmentation by energy development, or the intrusion of invasive plants. Not surprisingly, this incremental damage—death by a thousand cuts—is taking a toll on species that rely on wild grasslands for their survival. Take birds, for example. A study released in 2003 by the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (cec) identified thirty-two species of birds that are “highly dependent” on the Great Plains of Canada and the United States, in the sense that more than half of the population is found in the region at some time of year. This group includes not only permanent, year-round residents, such as prairie chickens, but also fair-weather friends, like Sprague’s pipits and marbled godwits, which are present only during the breeding season. In addition, there is a short list of species—sandhill cranes and common mergansers among them— that crowd onto the southern plains during the winter. By analyzing data from the Breeding Bird Survey (a standardized count conducted each year since 1966 in both Canada and the United States), the cec determined that more than 60 percent of the species that rely on the Great Plains are declining in abundance. In contrast, 23 percent of woodland species and about 28 percent of all bird species in North America are experiencing losses.
Once restricted to the foothills and aspen parklands, mountain bluebirds expanded eastward across the plains following settlement. Their initial success was dampened by competition from house sparrows and European starlings (both introduced from Europe). Fortunately, the provision of nesting boxes has helped to ease the situation in many localities, and these bluer-than-sky-blue creatures still add a shock of color to spring on the western prairies.
Arthur Savage photo
A similar study in 2005 focused exclusively on upland prairie birds— Swainson’s hawks, killdeers, meadowlarks, bobolinks, long-billed curlews, and the like. Of the thirty-seven species under consideration, all but five were found to be in decline. What do these “prairie canaries” have to tell us about the state of our grassland ecosystems? And if prairie birds are suffering, how can we be confident that the other critters out there (the rodents and creepy-crawlies, say, that inspire less interest) are managing any better?
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> THE SKY IS ROUND
Lakota elder Nicholas Black Elk, Hehaka Sapa, was born on the Little Powder River near what is now the Montana/Wyoming border in 1863. He died on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1950. This quotation is taken from the book Black Elk Speaks, which he published in 1932 with coauthor John G. Neihardt:
Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.
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The Western Advantage
By now, you may be wondering what happened to the “landscape of hope” that you were promised a few minutes ago. We’re lovers in a dangerous time, and preserving the splendor of the living world is a global challenge. As Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics remind us, “nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.” Yes, the trends are disheartening. Yes, the risks are real; but so is the potential for renewal. In spite of everything, native grassland still persists across the Great Plains, whether as isolated remnants in the Corn Belt or as vast sweeps of rangeland in the western provinces and states. And even though many of the prairie’s special creatures are under severe stress, it is encouraging to remember that every single one of them is still with us. The only known exceptions are the passenger pigeon, a bird that was driven from superabundance into oblivion by market hunting in the nineteenth century, and the Rocky Mountain locust—the scourge of pioneer agriculture—which is thought to have vanished around 1900. A number of important subspecies have also been lost to the past, including the prairie-adapted races of wolves, grizzly bears, and bighorn sheep, each with its own genetic innovations.
Sprague’s pipit, at risk
Mountain plover, at risk
Any human-caused extinction is a cause for regret. Yet given the intensity of development on the prairies in the last hundred-plus years, this record is better than anyone could have dared to hope for. It is a reminder that the grasslands and their native species are adaptable and tough, capable of coping with blizzards, fires, and hundred-year drought. Within limits, they can even cope with us. Yet natural adaptability on its own would not have been enough to bring the full complement of species through a century of crisis. Faced with rapid and violent change, several of the region’s unique life-forms would almost certainly have disappeared without the intervention of conservation-minded people. The survival of species like the bison stands as proof that people who love the prairie and take a stand on its behalf are the last, best hope of the wild West.
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> GRASSLAND-DEPENDENT BIRDS
According to a report entitled the “Importance of North America’s Grasslands to Birds,” there are about three dozen avian species that a
re critically dependent on the Great Plains grasslands of Canada and the United States for survival. In each case, at least half of the continental population is found in the region during all or part of the year, often in association with native grasslands and natural wetlands. The list is arranged in declining order of dependency, with birds that rely on the plains exclusively, or almost exclusively, at the top and those that are more widely distributed at the bottom. Asterisks indicate species that have been highlighted by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as “species of conservation concern.”
