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Prairie Isn’t Prairie Without Sky

By Linda Hasselstrom

Photography by Greg Latza

Sunlight illuminates the rolling prairie north of Mission Ridge, near the confluence of the Cheyenne and Missouri rivers.

To begin to see the prairie, walk away from buildings, power poles, asphalt, away from the sound of motors, away from anything electronic, especially anything that beeps. Walk in the grass that reaches perhaps to your ankles, lithe, whippy grass that has evolved with fewer than 16 inches of moisture a year. Walk until the only sound is the wind combing that grass and the chitter of a flock of horned larks somewhere above and behind you: the invisible birds of the plains. Walk and breathe deeply, inhale clear down to your toes, that clean, indefinable smell of grass that has never known chemical fertilizer, grass that holds man’s fate in its slender stems.

Prairie grass stands close to its ancestors; grass specializes in simplification. Wind-pollinated, grass flowers need no heady fragrance. No honey, no splashy colors. Some grasses do reproduce by flowering, but others spread by underground stems that creep sometimes through the grittiest, grayest, least fertile soil on the planet.

Of all the plants on earth, grass is most important to man. From grass like this evolved all the breadstuff we eat: corn, wheat, oats, rye, barley, rice, sugarcane.”It yields no fruit in earth or air,” said John James Ingalls, a Kansas senator,”and yet should its harvest fail a single year, famine would depopulate the world.” And Rumi, a Sufi mystic who lived from 1207 to 1273, said,”One half the planet is grass. The other half grazing.”

Only standing in undisturbed prairie grass can you truly appreciate prairie sky. Stand tall. Tilt your face to the sky; open your eyes wide. Turn your head from one shoulder to the other, and then turn around and do the same so you can see the whole bowl of blue, frothy with clouds.

Look carefully around you. You should see no sign of habitation. White settlers sensibly put their houses in valleys and low places close to water sources, following the practice of earlier Native residents both for practicality, and for safety from storms. And a low location offered concealment, too, from marauders, from wind. Most ranches in arid country lie down long winding gravel roads from the nearest highway, down in any available dip. Perhaps the house is sheltered by windbreak trees. The corrals are downhill, to protect the water supply.

“Only standing in undisturbed prairie grass can you truly appreciate prairie sky,” writes Hasselstrom. Such prairie can be seen in Harding County.

Only modern settlers are foolish enough, and rich enough, to plunk houses on top of hills. A hilltop house requires a deep well and powerful pumps to bring water to the surface. A house atop a hill must contain a monster furnace to fill it with heat when the thermometer reads 35 below zero and the winds are blowing 50 miles an hour. But most modern residents no longer earn a living from the land, so they situate their houses for the view without realizing that they have doubled, tripled the costs of their own living. They’ve also destroyed the prairie for everyone within sight of their misbegotten lodgings. If anything like this is in sight, walk farther. Use the time to breathe deeply.

The prairie sky. Standing with your eyes open, you must be able to see a harrier hawk rise up from that ridge to the south, wings extended and gleaming bronze in sunlight. Watch her fly, swoop, dip, glide and hover across the face of the ridge and down a half mile to the dam where the ducks scatter under her shadow.

Then the harrier tilts her wings and is lifted by the wind up to soar over your head, turning one eye then the other to see you clearly. Turn your head and watch as she leans first one way then the other against the wind, circling, pitching, angling down along fence lines until finally she drops on a vole or mole in the grass.

Wait. Wait.

The hawk rises, lifts great wings, ascends to the top of a tree at the very edge of your vision. With binoculars you can see the smooth neck bend as she begins to feed on a morsel of prairie life, a morsel of grass made flesh. Like yours.

Breathe deeply. Look around again. A few power poles may trace a lacy filigree at the edges of the blue, and a few trees may gather like seashore foam fringing the blue world overhead. But that’s all. A true prairie sky is clean, without neon, without smog, without the chatter of aircraft. No artificial lights shatter the perfect darkness of the night.

Only with the whole sky as background can you really see the great horned owl drop from the cottonwood near the house, swing around behind the windbreak junipers and alight on the branch of another cottonwood where she instantly looks like a broken-off stump. Only by watching for a long time will you see her glide out over the grass, drop on a rabbit, hold it down with one taloned foot while she turns her head, scouting for danger.

In the whole sky, you can really see the flock of red-winged blackbirds leap out of the cottonwood by the dam, and swing a mile around the hayfield, their gold and red wing patches signaling in the sun. Then they swoop, calling and whistling, into the branches of the two dead cottonwoods by the house. You can see barn swallows demonstrating their daring flying, zipping under the deck of the house, through the broken pane in the barn window, between the bars of the corral gate.

A thunderstorm approaches this otherwise peaceful prairie in Harding County, north of Buffalo.

