Audubon Center
Splendor in the Grass
At a nature center in the nation’s heartland tallgrass prairie restoration brings exciting rewards.
By Frank Graham Jr./Photography by Michael Forsberg
Biologist Gordon Warrick was at the wheel as we bounced across the tallgrass prairie in a John Deere Trail Gator, a six-wheeled, snub-nosed utility vehicle that submerged us in the prairie as wholly as a swimmer cleaving the sea. Autumn, with its rich reds and yellows and its teeming wildlife, was at full tide. Ahead of our alarming roar, grasshoppers exploded in waves from the vegetation. A vesper sparrow took wing, its white tail feathers flashing like tiny lights. Beetles, dragonflies, even an assassin bug materialized on the Gator’s fenders, and a praying mantis maybe four inches long flew panicky alongside us on bright, lime-colored wings.
Warrick, who is habitat program manager at the Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center 15 miles southwest of Lincoln, Nebraska, the state capital, brought us to a halt near a deeply cleft ravine. His job, in a region that has lost perhaps 98 percent of its tallgrass prairie to farms or concrete, is to help restore the center’s 808 acres to ecological relevance.
“Last spring [2009] I saw four male greater prairie-chickens dancing on that ridge up there,” he said. “We know there are 15 or 20 dancing prairie-chickens on a nearby property, so that means we have a small but active population here.”
Spring Creek’s staff looks to such small evidence of progress for encouragement as its slice of tallgrass land recovers. The prairie-chicken is its signature species. As a New Englander, I know that this species’ eastern race, the heath hen, faded into extinction within my lifetime (in 1932), while the Attwater’s race is gone from Louisiana and critically endangered in Texas. The species itself persists mostly in remnant Midwestern prairies.
We stepped out of the Gator into towering vegetation, sometimes six and more feet high, and marveled at its color and density. I followed Warrick toward the ravine, where he stooped on the edge to examine a small, dark-blue flower. “It’s a downy gentian,” he said, pleasure softening his voice as he gently fingered the blossom. “I was excited last week when I found a single plant in another area, but now look—there’s 12, 14, 15 of them right here. There’s a patch over there, too. This gentian grows only in real prairie—places where there’s been little disturbance—and it opens only in bright sunny weather when the air is full of pollinating insects. On cloudy days it shuts down.”
Some observers liken the tallgrass prairie to a rainforest. In both there’s the impression of prodigality, such a profusion of trees in the one and of grasses and wildflowers in the other, tangling and weighing one another down. But the forest often presents a stolid facade, a monotony of green, a profound silence broken only here and there by a bird’s cry.
A better analogy, I think, is the sea. Even in summer the prairie never gives the impression of quietude. Open to the wind, as here at Spring Creek, it is eternally restless, like the northern ocean. Civilization tends to overwhelm nature’s most compelling music, but not here. An incessant wind rakes the tall, pliable plants, which sway and quiver against their neighbors with a rustle that mimics the song of water in motion. Crickets, grasshoppers, and cicadas supply the rhythmic ground tone.
The sun is a master painter. Whatever the season, it draws out the prairie’s colors, intensifying or muting them depending on the angle of its rays. As summer’s green fades with the onset of cold weather and shorter days, the bluish-purple bloom on the main stem of the dominant big bluestem grass turns wine-red. Other grasses, such as the little bluestem, take on tan, copper, or golden hues.
Natives sometimes call the fall landscape not “grassland” but “daisyland.” This is the time when the composite, or daisy, family seems everywhere and competes with the grasses for altitude. I saw sunflowers 10 feet tall, their purple and yellow and golden flowers dimming the burgundy shades of big bluestem grasses. Splashes of gayfeather, rose or magenta, dazzled me so that momentarily I envied the region’s early settlers, who saw its glory extended to the horizon.
Much of the vegetation comes with bits of prairie history. The compass-plant is just becoming established in the center’s restoration areas. It has big, floppy leaves whose points are naturally aligned toward the north and south, maximizing photosynthesis and, legend has it, 150 years ago helping confused pioneers find their way westward. The plant’s sap is a natural chewing gum that John Madson, a prairie historian and onetime Audubon writer, recalled trying one summer before it had firmed up. “It’s truly the stickiest stuff in all creation,” he wrote, “and I literally had to clean it from my teeth with lighter fluid.”
But bringing back this historical landscape, I was beginning to understand, is going to be a feat almost akin to reviving the woolly mammoth.
Tallgrass prairie is outrageously threatened,” said Marian Langan, director of the Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center, as we stood in front of its education building, its orange and russet outside walls mimicking the autumn hue of little bluestem grass. “It’s the most threatened ecosystem in North America. One or two percent remains. Here in Nebraska, everything we have comes from the prairie soil. But now we’re close to losing a large part of our cultural and natural heritage.”
