ODE TO THE GRASSLANDS

Our national cathedral of space, wind, and sky...

Those who know me know that I have always self-described as a prairie rat. I fell in love with the plains and prairies the first time I beheld their vastness, and since that moment they have been the only place my soul has ever unfurled to its true size.

So in honor of National Grasslands Week, here’s a short essay about my absolute favorite place on earth. I penned it a few years back on a lark while sitting on my back porch listening to summer birds and dreaming of autumn birds.

I reworked it for publication, then reworked it again a few weeks ago to include it in a little writing project I’m slowly chipping away at. If the prairie moves your heart as much as it does mine, I hope you like it.

As I write these words I — like many other upland hunters — am dreaming of fall.

It is still summer, but the tug of autumn restlessness is upon me. Ancient gods will soon be stirring, spurred by the rustle of wind through turning leaves and the sound of summer birdsong fading into past.

I sit here, drinking coffee and writing on my back porch as hummingbirds drink at the feeder. I listen to the high-pitched calls of Mississippi kites soaring above. In a couple months they’ll feel that tug as well and be gone, riding the ancestral slipstream currents to elsewhere.

As will I.

I will head north, into the high plains, to hunt native prairie grouse; sharp-tailed grouse and greater prairie-chickens. These birds, these ancient icons of the vast sea of grass and staggering biodiversity that once was — and remains still — the vital, beating heart of the North American continent, enthrall me, and always have.

They are the embodiment of space and light and grass and wind and beautiful emptiness, and their disappearance from much of their historic range makes our world a poorer, less wondrous place.

I may be successful on my hunt, or I may not. The actual taking of birds is immaterial to me. I don’t hunt prairie birds because I want to bag prairie birds. I hunt prairie birds to connect — in some small way — with what they represent. And what they represent is the staggeringly important, yet tragically unheralded environmental soul of our nation.

Grasslands. No matter what you call them; plains, prairie, uplands, savanna, sagebrush steppe; or where they are found, grasslands are our national cathedral of space, wind, and sky.

Yet they have historically suffered the myriad indignities and abuses of our industrialized world virtually without advocacy or protest or concern.

But why? Why are our grassland regions and the amazing diversity they support so devoid of public thought, public concern, public protection?

Perhaps it is the illusion that our grasslands haven’t changed that much. After all, to the casual observer grass is grass, right? If you look out over a landscape that historically was devoid of trees and mountains, and that landscape is still largely devoid of trees and mountains, then what, really, is different?

As it turns out, virtually everything.

Grasslands may look like a monoculture, but in fact they are incredibly diverse ecosystems that support a dizzying array of plant and animal life, each one uniquely suited to and dependent upon the grasslands habitat in which it evolved. 

And if you take away all those little pieces that make up the whole and replace it with just a few pieces of something else, then you lose the whole.

What you are left with is not what it once was.

And we are losing all those little pieces at an astonishing — and accelerating — rate.

By most accounts, North America has lost almost three-quarters of its grasslands and prairies. In just the past 10 years we’ve lost an estimated 53 million acres of grassland habitat in the Great Plains region alone.

Think about that: in the span of a single bird dog’s lifetime, we’ve lost an area the size of Kansas.

According to a landmark 2019 report on the state of grassland birds released by the National Audubon Society, overall grassland bird species have declined by over 40 percent since 1966, and some species have declined even more.

But we haven’t just lost birds, or land, or grass, or places to make memories and watch our dogs run. We’ve also lost a part of who we are.

I’ll give you an example...

I live in Oklahoma, in the middle of the southern plains. I can step outside my back door after a prairie thunderstorm and smell the wet sand-sage wafting in the fresh, rain-scrubbed air. Yet I must travel north to hunt prairie grouse like sharptails and prairie chickens. I assumed it was always this way.

But one day, as I was perusing an old 1941 edition of a pamphlet published by the Oklahoma Game and Fish Department (now called the Department of Wildlife Conservation) that I had found in a bookshop, I read a passage that described a small, but most definitely present-at-one-time population of both sharp-tailed grouse and sage grouse in Oklahoma.

I was floored. Oh, I knew all about Oklahoma prairie chickens, of course.

But I had no idea, no idea at all, that those lonely sagebrush hills where I now follow the dogs in pursuit of my beloved bobwhite quail once held sharptails, and sage grouse, too.

The very birds that I now go 400 miles north to hunt were once here, where I live hard up against the 100th Meridian in northwest Oklahoma’s sand-sage prairie.

Imagine that.

Can a land hold some vestigial memory of what once was but is now gone never to return? I believe so. Our grasslands are at once our most magnificent and tragic place, a region crowded with ghosts that linger on just beyond the conscious periphery of memory. I can feel them all around me whenever I walk across this landscape and imagine what — and who — came before me.

And it's fascinating, in a decidedly bittersweet way, to imagine that in addition to all the indigenous peoples, homesteaders, cowboys, trappers, explorers, bison, wolves, bears, elk, mastodons and everything and everyone else that left an imprint in this swirling dust before me, I now know there are two more ghosts out there walking these plains, two more faint and dimming after-images of what was once a bright and searing now.

Will I ever see sage grouse or sharptails in Oklahoma again? Will they ever contribute to the character of this land, add to its sense of place and history?

Sadly, no. But we have the power to ensure that what still remains will always remain, and perhaps even reclaim some of what was lost. 

We can do it. We know we can because it’s been done before. The North American Wetlands Conservation Act was enacted 30 years ago in response to the exact same alarm bells that are now ringing for our grasslands.

Since its inception in 1989, NAWCA has helped protect almost 30 million acres of wetland habitat. Due to a combination of awareness and programs like NAWCA, wetland bird species have not experienced as steep a decline as grassland birds have.

That’s the power of awareness and action, and that’s what we need for our most imperiled, most overlooked, and most critically important landscape. We need a national, landscape-level initiative to save our grasslands.

Because if we lose the grasslands, we lose everything they represent and everything that depends on them.

And if we lose that, we lose ourselves.