Category: outdoors-top

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Roaming the Tall Grass

  • First pasque flower bloom pushing through the grass in Deuel County.
  • Inside a pasque flower.
  • Wilson’s snipe near Jacobson Fen.
  • Pasque flower in Deuel County.
  • Pasque flower in Deuel County.
  • Prairie smoke near Jacobsen Fen.
  • Small white lady’s-slipper orchid that seemed to be half nibbled off at Jacobsen Fen.
  • A small blue butterfly at Aurora Prairie Preserve near Brookings.
  • Sandhill crane with two chicks in the prairie hills of Grant County.
  • Regal fritillary on a blazing star at Aurora Prairie Preserve.
  • Blue-eyed grass near Jacobson Fen.
  • Wood lily in the Coteau Hills of Deuel County.
  • Green orchid at Jacobsen Fen.
  • Wild strawberry at 7-Mile Fen in rural Deuel County.
  • Great Plains ladies’-tresses orchid photographed at the Sioux Prairie Preserve.
  • Fawn in tall grass along with black-eyed Susan in bloom.
  • Bumblebee working for a blue lobelia’s nectar.
  • Just over the state line in Blue Mound State Park, the very rare western prairie fringed orchid blooms in July.
  • Touch the Sky Prairie near Blue Mound State Park is another tall grass haven.
  • Bottle gentian at sunset photographed in the Sioux Prairie Preserve.
  • Monarch on blazing star near Aurora Prairie Preserve.
  • Hard to find late season blooming downy gentian at the Sioux Prairie Preserve.
  • Late season little bluestem backlit by the setting sun.
  • A tall grass sunset silhouette taken at Makoce Washte Prairie Preserve near Wall Lake.

By Christian Begeman

The May/June 2026 issue of South Dakota Magazine features a story on the few tall grass prairie remnants remaining east of the Missouri River. When I was asked to help illustrate the story, I was surprised by how many photos I have taken in and around these places.

I grew up in short and mixed grass country along the Dewey and Ziebach county line west of the Missouri. Only in wet areas or in wet years did the grass get so high that you couldn’t see where your boot fell, which is an important thing in rattlesnake country. When I first began exploring the tall grass preserves with camera in hand, it was unnerving to not be able to see the ground below … and whatever sinister critters may be lurking. Turns out plenty of creatures call the tall grass home. My favorite are the colorful and elusive butterflies. From monarchs to tiny eastern-tailed blues, I have been known to spend hours on the trail seeking that perfect close-up shot.

I also discovered the beauty of the grass itself when peering through my macro lens at blooming sideoats grama florets at the Sioux Prairie Preserve near Colman. Big bluestem, cordgrass and many other tall grass regulars all flower during the summer and photographing them can be nearly impossible due to the wind that we regularly endure on the Northern Plains. To be honest though, a good breeze is welcome in that it keeps the gnats and mosquitos mostly at bay. Yep, it’s not all butterflies and flowers in tall grass country. Myriads of insects live there and a good breeze plus insect repellent is a must when exploring.

After gathering photos for the article, I was asked to gather again for a flyer promoting the new prairie grass area at Good Earth State Park. As I waded back into the archives, I noticed the crescendo of forays into tall grass preserves started slowly about 10 years ago and reached full throat when I was challenged to find and photograph the elusive green orchid. Until that point, I thought wild orchids only grew in exotic tropic locales. Thankfully, I was wrong. South Dakota is home to over 20 orchid species depending on who’s counting. The tall grass preserves are a haven for these beauties and their allies, all of which are a paradise for a camera guy with a macro lens.

Earlier this month, I was out finding the season’s first pasque flowers in the Coteau Hills overlooking Jacobson Fen in Deuel County. As I got up close to frame a few fuzzy portraits of our state flower, I got the idea to share these new photos along with a few other tall grass favorites I had gathered but did not make the final printed story. I hope they convey the sense of wonder and enjoyment I get while out roaming the tall grass remnants.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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Scoping the Missouri

By Cora Van Olson

Members of the South Dakota Ornithologists Union look for birds at Union Grove State Park between Beresford and Elk Point.

Roger Dietrich was scoping along the shore of Lake Yankton when a Rapid City woman approached him with a question about the tiny Ross’s gull, which had been sighted in the area.

“I’ve gone to Alaska twice and I didn’t see the bird there,” she said.”Is it still around?”

Dietrich pointed to a gull, sitting on ice in the middle of the lake.

The Missouri River is a bird-watching paradise. Hundreds of species of ducks, geese, gulls, loons and other birds congregate in parks, woodlands and farm fields that border its 443-mile corridor. But it still helps to know for what you’re looking.

Every habitat attracts different birds, says David Swanson, professor of biology at the University of South Dakota and author of Birder’s Guide to South Dakota, and habitats vary dramatically along the Missouri as it winds from Nebraska to North Dakota.

Following is a guide, from south to north, of habitat patches and the surprises that await birdwatchers, both the serious birders looking for the rarest”lifer” bird and those who are happy spotting sparrows and swallows.

The Adams Nature Preserve attracts wading birds such as blue herons.

Adams Nature Preserve

Southeastern South Dakota

The Adams Homestead and Nature Preserve near North Sioux City includes many trails.”It has a variety of habitats,” Swanson says.”It has an extensive cottonwood forest that borders the river, and there’s also a little lake called Mud Lake that’s attractive to waterfowl. The ring of trees surrounding Mud Lake can be good for woodland birds, too.”

Mud Lake is approximately a quarter mile from the Adams Homestead parking lot, so a brief hike is required to access it. Wooden observation blinds lie along the trail with a view of the lake.

“The other habitat at the park is a restored open prairie,” he says.”It’s one of the few sites in the southeastern part of the state where you can find Eastern meadowlarks. The common meadowlark in South Dakota is the Western meadowlark, but the Eastern meadowlark is expanding its range in the southeastern part of the state and Adams Homestead is one of the places where you can find those.”

Since first being sighted in 2017 by Swanson and his ornithology students, the Eastern meadowlark has made regular appearances in the open-prairie habitat, often with multiple birds singing among the scattered trees.