Langan emphasized that “prairie is process.” It was another way of explaining that the landscape we scanned is one of the most explosively dynamic of ecosystems, a force she and her staff are putting to work in restoring prairie. Renewal isn’t simply a matter of eliminating invasives and planting native species, but one step in that direction.
“If the land hasn’t been plowed,” Langan went on, “and there are enough grasses and wildflowers still there, it’s a matter of bringing back the processes. With some burning and managed grazing, native plants will return with natural cycles. Their tenacity is incredible. We’ve had 11 years of restoration, though we still see plants appear that we had no idea were here. Just up that ridge, the pretty little white orchids called nodding ladies’ tresses bloomed last fall. It’s the first time we’ve seen them."
The little orchids had been hanging in there all along, just waiting for conditions to be right.
Let’s define what prairie consists of. The word itself comes from the French, meaning meadow. Put “tallgrass” in front of it and you find a deceptively complex natural environment. Three types of prairie extend from west to east across the middle of our continent: shortgrass, standing directly in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains and thus the driest of the three; mixed-grass, exposed to a little more moisture and together with shortgrass composing the Great Plains; and tallgrass, originally covering about 142 million acres in a thin strip from Manitoba through Texas.
Topography is not as important to the formation of this system as soils and climate. Spreading over much of what is now the north-central states thousands of years ago, the glaciers created a physical legacy in the modern prairie. Glacial till, in which clay mingles with rock debris, remained from the crushing advance and retreat of mile-thick ice. This mineral component further mixed with an almost mystical substance called loess (pronounced “luss” by prairie people). Loess is a kind of rock flour blown widely by the wind and heaped in places to depths of perhaps a hundred feet, giving the soil lightness and permeability. Into this post-glacial cover fell seeds of grasses and other non-woody plants that rooted, flowered, and decayed, producing the rich organic soil in which the prairie took on its unique character.
Such was the landscape that waves of pioneers encountered as they left the forested country of the Atlantic states and crossed the Alleghenies at the beginning of the 19th century. Prairie grasses, whose height was said to obscure even a man on horseback, astonished them. The dominant species, sometimes 10 feet tall, was called big bluestem because of the blue-green tint of its stem in early summer, though later it takes on a burgundy hue. Its roots force their way as much as seven feet below the surface, while the rootlets form a dense, almost impenetrable tangle.
Wind and color mingled to lend an enchantment to this tree-scarce land. Willa Cather, America’s first great woman novelist, grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, about 150 miles from Spring Creek, in the 1880s. “As I looked about me,” she wrote years later in her novel My Antonia, “the red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”
But of greater concern to pioneers than aesthetics was their survival among frontier life’s realities: bitter cold, drought, fierce grassland fires, loneliness. The one certainty in their existence was that wherever big bluestem grew, the corn crop would flourish. So big bluestem never had a chance. Once industry began turning out the tough, sharp plows that sliced through root tangles in prairie sod, tallgrass went the way of the bison. Every-thing the pioneers planted in its place prospered. The prairie states became the “breadbasket,” eventually supplying America’s (and much of the world’s) corn, wheat, and soybeans.
As John Madson pointed out in his 1982 book, Where the Sky Began, this was some of the richest soils ever known. “The energies of our other black fuels, coal and oil,” he wrote, “are rather modest, short-term sources of power when compared to the great black loams of the American midlands.”
Each of eastern Nebraska’s tallgrass plots stands today almost in splendid isolation; the rich loam enticed wave upon wave of settlers to cultivate whatever virgin land wasn’t needed for roads and buildings. Here and there, however, overmuch clay or glacial till in the soil rendered it more desirable for grazing cattle than plowing for corn. Such was the case at Spring Creek Prairie. The plow seldom touched it.
By the early 1970s some Nebraskans sensed that much of their prairie heritage was slipping away. “A group here in Lincoln got together and founded the Wachiska Audubon Society,” Tim Knott, a longtime volunteer and a former chapter president, told me on a recent visit to the area. “The members were looking for a project, and they settled on prairie preservation as one of them. My friend Ernie Rousek and I began spending our weekends driving around the area, scouting hayfields and pastures for signs of prairie wildflowers. We looked for the creamy-yellow blossoms of plains wild indigo, the bright yellows of prairie ragwort, and the white or pinkish prairie phlox. They’re indicator species, telling us the land hadn’t been plowed.”