Only the whole prairie sky allows you to properly see clouds. The Navajo have a proverb:”The clouds must look like many sheep before the rains will come.” Look up: When you see flat-bottomed cumulus clouds with puffy heads arranged as evenly as sheep in a pasture or as tiles on the floor, find your umbrella.

Late in the summer, look forward to the towering cumulus clouds called”cauliflower” because their crowns are boiling upward into blue sky like bubbles in a bathtub. Then watch out for the revealing shape of an anvil against the dark blue: ice crystals building into a thunderstorm likely to bring hail that can flatten a hayfield in minutes, killing birds, rabbits, damaging man’s possessions. After hot days, beware of the pouch-like formations called”mammy” clouds that may signal a tornado.

In the wide prairie sky, you can spot the undulating wing beats from a distance, and watch until they come close enough to identify a great blue heron, flying from the nesting spot on Battle Creek 6 miles to the north to this shrinking pond on the prairie where it will stand on one leg for a few hours while hunting frogs. In summer, the heron may be almost invisible among the crowds of sunflowers along the edges of the pond. In winter, the heron is a cultural icon, a Chinese painting against the silver water as it slowly freezes in the falling snow.

Only the whole sky is large enough so you can hear the shooping and chortling and chuckling of the sandhill cranes miles away. You turn your head this way and that, eyes straining for a sight of the wavering V shapes. Lie down; relax. Let your eyes slide over the sky. There, far to the north, the line thinner than a pencil leaves, growing closer and thicker as the sounds drop to you, hooting and cooing and laughing. The shifting line of birds, mighty wings outstretched, is headed south to gather on the Platte River in Nebraska. Only the whole sky is enough so you can see several V’s of them ó 20, 60, 200 cranes at a time, breaking into groups, circling up the sky until they hit a fast wind that shoots them south, deploying into another ragged arrow shape.

Only the whole sky will hold and amplify the thunder that begins somewhere to the north. The ground shudders as the clouds shimmer: a B-1 bomber takes off from Ellsworth Air Force Base, blasting upward until it is only a silver dot, trailing white vapor into the sunset. Headed perhaps for Iraq, it booms its message of war over this quiet landscape. Only the whole sky allows you to understand the immensity of its power, its importance. Think of it: filled with munitions, and with men and women whose job is to protect this prairie and everything connected to it. Only the whole sky can contain their gallantry, and their work.

The whole sky must be visible for proper appreciation of a sunset. I may be facing east when I notice puffy clouds turning from gray to pink. Instinctively, I look west, where the sunset is supposed to be. It’s there too: golden rays shooting up into the sky or turning the underside of a sky full of clouds pink and gold. When clouds are heavy in the west, sometimes the sunset can’t be seen at all where it should be, and the reflection in the east is so vivid I distrust my sense of direction.

While my mind wrestles with a writing project, I often search for a quotation, a summary, a comforting reminder that someone wiser than I am has considered the same subject. This time, I turned to Henry David Thoreau:”Thank God men cannot fly,” he said,”and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” Oh Henry, did you speak too soon?

The decisions that can protect the prairie sky rest with us. Without the grass, without the harrier and the owl, the whooping cranes and the redwing blackbirds, the prairie can’t exist.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Saving Our Native Prairie

By Jerry Wilson

Some ranchers protect native grasses for their exquisite beauty, but they also know of the prairie’s nutritional value.

I sprawl in tall prairie grasses on the Missouri River bluff, and inhale the purity of the universe. Big bluestem, Indian and switch grasses, still lustrous in winter, waltz in the wind six feet above my head. In their shadow glint purplish hues of little bluestem, the amber of sideoats grama and the drying heads of wild flowers.

From ground level this seems a vast jungle of grass, but in fact it is an isolated handful of acres, a remnant of the million square miles of wild prairie that 150 years ago stretched from Canada to Texas, including most of South Dakota. Two centuries ago Meriwether Lewis stood nearby and marveled at 3,000 bison in a single herd.

How did these grasses survive? The roots of prairie plants may reach 12 feet down, safe from drought and able to survive decades of overgrazing and chemical warfare. By weight, more than two-thirds of many native grasses are subterranean. In the 1930s, University of Nebraska ecologist Frederic Clements excavated a half-square-yard of prairie grass, and from the earth extracted 150 miles of root.

It would be a rare half-yard of earth that contained the roots of a single plant. More likely, in any scrap of native prairie, half a dozen grasses and forbs — broadleaf plants — would be in reach. That is by design.”The old prairie lived by the diversity of its plants and animals, all of which were useful because the sum total of their cooperations and competitions achieved continuity,” said Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

The goal of modern farming is to replace that diversity with monoculture. Whatever is not corn or soybeans or the other chosen seed, is a weed. After 150 years of plowing, just two percent of the tallgrass prairie that once dominated eastern South Dakota remains, and the mixed and shortgrass prairies of our west are disappearing fast. Will we lose the last vestiges of wild prairie? Does it really matter? Is it possible to save some of what remains, and perhaps to restore and rehabilitate some of what we have lost?