Year-Round
* lesser prairie chicken
* greater prairie chicken
sharp-tailed grouse
* McCown’s longspur
Nonbreeding season
Smith’s longspur
sandhill crane
common merganser
Breeding season
* Sprague’s pipit
* marbled godwit
* upland sandpiper
* mountain plover
blue-winged teal
* Swainson’s hawk
* Mississippi kite
western meadowlark
* Baird’s sparrow
* chestnut-collared longspur
* lark bunting
* grasshopper sparrow
* piping plover
yellow-headed blackbird
western kingbird
* ferruginous hawk
canvasback
* black tern
Wilson’s phalarope
gadwall
* Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrow
northern shoveler
willet
* marsh wren
* long-billed curlew
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Gone Today, Here Tomorrow
The story of environmental resistance on the Great Plains goes at least back to 1872 and the bloody era of the bison slaughter. In a year when 2 million bison were killed for their hides—their carcasses left to rot—a man named Samuel Walking Coyote took the exceptional step of rounding up seven orphaned calves and driving them from the Milk River country to his home on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana. There they and their burly descendants soon found their way into the hands of two local ranchers, Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, the latter a reformed buffalo hunter who wanted to make amends for his involvement in the bloodbath. Over the next twenty years, as the last of the wild herds were exterminated, Pablo and Allard devoted themselves to breeding and rearing their captive stock. By 1891, the two men possessed around thirty-five head, making theirs one of the largest herds of bison in existence. (The other survivors included a handful of stragglers in Yellowstone National Park, plus a couple of dozen private herds in Canada and the United States, with a combined population of two hundred to three hundred bison.)
Proving that conservation can be good business, Pablo and Allard managed their herd successfully for the next thirty years, selling hides and mounted heads and supplying live animals to zoos, parks, and other ranchers. Then, in the early 1900s, a change in government regulations opened the Flathead lands to homesteading—an intrusion that Pablo and Allard were helpless to resist—and there was no longer any place for them or their bison. Was the species finally being pushed into oblivion? Faced with this bleak prospect, a group of prominent eastern conservationists formed the American Bison Society, one of the first national environmental groups in North America, in 1905. Its objective was to establish wildlife refuges and, while there was still a chance, stock them with some of the captive bison. In short order, two small blocks of land were acquired, the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma and the National Bison Range in Montana, the latter situated on what until then had been Flathead land, a maneuver that continues to be a bone of contention.
There are now about 500,000 bison on the Great Plains, up from a few hundred at the turn of the last century. Only a small fraction (about 4 percent) are managed for conservation. Small herd size and an inadequate land base frustrate efforts to maintain the species.
With the refuges in place, whether by fair means or foul, it was time to bring on the bison. A deal was struck with Pablo and Allard for the purchase of their herd, but Congress vetoed it as a waste of taxpayers’ dollars. The Bison Society then set to work collecting private donations, in nickels and dimes, and ultimately raised enough funds to purchase a few head of breeding stock. Meanwhile, news that the Pablo-Allard herd was for sale sped north to Banff, Alberta, where it reached the ear of park superintendent Howard Douglas. A conservationist who already oversaw a small herd of bison in Rocky Mountain (now Banff) National Park, Douglas persuaded his superiors in the parks service to buy the Pablo-Allard outfit and transport the animals to Elk Island National Park, near Edmonton. Although it took six successive spring roundups to catch the half-wild beasts, just over seven hundred animals were eventually transferred across the border to relative safety.
American burying beetle, at risk
Elk Island was supposed to be a stopover on the way to the animals’ real home, the brand new Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, Alberta. About fifty of the animals managed to evade capture, however, and had to be left behind at Elk Island. The rest of the animals were duly transported to southern Alberta, where some of them were eventually crossbred with cows in an attempt to make them more amenable to domestication. Most of the bison in commercial production today carry cattle genes from this kind of misguided experiment. So, too, do many of the bison in Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta, where the Wainwright herd—by then 6,700 strong—was transferred during World War ii. The escapees at Elk Island, by contrast, are thought to breed true to their ancestral stock, as 100-percent-pure-and-unadulterated plains bison. (Other sources of pure plains-bison genetics include the herds at Wind Cave and Yellowstone national parks, in South Dakota and Wyoming, respectively, and likely those at Henry Mountains State Park in Utah, Sullys Hill National Game Preserve in North Dakota and Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.) Of all the bison alive today, less than 1.5 percent are the Real Deal from a genetic point of view, and it is more by good luck than good management that we have any at all.