“I wasn’t aware at the time that Eastern meadowlarks had started to expand their range, and I heard these Eastern meadowlarks calling,” Swanson says.”I go, ‘That is very unusual.’ We kept walking and saw them and everybody in the ornithology class got to see me geek out over it.”

Though birdwatching at the Adams Homestead is enjoyable year-round, it’s best in spring, summer and fall.”Mostly, it’s hiking the trails during migration and seeing a variety of birds at that time,” Swanson says.”It’s lots of warblers and sparrows, so the migration periods are late April to mid-May. Then in the fall, from mid-to-late August into about mid-September is probably the peak for warblers and vireos, some of which migrate all the way down to Central and South America.”

Sparrows that migrate to the southern U.S. and Mexico slightly later in the year can typically be seen at the Adams Homestead from mid-September to mid-October. Along the river and at the lake, birdwatchers encounter ducks and geese, as well as wading birds like herons and egrets.

“In the cottonwood forest, there are Eastern whippoorwills,” Swanson says.”Those are birds that don’t really get too much out of the southeastern part of the state. Of course, they’re nocturnal, so they don’t start calling until it starts to get dark.”

Least terns can be found on sandbars below Gavins Point Dam.

Gavins Point Dam

West of Yankton

Gavins Point Dam, the southernmost project on the Missouri’s system of six dams, is surrounded by unique bird habitats.

During the summer, hundreds of American white pelicans can sometimes be seen near the dam, while on the river itself, there are piping plovers, still considered a threatened species in most of the U.S., and the least tern, North America’s tiniest tern, often seen flying low over the river and hovering before plunging for prey.

“One of the reasons I like birding is the idea that it would be so cool to fly, and least terns are just the best flyers,” says Roger Dietrich, a local authority on ornithology.”They’ll fly and they’ll see a minnow, and then they dive straight down in the water — and splash!”

In winter, the 2-mile-long earthen dam creates an unusual condition for birds and birders.”Some years, when it doesn’t freeze, like lately, there’s been lots of open water above the dam,” Dietrich says.”Some years, we get lucky and even the Lewis and Clark Marina doesn’t freeze over real early. So, that’s a popular spot where some grebes and loons will stop.”

Black scoters, surf scoters, white-winged scoters and long-tail ducks, which are mainly ocean birds, are known to visit the lake and river in winter.

“I tell people from other places that we have those birds here and they’re just not believing it, because they don’t think of the center of the United States as a place where these birds would show up,” Dietrich says.”And when I say they show up every year, usually, for a fairly long period of time, they just can’t believe that we’re so lucky.”

The common loon migrates through the area, as well as a number of gulls — including Sabine’s gulls, kittiwakes, black-legged kittiwakes and even the Ross’s gull, which is associated with the remote arctic. Crest Road, which passes over the dam, is a good place to observe such birds. It requires no special pass or permit.

“Scan for the birds with binoculars or a spotting scope and chances are, you’ll find something different,” Dietrich says.”Sometimes there are huge flocks, and you can spend hours just scoping the birds there,” he says.”So, if you see somebody there with their scope out or binoculars, stop and ask them what they’re seeing. I’d say 99 percent of the people will be glad to point things out to you, and maybe even let you look through their scope to see what they’re seeing.”

Several snowy owls hung out along the dam road a few years ago.”They were feeding on the flocks of coots that were there.” Wintertime also brings large flocks of lesser scaup, which birdwatchers will scan for specimens of greater scaup, a polar bird that tends to prefer saltwater and is rarely seen inland, Dietrich says.

“It’s the same with the big flocks of common goldeneye,” he says.”People try to scope out the Barrow’s goldeneye, which is another species. It’s more of a West Coast bird, but once in a while, we’ll get one here — always a highlight.”

Bald eagles frequent Gavins Point Dam and some now nest year-round in the tall cottonwoods that border the Missouri.”They’re used to a lot of people around and some of the trees they perch in are right along the local roads,” Dietrich says.”You can see them in action, swooping down and picking up fish. I’ve seen eight or nine at a time on the ice up above the dam, eating the dead snow geese they’ve picked off.”

A pair of Barrow’s Goldeneyes at Fort Randall.

Fort Randall

Pickstown

Fort Randall Dam also hosts a large congregation of bald eagles. Below the dam is the Karl E. Mundt National Wildlife Refuge, which provides habitat for the eagles.

Kelly Preheim, a kindergarten teacher in Armour and a well-known local birding enthusiast, especially likes the wooded area around the Fort Randall Dam.”We’re mostly on agricultural grassland in southeastern South Dakota,” she says.”But the dams have a lot of woodland, forested areas, and I enjoy walking on the trails.”

She found 71 bird species on a recent camping trip to Pickstown.”In the morning, oh my goodness, the singing,” she recalls.”My husband’s like, ‘I can’t get any sleep. It’s so loud here!'”

A hike to the tailrace, the channel below the dam that carries water away, will often be rewarded.”Fish that go through the dam come out somewhat stunned in the tailrace,” Preheim says.”Then, all these birds, like gulls and eagles and certain ducks, eat those fish.”

Like nearby Gavins Point, Fort Randall Dam is also home to many types of waterfowl in autumn and winter.”There are a lot of different ducks on the scene, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of different ducks there at a time,” Preheim says.”I saw a brown pelican one time. That’s actually an ocean bird.”

Other surprise visitors at Fort Randall include a yellow-billed loon, typically associated with Alaska and America’s western coast, and a great black-backed gull, which is an Atlantic coastal bird, Preheim says.

Scarlet tanagers are often found in South Dakota but summer tanagers, a rare visitor, might also be seen around Fort Randall.

Pelicans near Big Bend.

Big Bend Dam

Fort Thompson

The best birdwatching at South Dakota’s northernmost dams — Big Bend and Oahe — occurs from April through May and from September to November, according to lifelong birdwatcher Ricky Olson, who lives at Fort Pierre.

Big Bend has fewer access roads and trail amenities than Oahe and the other dams, but it has its own charms. Ospreys nest below the dam and brown pelicans have been spotted.

“Once in a while, in the wintertime, you get a Brant goose at Big Bend,” a seacoast bird.”I run down to Big Bend at least every two weeks in the winter to see what’s there,” Olson says.