In his autobiography A Son of the Middle Border, Hamlin Garland recalled his pioneering family’s arrival on the South Dakota prairie, and the first order of business:”At last the wide ‘quarter section’ lay upturned, black to the sun and the garden that had bloomed and fruited for millions of years, waiting for man, lay torn and ravaged. The tender plants, the sweet flowers, the fragrant fruits, the busy insects, all the swarming lives which had been native here for untold centuries were utterly destroyed.”

Linda Hasselstrom developed an appreciation for native prairie while growing up on the family ranch near Hermosa.”A lot of people would die for the mountains,” she says.”What we need are people willing to die — or at least fight — for the prairies.” Photo by Greg Latza.

In geological time, the age of America’s prairie is actually brief, a mere 10,000 years, the hundreds of grasses and flowering forbs evolving as the glaciers of the last ice age retreated. And yet in a fleeting fraction of that time, what nature wove has been undone.”The more we love this place as it is, the more we feel the pain of what it so recently was,” says Candace Savage in her book Prairie: A Natural History.”The wild prairie ecosystem is gone. And this tragedy is compounded by the realization that we don’t know exactly what it is that we have lost.”

In fact, the question wasn’t even asked until 1916, when Frederic Clements, focusing on the ability of native prairie to recover after fire, realized that prairie is a self-healing system, a community of plants and other organisms with regenerative power, the ability to reassert themselves, as Savage puts it, in an”orderly sequence, each wave creating the conditions required by the next, until the vegetation reached a stable configuration, or ‘climax’.” Clements recognized nearly a century ago what we today know as an”ecosystem.” But for regeneration to occur, modern man must provide minimal help — and then step aside.

My family and I arrived on the Missouri Valley bluff a century after the first settlers, Nels and Martha Oakland, took the land. Under terms of the Homestead Act, the Oaklands had five years to”prove up,” to plow so many acres and make other”improvements” to earn the land. About 1875, Nels hitched a one-bottom plow to a team of mules, and inch by inch, turned the waving heads of native diversity under. Even if he had wished to let the grasses grow and fatten his cows, he had no choice. The Homestead Act required that he plow his hilly land.

To pay interest on borrowed money and somehow survive on 160 acres of marginal land, the Oaklands no doubt took all the soil could give. Each season, inconsequential handfuls of topsoil washed away. Perhaps in his 37th and last spring, Nels’ plow still turned up darkish earth. Perhaps he didn’t know that the life-giving layer above clay and glacial debris had worn dangerously thin. But I suspect he knew that his generation was both a beginning and an end.

Thirty years ago we found the Oaklands’ hills depleted and eroded, producing imported grasses and weeds. One spring I stripped a handful of big bluestem seed, spaded a plot behind the home we’d built, and began a small experiment in prairie restoration. Two decades later we have restored 30 acres of prairie — in so far as that is possible — and are working to rehabilitate 30 more. And we are not alone. Alongside the rapid conversion of prairie to commodity crops, scores of South Dakotans are at work preserving and restoring native grasses and flowers.

Across the state, and particularly west of the Missouri River, conscientious ranchers still zealously protect the prairie. Perhaps some are motivated by the exquisite beauty of wildflowers in spring and the bronze and purple hues of prairie grasses in fall. Some protect native grasses and forbs because they know the plants that evolved on our sometimes unforgiving plains survive the fiercest cold and drought our climate can deal. But ranchers also know the superior nutritional value of native prairie for growing the most healthful meat.

The Mortensons have been rehabbing the native prairie for 60 years on their sprawling ranch northwest of Pierre. Cattle now graze where corn was grown.

The prairie has many friends — ranchers whose grandfathers homesteaded the land and who would sooner cut off an arm than plow under the legacy of 10,000 years, scientists, soil conservationists, hunters and fishermen who know that prairie produces wildlife, and city folk who plant tiny scraps of prairie in their backyards because its beauty thrills.

Many South Dakotans are familiar with the books of Linda Hasselstrom and Dan O’Brien. Hasselstrom grew up amidst her father’s Herefords near Hermosa; O’Brien raises bison on his ranch by the Cheyenne River. Both honor and defend the prairie ecosystem and the ranching way of life.”A lot of people would die for the mountains,” Hasselstrom says in Going Over East.”What we need are people willing to die — or at least fight — for the prairies.”

On the Pine Ridge Reservation near Allen, the Lakota buffalo herd thrives on intact native prairie. On the Mortenson ranch northwest of Pierre, Todd, Jeff and Curt Mortenson raise cattle on native grasses they and their father, Clarence, have maintained in good health for many decades. Clarence began rehabilitating his ranch’s natural ecosystem 60 years ago, combating erosion with sediment-trapping dams and revitalizing native prairie with rotational grazing. Gradually native vegetation reestablished itself and wildlife returned. Ecologically-conscious management increased both profits and sustainability.