If there is a moral to this story, it is that prairie conservation is a high-stakes, high-risk undertaking, with a surprise at every bend and a constant call for new strategies and alliances. Plains bison would not have survived the last century without human help, however bumbling and misguided that “help” has sometimes been. The fact that the species exists today is a tribute to a fractious and imperfect collaboration between ranchers and city slickers, individuals and groups, Natives and non-Natives, citizens and civil servants, each group following its own bent—and with a little luck thrown in at critical moments. By engaging the problem from different angles, a diverse coalition of people came up with diverse approaches that, over time, have permitted them to confront a series of unexpected challenges. Just as an ecosystem relies on the interplay among species, so conservation depends on the interplay among people, with all their differences.
These days, the bigwigs in bison conservation are beginning to dream about boosting the recovery effort into a whole new dimension. In their minds’ eyes, they can already envisage several herds of pure plains bison, each at least a thousand animals strong, roaming over wide vistas of windswept grassland. (Canadian Forces Base Suffield in Alberta, Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana, and the Pine Ridge region of South Dakota and Nebraska are among the locations that have featured in these speculations.) Ideally, these populations would be free not only of cattle genes but also of cattle diseases, like anthrax and brucellosis, yet would be subject to a full suite of predators— perhaps grizzlies and certainly wolves—and other natural, evolutionary pressures. That’s what it will take, the experts tell us, for plains bison to advance from mere survival toward restoration as the living, breathing embodiment of the prairie ecosystem, capable not only of restoring ecological function but also of “inspiring, sust
aining and connecting human cultures.” Is this just a pipedream? Or might this hopeful vision be just the spark we need to bring diverse interests together over a fresh pot of joe and get us talking to one another about the future?
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch . . .
Bison carry the romance of the grasslands on their broad shoulders, so it is perhaps not surprising that they continue to inspire people to take action on their behalf. But many other grassland-adapted species have also benefited from human intervention. One thinks, for example, of the swift fox, a small, bat-eared, rodent-hunting canid that was once widely distributed across the Great Plains but that, after settlement, became severely diminished in both population and range. Thanks in large part to a captive-breeding program initiated by Beryl and Miles Smeeton of the Cochrane Ecological Institute, the species has been reintroduced to an area in southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan from which it had disappeared, and a similar recovery is also under way on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. Meanwhile, reintroductions are in progress on Kainai (Blood tribal) lands in Alberta and at Badlands National Park and the Bad River Ranches in South Dakota. At the same time, a host of agencies and individuals are engaged in the conservation of other organisms, from endangered prairie orchids to native butterflies and bees to rattlesnakes and other reptiles that rely on native prairie.
Blowout penstemon, at risk
Western prairie fringed orchid, at risk
“To keep every cog and wheel,” the American environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold once wrote, “is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” But simply retaining all the pieces of the ecosystem will not be enough in itself; we also need places where the cogs and wheels can be put back together. To ensure their long-term survival, grassland species need wild grasslands—broad expanses of native prairie that, through a natural process of disturbance and renewal, are able to maintain a living mosaic of habitats for a full complement of birds and animals. Despite all the historic losses, large, areas of more-or-less natural prairie still exist, especially on the rangelands of the northwestern short-and mixed-grass ecoregions in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Nebraska. To this day, there are at least ten regional landscapes on the northern plains that are dominated, as far as the eye can see, by expanses of native prairie. Several of these areas encompass as much as 4,600 square miles (12,000 square kilometers), larger than either Jasper or Yellowstone national parks, making them of real significance for conservation. With this in mind, the World Wildlife Fund recently identified the northern plains as a “biologically outstanding” habitat and one of its Global 200 targets for biodiversity conservation. Opportunities for large-scale conservation on the southern plains are also coming into focus.
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