Big Bend also attracts smaller goose species, including snow geese and white-fronted geese, both of which are common to the area.”In the fall, it’s neater to go to Big Bend,” Olson says.”Also, the shad and minnow species will be in the shallows then, and you’ll get all kinds of cormorants and pelicans and hundreds of gulls in these frenzies where they’re all feeding, and the gulls are trying to steal from everybody.”

Canada geese along the Missouri River.

Oahe Dam

Central South Dakota

Ring-billed gulls, herring gulls and California gulls may be sighted at Oahe, as well as the arctic tern, a mega-find for birders.

A spectacle occurs during flooding when Oahe Dam’s hydraulic turbines are running.”It’s a feeding frenzy. You get thousands of gulls, maybe 20,000, below the tailrace in a half-mile stretch,” Olson says.”It’s like a snowstorm. Thousands of people come to watch the ‘gull snowfall.'”

Oahe also has cliff-dwellers.”In the sand layers in the cliffs, in the holes, there are barn owls nesting,” Olson says.”They dig their own holes, and often, they’re near where colonies of bank swallows have dug holes.”

In autumn, Sabine’s gull may be spotted.”It’s very pretty. It’s black and white with half a diamond on the wing,” Olson says.”We also get Bonapartes and Little gulls, which is a little gull, and we get some of the big ones. Once in a great while we get the great black-back, which is the biggest gull.”

Gulls breed on a few islands along Oahe, Olson says.”There are only a few places in South Dakota where that happens.”

Another rare visitor to Oahe, among the sea ducks like the scoters and the long tail duck, is the occasional coastal harlequin duck in the tailrace.

“We get loons,” Olson says.”Sometimes we get the Pacific or the yellow-billed or red-throated loon, which are rare for our state.”

Further north on Oahe, retired biology teacher Stan Mack says opportunities are available even in Mobridge’s city limits.”There’s a walking trail along the south side of town. Just follow Main Street to the river and walk west and you’ll see the ducks and geese and gulls that sit on the water.”

Mack says Indian Creek (east of Mobridge) and Indian Memorial (across the river to the west) offer trails and habitat.

Mack doesn’t walk well enough to explore like he once did, but the birds will come to him.”I’m doing a feeder watch for Cornell University. Right now, I’m looking at a collared dove — we never saw them before — and I see about 16 more picking up seeds on the ground.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Finding the Wilds of Winter

By Christian Begeman

Spotting winter wildlife on the Northern Plains can sometimes seem impossible. Frigid temperatures, relentless wind, snow and ice usually keep critters out of sight during the diminished daylight hours. When I was in junior high, I spent a good chunk of an afternoon sitting in what I thought was a pretty good hiding spot overlooking a stock dam bordered by a chokecherry thicket. A recently deceased cottontail was on the edge of the ice, placed as a lure. I think I hoped a hungry coyote or maybe even a hawk or eagle would arrive. Nothing did. All I heard was the wind though the thicket and all I saw was gray and sullen clouds overhead.

I’m not sure when I figured out that the golden hour was when wildlife is most on the move. Maybe it was deer hunting with my brother or simply noticing more things after I shut the tractor down for the day. This tip generally still holds true when I’m out looking for wildlife with my camera. Not only are there more opportunities to see wildlife, but the golden hour provides beautiful light. Win-win.

It has been my family’s custom to find time to survey the countryside when we get together for the winter holidays. To this day, I keep this tradition alive. Sometimes I’m with my dad, sometimes with brothers and nephews and sometimes it is just me and my camera. This year, I spent three days looking for wildlife in Badlands National Park, Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park between Christmas and New Year’s Day. And yes, late afternoon and early morning proved to be the most fruitful times.

I arrived in the Badlands around 3 p.m. on December 27. This may seem like mid-afternoon, but winter light is short-lived and angled low and lovely, which is a photographer’s delight. At 3:20 a great-horned owl was out on a ridge waking itself up in the sunlight. About a half hour later I spotted a golden eagle riding updrafts near the Sage Creek Wilderness Road. After photographing a few solitary bison bulls, I headed west and got to Custer State Park with very little light left on the western horizon.

Overnight, a skiff of snow fell in the Southern Hills and there was frost on the grass as I headed to a favorite spot along Highland Ridge Road in northern Wind Cave National Park before sunrise. There were elk below the ridge and bison on the horizon as the sun appeared with warm tones even though the temperatures were well below freezing. As the day lengthened the light brightened, the wind increased and the frost fell to the ground. After driving a few of my favorite routes, I ended up calling it day fairly early. I repeated this routine for the next few days, and it was glorious. Here are some of my favorite photos from that vacation. I’m already counting down the days for another foray or three into South Dakota’s winter wilds.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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If Our Trees Could Talk

Story by John Andrews

Photos by Paul Schiller

A pair of oak trees known as the Twin Oaks are among the trees chronicled in Paul DeJong’s book on the Sioux Falls urban forest.

“Have you been here before?” asks Paul DeJong as we sit around a small conference table inside Touchmark at All Saints, a senior living community in one of Sioux Falls’ most historic buildings — the former All Saints School. The massive, four-story granite building in the heart of the city was finished in 1884 under the direction of William Hobart Hare, the first Episcopal bishop of South Dakota. The all-girls boarding school was designed to serve the daughters of missionaries who were serving the sparsely populated Dakota prairies.

But that’s not where this conversation is heading.”Some of the most majestic trees in the city are right outside,” DeJong says.”There’s a catalpa and a ginkgo tree on this property that were probably planted in the late 1800s or early 1900s.”

It stands to reason that the trees would be at least as old as the building itself, and of course DeJong would notice them. He worked at Landscape Garden Centers for more than 30 years, first as an employee and then its owner. He’s had a hand in selecting trees for nearly every neighborhood in Sioux Falls, an accomplishment made even more impressive considering the city’s rapid growth.

He seems to know every inch of soil beneath South Dakota’s sprawling metropolis. His quick and encyclopedic knowledge of trees allows him to tell you exactly why an American sycamore would thrive in one neighborhood but not another.