When these tireless hunters of prairie remnants spotted such telltale signs, they followed up with visits to the landowners and located people interested in the future preservation of their property. Over the years the Wachiska chapter members saved a couple of dozen small plots (perhaps 20, 30, or 40 acres, some larger) of tallgrass prairie. They secured them mostly by conservation easements but also by direct purchase of the land with the help of funds from the Nebraska Environmental Trust. Using targeted burning and other techniques, they restored these properties more or less to true prairie.
“We knew about Spring Creek Prairie,” Knott told me. “In the late 1990s one of our chapter members heard it was for sale. So we got in touch with the owner—a woman named Kathie O’Brien. Her family had owned the land for about a century, and she said she would like to see it go to a conservation organization.”
O’Brien, a gifted horsewoman, had raised cattle on her property, but her chief interest was competing on the rodeo and barrel racing circuits throughout the West. In retirement, she wanted to move to Oklahoma. When Wachiska chapter members described the property to Dave Sands, then National Audubon’s state director, he agreed to help raise more than a million dollars to meet the purchase price for O’Brien’s 600-plus acres of land and buildings. (Subsequent purchases have brought the total to 808 acres.) A bank loan secured the property, then contributions from generous individuals and a grant from the Nebraska Environmental Trust paid off the loan.
Marian Langan became Spring Creek Prairie’s director in 2001. After growing up just a couple of hours north of Lincoln, she set out on a career in nursing. But her increasing interest in biology drew her to the University of Nebraska, where she completed her studies.
“For the first few years we had our office in what had been Kathie O’Brien’s home,” Langan said. “There was an old falling-down barn and some outbuildings and watering places here. That first spring we just planted rye to loosen and break up the soil, which had been compacted all those years that the place had been a ranch. Later we burned to get rid of invasive plants, and now we lease plots to local ranchers to let their cattle graze the land lightly. The sunflowers came on strong at first, and it was just a big weed patch. Now the native grasses are coming back in.”
The old O’Brien ranch house cramped the staff. On rainy days, too, there was little room for the children who came for field trips from schools in Lincoln and the surrounding area. The $1.3 million needed for a new building was met by a committee of local volunteers that obtained federal funding through HUD, state funding through the Nebraska Environmental Trust, and the rest through private donors.
Economy and efficiency dictated the manner of construction. Wheat straw and the baled hay from prairie flora provide 14 inches of insulation between the walls. Much of the other materials and furniture came from recycled or secondhand items: salvaged wood for construction, for instance, and plastic milk jugs recycled into picnic tables (4,000 jugs each), benches, and curb stops. Langan wanted to set an example for the public, showing how to go green on the cheap.
While a stickler for sustainability, she adopts a less doctrinaire approach to environmental education. “A lot of places are heavy on the knowledge paradigm,” she told me. “They have to put a name to everything. But it’s important to accept that a part of the 10,000 visitors here each year just don’t care about biology. Some may want the excitement of finding a new bird here, but others come simply for quiet or solace.”
About 3,500 children and their parents come annually for Spring Creek’s programs. “I really look on the kids who visit here as my peers,” the center’s education coordinator, Deborah Hauswald, said to me as she was slipping a large orb-weaving spider into a terrarium, where she hoped it would spin a web. “I just bring them to the prairie and then I get out of the way. They do the exploring and then we talk about what they see, and we try to figure out what is going on out there.”
A little girl, returning to the education building after an hour and a half on the prairie with her fourth-grade class, made Hauswald’s day. “I thought I was afraid of bugs,” the child said with satisfaction. “But I’m not!”
Before leaving Spring Creek Prairie, I followed Marian Langan up a winding trail toward one of the ridges. She stopped where another trail crossed ours. “The depression in the track going almost straight down from the ridge here is the remnant of the ruts left by wagons that went through in the 1860s,” she explained. “They carried freight along the Nebraska City–Fort Kearney Cutoff to the Oregon Trail. Probably the drivers wanted to camp near Spring Creek.”
Elsewhere in the region, farms and towns destroyed the historical record. But here the land was never plowed, and the ruts, etched in the soil as wagon drivers braked coming down the steep slope toward water, endured along with remnants of the prairie itself. Another sign of how men and women have used this land confronted us farther up the ridge. Inside a crude, split-rail fence is a monument—a cross, lovingly put together from a couple of dozen horseshoes painted white, marking the final resting place of Kathie O’Brien’s championship horse, Jube.
Both history and beauty have survived here. Around us the tallgrass prairie was in full autumn glory, all russets and faded yellows, “running” in the wind as it had on a long-ago day during Willa Cather’s girlhood. And that’s what Spring Creek is all about.
To learn more about the Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center, click here.
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