The book publishing team includes (from left) Jeremy Brown, Paul Schiller, Paul DeJong, Heather Kittelson and Mike Cooper.

The urban forest of Sioux Falls became his passion, and now, with help from friends, he’s finishing a book that he hopes will inspire future generations to appreciate the diversity of the city’s arbor culture. If Our Trees Could Talk: Discovering the Urban Forest of Sioux Falls is a 172-page coffee table book, completed in collaboration with the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, that traces the development of several historic Sioux Falls neighborhoods and the trees that give them life and character.

The idea for a book has been in the back of DeJong’s mind for at least 10 years, but it’s coming to fruition at perhaps the perfect moment. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at age 53. He retired from ownership at Landscape Garden Centers in 2018, though he continued to work part-time until 2022. Eventually, he sold his home and moved to Touchmark.

The urgency of such a diagnosis led to the creation of a team to help make the book a reality. Heather Kittelson is the self-described”connector” of the team. She met DeJong in March of 2023, while both served on the board of directors for the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, a 155-acre greenspace tucked next to the Big Sioux River just off Highway 42 on the east side of the city. As she learned about DeJong’s health challenges (which included a serious car accident and a bite from a brown recluse spider earlier in life), she was inspired by his drive to persevere.

DeJong was equally impressed by Kittelson’s energy and positive attitude. She subsequently invited him to be a guest on her podcast called”Fortitude,” in which she interviews people who have overcome adversity. DeJong’s is among the most listened-to episodes.

After the podcast, Kittelson asked DeJong if he had any dreams he would like to see fulfilled. The answer was a book about the trees of Sioux Falls.”It really was a dream,” she says.”He just needed someone to help execute it. I love being resourceful and a connector, and I wanted to see Paul’s dream come to fruition.”

The rest of the team quickly formed. They include Mike Cooper, the arboretum’s executive director and a retired city planner for Sioux Falls; Jeremy Brown, the head of Throne Publishing; and well-known regional photographer Paul Schiller. Cooper and DeJong drove many miles around Sioux Falls, identifying neighborhoods and trees, and Schiller captured them throughout the year.

McKennan Park in spring.

DeJong wants the book to be an educational tool and hopes it will direct more attention to the arboretum. It could also be the culmination of a life devoted to the outdoors.

DeJong grew up on a farm between Sheldon and Hospers, Iowa. He got an associate degree in business and marketing from Northwest Iowa Community College and then headed to Sioux Falls, looking for opportunity. He stopped by Lakeland Nursery and noticed they were hiring.”Having grown up on the farm, I had a general knowledge of trees,” DeJong says.”They were taking applications and I needed money fast, so they said I could start working there the next day. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and in a couple weeks’ time I had found my passion working with trees, landscaping and outdoor living areas. You’re enhancing everybody’s opportunity to spend more time outdoors with their families as opposed to sitting in the house.”

He threw himself into the work, getting to know our native and non-native species and talking with both residential and commercial customers about the trees they wanted and the trees they needed — which were not always the same thing. DeJong is a huge advocate for tree diversity, and that can be challenging in South Dakota.”We can beat up on ourselves for not diversifying, but we are a prairie state with a mix of prairie grasses, so we’re limited in what species thrive here,” he says.”Trees weren’t necessarily by God’s hand meant to grow in South Dakota.”

An American larch in McKennan Park.

When settlers first arrived in Dakota, they would have seen a nearly treeless landscape, other than the occasional willow, elm, ash, box elder and the cottonwoods growing in the river valleys.”Cottonwoods are so towering and large, and they’ll grow in wet, boggy areas,” DeJong says.”They could be several miles away and see these stands of cottonwood trees in the distance and know that there was likely water nearby.”

As railroads moved into Dakota, it became easier for those settlers from Europe or bigger eastern cities to order the trees they knew and loved. Maybe that’s how the catalpa and ginkgo trees ended up in DeJong’s new backyard.”Ginkgos are a very slow growing tree, but this one’s probably 80 feet tall,” he says.”They originated in China and are disease and pest resistant. They’re actually prehistoric trees. They’ve got fan-shaped leaves, very distinctive. The catalpa has a large plate sized leaf. It largely remains silent except one week in June when it gets a hydrangea-like flower. That’s its one week of glory for the year.”

One of DeJong’s favorite neighborhoods is McKennan Park, which is filled with historic homes and majestic trees. Among them is a big bur oak planted after World War I to honor the returning soldiers. It’s also home to the largest silver maple in the state and a stand of American larch.”When I was a kid, they quite often planted windbreaks with American larch,” DeJong says.”I didn’t realize what they were at the time. In the winter all the needles were gone, so I thought they were dead. But they come back in the spring and turn a brilliant golden color in the fall. Then in the winter they go dormant again. They’re mysterious or haunted looking trees.”

The American sycamore in McKennan Park is an example of being in the right place.”There are microclimates in Sioux Falls, like McKennan Park and the Cathedral District,” he says.”There’s good soil; it’s not only cold hardiness. You get on the edge of town where the winds are more abrasive, you’ve got about two inches of black dirt and the rest is excavation clay, and you’re more limited in what species you can use. I would never recommend an American sycamore anywhere other than the core area of the city.”

Other trees stand out for different reasons, such as a concolor fir in the Riverview Heights district north of the Veterans Administration hospital.”I would say it’s 100 feet tall. The first time I viewed that tree, a deer and a turkey came running out at the same time. I bet the bottom branches spread 40 to 50 feet across.”

A stately cottonwood at 57th and Minnesota.

A cottonwood tree near Covell Lake is notable because its lowest branch is probably 50 feet off the ground. Another at the corner of 57th Street and Minnesota Avenue has been growing for more than 100 years and towers over other neighborhood trees. Black locusts in the Cathedral District shine in spring, when they blossom with droopy, lilac-colored flowers.

A stand of hackberries along South Cliff Avenue accents a neighborhood that began as a place for the city’s more affluent citizens to build second homes. A blue beech in the Maplewood District is rare for South Dakota.”It has very smooth bark and looks like an elephant’s leg because it flares out at the bottom. The smooth bark prevents insect infestation. If a tree has rough bark, it’s easier for insects to burrow into it, but the blue beech evolved over time. Trees are constantly under evolution. They’re just like human beings; they have to adapt.”

Everyone involved sees the book as a starting point that can lead to continuing education in K-12 classrooms and at the arboretum. DeJong envisions an”urban forest university” that encourages young people to get outdoors and learn about the trees surrounding them — not just because they might be pleasant to look at but because of their benefits for the environment and our health.”I spent a fair amount of time recovering from surgical procedures at the Mayo Clinic. I remember going through the gardens once I was able to get outside. The trees seemed to soothe my physical pain. It is true that trees reduce stress and promote physical and mental healing.”

Working with DeJong on the book has been rewarding for Cooper and Kittelson.”We’re all so busy going through life that we tend to forget how beautiful our surroundings are,” Kittelson says.”Paul has helped me to stop and be present and take in what’s around me.”

May we all slow down and learn to appreciate both the forest and the trees.

Editor’s Note: DeJong’s book is available from the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum in Sioux Falls. This story is revised from the March/April 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Grassland Delight

By Christian Begeman

“Here was the endless prairie, so rich in its blessings of fertility, but also full of great loneliness–a form of freedom which curiously affected the minds of strangers, especially those to whom the Lord had given a sad heart.”
‚Äï O.E. R¯lvaag, Giants in the Earth

There aren’t nearly as many places to look out over endless prairies as there were before immigrants arrived. Yet there are still a few places where it can be accomplished right here in South Dakota. From the farmhouse I grew up in, you could drive about 2 miles west over prairie dirt tracks to the rim of the Moreau River breaks and look out over what seemed like a vast wild land of hills, draws, cactus and grass. Thunder Butte hovered in the distance with an unknown number of prairie dogs, rattlesnakes and deer making their living in vastness between. Some years it was green for most of the summer, other years only saw it green for a few weeks in May. Even so, the views affected any and all who laid eyes on it, and especially me.

I saw my first Golden Eagle”out west” as we called it. It made a large wooden fencepost seem tiny as it slowly lifted off to catch the swirling wind. When night rolled in from the east, I heard my first coyotes sing to the evening out west. It wouldn’t be the last I’d hear that lonely song drift in. Rainstorms and thunderclouds seemed to always originate from out west. It wasn’t hard for me to understand why Thunder Butte was so named. This landscape of the open, mixed grass prairie got a hold of me then and I haven’t shaken it since.

From spring to late summer, the magic of the grasslands can often go unseen. The shy wildflowers don’t grow in vast numbers but instead sprinkle the grasslands with decorative color. Butterflies and songbirds are easier to spot in season, but still, you have to be intentional when seeking them.

I have now lived the majority of my life east of the Missouri, and I have come to appreciate the tall grass patches on that side of the state. There is not as much of it to be found since the soil is so conducive to growing corn and other small grains. Even so, when you can find a good patch of tall grass it is worth taking a close look. The hiking is a little harder as the grass is thicker. It took me many years to be comfortable putting my foot down where I could not see the ground. Thankfully prairie rattlers do not abide in tall grass country.

This column is a long look back at the few times I was able to get out and explore our state’s grasslands this past growing season. From Harding to Moody counties and points in between, please enjoy a few postcards from the prairie.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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Living with Lions

By John Andrews

Mountain lions, found from Chile to the Yukon Territory, are the most widely distributed wild, terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. Researchers estimate that between 200 and 300 mountain lions live in the Black Hills, though their secretive nature makes sightings rare in the wild. Photo by Sam Stukel

REPORTS BEGAN COMING into Yankton police at 5:50 on a Monday morning in June of 2004. Two hours later, police and state Game, Fish and Parks Department officials had found a 115-pound mountain lion beneath a camper in a quiet neighborhood just east of the Yankton Middle School. Tranquilizing and relocating the big cat was not an option, so officers shot it in accordance with Game, Fish and Parks policy.

There was still a buzz about the mountain lion when we moved to town a year later. In fact, people talk about it today. Mountain lions live in the Black Hills, 400 miles away. One had never been seen in town. The only previous evidence of a lion nearby was a confirmed footprint found in Yankton County in 2002.

I thought about the excitement of that lion sighting when police congregated in my neighborhood in July of 2020. An officer said a mountain lion had been spotted just a few blocks away — captured on a home security camera sauntering between split-level homes — and was last seen heading east through a cornfield between the airport and my house.

Suddenly alert neighbors stood in driveways, hoping to catch a glimpse of our unusual visitor. I kept watch at the window for a flash of tan moving through the tall green cornstalks. But I think we all knew that the lion had slipped quietly into the country just as quickly as he had appeared.

Mountain lions still show up in Yankton, mostly on game cameras that are monitored by residents living along the forested river bluffs on the south edge of town. None have been shot since the 2004 incident.

Few animals in South Dakota seem to captivate us quite like the mountain lion. Fifteen years ago, Sam Stukel was hunting elk in the Black Hills when he suddenly noticed a young lion about 15 yards away. He captured a shaky video and posted it to YouTube, where the 75-second clip has amassed 232,000 views.”I still get email notifications every time someone comments on it,” says Stukel, who is also a photographer and a fisheries biologist at the Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery west of Yankton.”The variety of critiques is amusing. I’m an idiot for not being more afraid of the cat, or I’m a chicken for being so afraid of the cat. Everyone’s an expert on YouTube.”

Mountain lions are just as divisive offline. People like my Yankton neighbors are eager to someday see one in the wild, while others think one mountain lion is one too many. They are seen as both majestic creatures and vicious predators out to kill pets, livestock and maybe even humans. Reality is somewhere in the middle. Mountain lions lived in South Dakota long before people and have become an important part of our ecosystem. They are our neighbors, so we should get to know them.

*****

Jonathan Jenks and John Kanta are our state’s leading authorities on mountain lions. Jenks, a distinguished professor emeritus of wildlife science at South Dakota State University in Brookings, spent 17 years closely studying mountain lions in the Black Hills. Kanta is a terrestrial section chief for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks based in Rapid City who has devoted nearly all of his 27 years with the agency to mountain lions.

Jenks began his research in 1998 when GF&P noticed an uptick in reports of mountain lion attacks. Livestock and horses on West River ranches and two mule deer within the Rapid City city limits were believed to have been killed by mountain lions. A year before, GF&P had estimated only 15 to 25 mountain lions lived in the Black Hills, but officials wanted to learn more. The agency partnered with SDSU and Jenks and his graduate students began capturing and radio collaring lions to establish a population estimate and learn about their lives, which date back millions of years on the continent.

The lions’ earliest ancestors likely migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas between 8 million and 8.5 million years ago. Mountain lions became recognizable as a distinct species about 400,000 years ago and roamed the continent alongside giant sloths, mammoths, dire wolves and saber-toothed lions.

Scientists believe the climate grew too cold for mountain lion populations to survive during the Pleistocene ice ages, but they later returned from more southern regions. They can be found from the southern tip of Chile to the Yukon Territory, making them the most widely distributed wild, terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere.

As settlers populated the Upper Midwest in the 1800s, mountain lions became targeted as threats to livestock. The animals were hardly mentioned in the reconnaissance ahead of Lt. Col. George Custer’s 1874 expedition into the Black Hills. But the following year, Richard Irving Dodge, who had been with Custer’s men, accompanied geologist Walter Jenney back into the Hills. He noted mountain lion prints around their campsite.”He thought these lions were investigating the camp at night because they are nocturnal,” Jenks says.”They would approach the camp, probably mostly out of curiosity. As a result, Dodge called them cowards,” implying they wouldn’t come out when they could shoot them.

South Dakota State University professor Jonathan Jenks and Steve Griffin of the state Game, Fish and Parks Department (in the foreground) collect information on the age of a mountain lion.

In 1889 the South Dakota legislature placed a bounty on mountain lions, and by 1906 they were nearly extirpated. Sightings were scant for decades. A man named Earl Bedell killed one near the head of Stockade Creek in Wyoming in 1930. Ted Mann, who ranched near Dewey in southwestern Custer County, shot one in the early 1950s. Four were spotted in Wind Cave National Park in 1964 and 1965, and tracks were found west of Custer in 1965 and near Crow Peak in Lawrence County in 1968. No one could be sure if they lived in South Dakota or were transients. By 1978 all bounties were gone, and mountain lions were declared a state threatened species, which garnered legal protection.

That opened the door to recovery. Jenks and other researchers believe that lions from southeastern Wyoming followed northeasterly draws that effectively funneled them into the Hills.”That’s why when we first started studying them, it was easier to capture mountain lions in the southern Black Hills because there were potentially more of them there than in the northern Hills,” Jenks says.”It was right at the beginning of the recolonization of the Black Hills in the late 1990s.”

After a few years of research, Jenks and his team of graduate students estimated that 100 mountain lions lived in the Black Hills — far surpassing the GF&P estimate of 15 to 25 in the late 1990s. The animals were removed from the threatened species list and reclassified as a big game animal.

In 2005, GF&P announced the first experimental mountain lion hunting season with a limit of 12, no more than half female. It resulted in a lawsuit from the Mountain Lion Foundation of California and the Black Hills Mountain Lion Foundation, which sought an injunction to stop the harvest, arguing that there was still not enough known about the local population and that a hunting season could once again lead to regional extinction. A judge in Pierre ruled in favor of the state a week before the season was to open. A mountain lion season has continued every year beginning the day after Christmas and running through April. The season ends earlier if either 60 total mountain lions or 40 females have been harvested.

So began a delicate balance between those fascinated with the presence of mountain lions and those who want to hunt them. Kanta says between 3,000 and 5,000 licenses are sold for every season.”A lot of our mountain lion hunters are very dedicated and love that opportunity,” Kanta says.”I would also offer that there are a good number of folks who feel like this is a magnificent critter and would love that one-in-a-million chance to see a mountain lion out in the wild. They are intrigued by mountain lion tracks in the snow, or just knowing that they are out there.”

As mountain lions re-established themselves in the Black Hills, Jenks’ SDSU team and GF&P researchers like Kanta learned as much as they could. Adult males can be more than 8 feet long and weigh an average of 150 pounds. Adult females are around 6 Ω feet long and weigh 90 pounds. Adult males are generally solitary, while lions seen traveling together are usually a mother and her kittens, which stay together for 12 to 14 months.

Lions are solitary hunters that stalk their prey. They take advantage of thick vegetation or attack from upslope when they need a quick sprint. Lions have low endurance in chases, so targets that can run fast and long will likely escape. Older lions have better success rates because they learn the traits of other wildlife. Their preferred meal is deer, but Jenks learned that they are opportunistic, capturing whatever might be near, including rabbits and porcupines.

A capture crew including Jenks and SDSU graduate student Brian Jansen determines the weight of a male mountain lion in Custer State Park.

Mountain lions that show up East River and beyond most likely come from the Black Hills. Young males want to leave their home range and their mothers.”We did a lot of work on dispersal, trying to figure out where these cats were going,” Jenks says.”We followed them through North Dakota, northern Minnesota, the Niobrara River in Nebraska. There was one in Howard, one in Brookings. A 3- to 4-year-old male ended up about 8 miles south of Brookings, which was unusual to have a cat that age.”

In most instances — including the animals that wandered into Yankton — the mountain lions were simply passing through. They have no interest in interacting with people.”What they want to do is get away from you,” Jenks says.”It’s exciting to see them, and they are such an amazing animal, but they really just want to get away from you. In order for them to interact with you, there’s got to be some reason. A worst-case scenario might be standing on a hillside, and you slip into a den with kittens. In all the other situations that you can envision, lions are trying to avoid you. They might be climbing up a tree to let you go by, or running away from you, or staying quiet while you pass. That is borne out by looking at the number of negative interactions between people and mountain lions in the Black Hills. They are very few to nonexistent.”

As their familiarity with lions increased, it grew challenging to deal with public perceptions, which seem to be black and white.”There are two sides of the coin with mountain lions, and that’s what makes them interesting,” Jenks says.”You’ve got people who love them to death and people who hate their guts, and you’re trying to weave between the two to make everyone happy.”

That divide has a long history. The Cougar Hunt is a 1920s silent film created by the United States Department of Agriculture in which mountain lions are nature’s scourge slayed by noble hunters.”Predators of the range,” reads the opening slide before showing a lion lounging in a tree.”Uncontrolled predators exact a heavy annual toll of livestock and game,” reads the next slide, before shots of grazing cattle and sheep. Then, a group of men walking through the woods encounter an animal carcass covered with debris,”The work of that prince of predatory cats — the American lion, or cougar.” The film ends with a hunter shooting a treed lion. As it falls, the final slide reads”a ëgood’ lion at last.”

Others have admired the big cats. A mountain lion from Arizona named Josephine became the mascot of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt clearly respected lions.”It is itself a more skillful hunter than any human rival,” he said.”Ö It is a beast of stealth and rapine; its great velvet paws never make a sound, and it is always on watch whether for prey or for enemies, while it rarely leaves shelter even when it thinks itself safe.”

A student once asked Jenks if she could raise two cute mountain lion kittens In her home.”What happens when you’ve got a 150-pound mountain lion in your living room with your two small kids?” he asked.

During a GF&P commission meeting, after Jenks testified about the number of lions in the Black Hills, a local resident objected, saying there were many more and their numbers should be reduced. He believed he had seen the same mountain lion three different times near Hill City, and suggested lions were decimating the deer population.”It’s really tough to get by those perceptions, because mountain lions do kill deer,” Jenks says.”If you have a mountain lion, it has to be killing deer, and that’s the real simplistic vision of people with predators and prey. But there are a lot of other things going on in the Black Hills. Harvest, predators and disease make species management difficult, and mountain lions bear perhaps an unfair burden.”

Fear might even lie in the animal’s very name. Because of their wide dispersal and interactions with different subsets of American culture, they have assumed many monikers. In Florida they are panthers, in New England catamounts, for cat-of-the-mountain. Elsewhere, they are cougars or pumas. In South Dakota, they are lions, which conjures a very specific image.”When people hear lion,” Jenks says,”they think African lion.”

*****

Mountain lion numbers in the Black Hills ebb and flow. The GF&P’s current population objective is between 200 and 300, as established in the South Dakota Mountain Lion Action Plan, first written in 2010 and updated every five to 10 years. Kanta recalls one year when numbers surged, and his office fielded multiple reports of mountain lion sightings.”Anything that flashed by was a mountain lion and people would call us,” Kanta says.”Ninety percent of them were not legitimate, so you’d start to get a little complacent.”

One day he responded to a report of a mountain lion living in a garage. When he arrived, he found the garage door open about a foot. The homeowner explained that he had housecats and left food for them in the garage.”I’m standing right in front of this door, and I told him to go inside and push the button and let me take a look. As he opens it, a full-grown mountain lion comes running out and almost bumps into me. It turned out that the lion had been going inside the garage in pursuit of those cats.”

Information collected on radio-collared mountain lions has confirmed dispersal from the Black Hills to Minnesota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming and Saskatchewan. DNA from lions captured in the Black Hills has been linked to cats that have traveled to the Chicago area and central Connecticut.

Mountain lions will take domestic animals. It’s one thing Jenks and Kanta want the public to know about living with big cats as neighbors.”If you have small children, you need to keep them close,” Jenks says.”If you have livestock or pets, you need to have them close. You need to watch if deer are spending a lot of time in your yard, because of the potential for drawing a cat in. And you need to know how to act if you encounter a cat. Act big. Don’t run. Yell at them. Show them that you’re not afraid of them and don’t act like prey, because there’s a chance that you might get attacked.

ìWe do need to learn to live with mountain lions, and that means people in South Dakota and the Black Hills have to take an active role in learning how to react when you see a mountain lion or if you’re going to recreate or live in mountain lion habitat.”

That may take time. Jenks is many years removed from actively working with mountain lions, but friends and neighbors in Brookings still call when they find suspicious tracks.”I never say that I don’t want to go out and look at it, because it very well could be a cat, and I’d be really interested if it was,” Jenks says.”People get excited.”

One recent winter, he was called to an area along Western Avenue on the west side of the city to examine tracks in the snow. He quickly realized it was something entirely different.”If you look at dog tracks, eventually you will find one that does not have nails and you can’t see the hind pad, so it looks like a lion print. I didn’t want to say this to the guy, but the reason he thought it was a cat print is because he was afraid of cats. And it was really just a dog that was walking along Western Avenue.”

Mountain lions are not fuzzy like bison (which can still be dangerous, as several visitors to South Dakota have discovered). They don’t have trophy antlers like elk and deer, or the uncanny ability to scale sheer rock faces like mountain goats or bighorn sheep. Yet they are mysterious, charismatic and — no matter if you’ve never seen one or have spent decades studying them — always captivating.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2025 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Goat Watcher

By Bernie Hunhoff

A ragtag herd of mountain goats has chosen to live on the high cliffs of Spearfish Canyon.

Mountain goats have a reputation as escape artists, so it wasn’t a shock when a nanny left Custer State Park in 2016 and showed up about 70 miles away in Spearfish Canyon. The bigger surprise is that there are now 10 goats in the canyon, leaving wildlife officials to wonder what comes next.

Les Heiserman, a retired Spearfish school custodian and inveterate explorer of the canyon, was one of the first persons to observe the nanny.”I first saw her in 2016,” says Heiserman, who visits the canyon daily.”We know she came from Custer State Park because they put a radio collar on her there, but no one had any idea she would travel so far away.”

He has been watching, photographing and advocating for the stray goats ever since. A billy showed up in 2017, and a kid was born the following spring. With so many goats to watch, Heiserman began to name them just so he could keep track. He called the matriarch Granny Nanny. The billy is Bill. Other names include Thimbleberry, Broken Horn, Scooter, Rocky and No. 18 (because he was the first kid, born in 2018).

“I name them for their physical characteristics for the most part,” he says. Thimbleberry was an exception; that name came from seeing the young goat chewing on the fruit of a thimbleberry bush.

The wooly, snow-white creatures are native to the northern Rockies and Canada. Though misidentified as goats by early explorers, they are more closely related to the gazelles and antelopes of Africa.

Despite the namings and his frequent visits, Heiserman keeps a distance from the goats because he worries that too much familiarity with humans could put them at risk.”They don’t mind me, but I know they will shy away from strangers.”

Though the goats generally dwell atop the rocky, rugged limestone cliffs of the 1,000-foot-deep gorge, they sometimes descend to the scenic byway, Highway 14A, that winds 22 miles through the canyon floor.”They love it behind Bridal Veil Falls,” Heiserman says.”They also like to splash in Spearfish Creek and jump over the fallen logs or pose in the stream.”

Tens of thousands of cars, campers and logging trucks travel the byway. Even though the speed limit is 35 miles per hour, Heiserman is concerned that the goats are at risk.”Goats can get salt starved,” he says.”It’s possible that they come down to lick salt off the road, especially in winter. They probably also come down to drink from the creek.”

Because tourists, and even many locals, are not aware that goats are in the vicinity, Heiserman embarked on a campaign to post warning signs. He is adept at climbing the canyon walls, even with a camera around his neck; as it turns out, he’s equally skilled at maneuvering the bureaucracy of government.

Numerous state and federal departments share responsibilities in the canyon, so it was complicated to get everyone to agree on what to do and how to do it. Finally, the state highway department acted on a recommendation from the state Game, Fish and Parks Department — with approval from the U.S. Forest Service — to post the cautionary road signs.

Heiserman says another danger for the goats is inbreeding. Thus far, the entire herd has descended from Granny Nanny and Bill.”They could use a fresh gene pool here,” he says, meaning the introduction of another billy goat.

They face a more immediate threat atop the canyon, not from humans, genetics or vehicles but rather from mountain lions. Chad Lehman, a senior wildlife biologist for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks, says lion predation can affect goat populations.

“We just did a survey and we counted 49 mountain goats in the Custer State Park area, which is down quite a bit,” Lehman says.”The last time we did a survey was in 2018 and then we estimated about 130. We never have an exact count, and we don’t have enough collared goats to know for sure, but there are fewer of them, and we will probably recommend closing the mountain goat hunting season next year.”

Mountain goats are not native to the Black Hills. Their original and natural habitat is Alaska, Canada and the northern Rocky Mountains. They are considered an invasive species in other places. Fifty goats were shot last year in Grand Teton National Park, where officials are hoping for a full extermination. Authorities there think they hinder native flora and fauna, including the bighorn sheep.

Few people know Spearfish Canyon like Les Heiserman. Wildlife officials call him a citizen scientist.

“It’s interesting how two national parks deal with the same critter so differently,” Heiserman says.”In Montana’s Glacier National Park, the goats are revered, almost like the sacred cows of India.”

Lehman and other wildlife officials in South Dakota say they are not concerned about the goats’ environmental impact, and they have nearly a century of experience on the matter. The first goats came to South Dakota in 1924 when Custer State Park, then in its infancy, featured a zoo that provided visitors a close-up view of bear, deer, elk and other species.

Six goats were brought to the zoo from Alberta, Canada, but two escaped the fenced enclosure on their first night in the Hills, and within a few years the entire herd was living on the Black Elk Peak range. Their numbers grew to a high of 400 in the 1940s, and occasionally a billy or nanny has ventured away from the park.

“They need precipitous terrain,” Lehman says.”They love places that are really steep. The granite outcroppings in Custer State Park, the Needles Eye and the Black Elk Wilderness Area all have incredibly steep, granite cliffs. We’ve also had a bunch move into Battle Creek Canyon to the east where it’s basically just a sheer cliff. We had one nanny go to the Boy Scout Camp area on a limestone plateau where she lived for eight years all on her own. We had another in the Bethlehem Cave area for a couple of years, so we’ve got these bizarre stories of how they’ve traveled.”

Lehman says it’s difficult for Game, Fish and Parks staff to monitor the well-being of the wide-ranging goats, so he appreciates”citizen scientists” like Heiserman who monitor and advocate for them.

“I know that Les pretty much lives in the canyon, and he does it just right. You want to be there, yet not too close. What can happen if you habituate them is that they might suddenly inflict their dominance — maybe not on you but on another unsuspecting tourist who gets too close.”

Heiserman does get close enough to document the canyon herd throughout the four seasons. Using a Canon camera with a 100/400 lens, the talented, self-taught photographer captures excellent pictures of the goats and other scenery in the canyon. He posts photos and occasional videos almost daily on his Facebook page, which is open to the public and has a big following. He even published a 2023 goat calendar, which is available through his Facebook page.

Visitors to the canyon are attracted to the goats’ playful nature. Though seemingly tame, wildlife officials caution that they are wild animals and can be dangerous.

Heiserman also shares other tips on enjoying Spearfish Canyon. He has photographed and written about the rare American Dipper as well as osprey, eagles and numerous other species.”The more I know about Spearfish Canyon, the more I realize I don’t know,” he says.”There are subtle changes in the flora and fauna. I recently spotted a peregrine falcon, and then while in the canyon I met an experienced falconer who explained some of the sounds they were making. He thought they were fledglings crying out for food.”

He’s intrigued by the mining and logging activity, the pioneer history and the geology of the canyon. However, the mountain goats get most of his attention. In early summer he saw the kids playing a version of”king of the mountain” on a granite promontory. He’s watched as the nannies teach their young how to make the most of the gifts Mother Nature gave them — their cloven hooves and their horns.

The two-toed hooves expand widely to give them greater balance, and the rough pads of each toe give them a firm grip. That allows them to scale and traverse steep cliffs and walls that scare even mountain lions. But there’s also a technique involved. The goats learn to scratch away loose rocks. They learn to look before they leap. They experiment on how to use speed for horizontal jumps.

Those death-defying theatrics and more show up on Heiserman’s Facebook page. It’s also where followers learned, in April of 2022, that Granny Nanny had died.”When I first saw her, she was a strong-looking goat, but when she passed away, she was worn down to nothing and her teeth were gone.”

That same spring brought the birth of two kids, however, so Granny’s little tribe continues to prosper. Watch for them if you drive through the canyon and follow their growth on Heiserman’s social media postings.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.