Recent decades have seen the flowering of numerous private organizations devoted to preserving native prairie. Ranchers and conservationists of the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition, for example, provide scientific information on the virtues of native ecosystems, the conservation and management of grazing lands, and ways to exploit the prairie’s economic potential without compromising its health. The South Dakota Art Museum in Brookings and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raise money for prairie preservation by selling prints of Harvey Dunn’s famous painting, The Prairie Trail.

Among the prairie’s oldest friends is The Nature Conservancy, a nationwide organization founded in 1951″to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.” The largest South Dakota grassland under TNC management is the 7,800-acre Ordway Prairie, 50 miles northwest of Aberdeen.

The Ordway ecosystem includes over 300 plant species, says manager Mary Miller, from tall grasses and wetland species to short grasses on hilltops. Hillsides bloom with wildflowers from late spring through summer. Ordway’s fauna is also diverse, including badgers, ground squirrels, foxes, coyotes and 280 bison. TNC simulates nature’s management strategy, periodic controlled burns followed by grazing bison, a progression that for millennia kept prairie healthy. Surplus grass-fed bison are sold each year. Bio-control agents — insects that feed on specific invasive weeds — allow managers to limit chemical use.

The importance of the TNC preserve grows as surrounding prairie faces conversion to agriculture, heavy grazing pressure and invasive species. The preserve’s 400 wetlands provide nesting for thousands of waterfowl, shorebirds, grebes, rails and herons, while numerous grassland birds inhabit the mixed grass prairie.

Northern Prairies Land Trust takes another approach to preservation of native prairie and other vulnerable special lands. The non-profit conservation organization was established in 1999 to safeguard unique ecosystems of the Northern Great Plains by helping South Dakota and Nebraska landowners conserve lands for habitat preservation, agriculture, ranching, water, cultural and historical resources. NPLT has protected nearly 20,000 acres of unbroken tallgrass prairie in over 25 perpetual conservation easements.

Serious threats to the nation’s bird species highlight the urgency of conservation, says NPLT president John Davidson. According to a recent U.S. Interior Department report, nearly one-third of the nation’s 800 bird species are endangered, threatened, or in significant decline, including 46 grassland breeding birds, many of which depend on native grasslands for survival.

Bluestem now grows on writer Jerry Wilson’s Clay County farm. He has restored 30 acres of prairie and is working on 30 more.

Davidson also emphasizes the value of perennial grasses as”a stable repository of carbon. Grasses store carbon quickly,” he says,”providing an immediate mitigation against global warming.” Besides destroying habitat, plowing prairie releases stored carbon into the atmosphere.

Fortunately, protecting native grasslands can be financially profitable, since high quality grazing and hay production increase ranchers’ income.”The key to prairie conservation,” Davidson says,”is the sustainability of the ranching economy and culture.”

Private conservation and restoration efforts are assisted by federal entities like the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which pays landowners to restore grasses to floodplains and other marginal lands, and the National Forest Service, which 50 years ago set aside three sections of South Dakota’s shortgrass prairie as the Oglala, Fort Pierre and Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. Now Sen. Tim Johnson is taking the prairie protection effort to another level. If enacted, Johnson’s SB 3310 will designate 48,000 acres of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands between the Badlands and the Black Hills as the first federal grasslands wilderness, in honor of outdoorsman and conservation advocate Tony Dean, who died in 2008. Wilderness designation provides long-term protection of a key ecosystem, while allowing multiple private and public uses to continue.

Noble and important as all these preservation efforts are, they may not be enough to balance the loss of prairie. Saving prairie also requires restoration, work that can occur on a landscape scale only if farmers and ranchers can make a living by replanting prairie while simultaneously freeing themselves and taxpayers from dependency on annual crop subsidies. That is what South Dakota State University ecology professor Carter Johnson and three colleagues hope to demonstrate on the EcoSun Prairie Farm southwest of Brookings.

The 640-acre project is funded by the Sun Grant Center at SDSU, whose mission is biofuels research. But Johnson and his colleagues have a broader mission, to demonstrate the economic and ecological sustainability of a working prairie farm. They leased the land from Bill Lee, curator of the Ag Heritage Museum in Brookings, who restored the big Case and other tractors at the museum and who still lives on the farm.

The farm was typical for the region — most of the wetlands drained, 400 acres in corn and soybeans, the rest in non-native pasture grasses. The Mortenson brothers will bring yearlings from their Stanley County ranch to the cool season pasture in spring, then move them to EcoSun’s native grasses in summer to produce grass-fed beef. The 400 acres of cropland are being restored to the native plants best suited to the particular terrain, hydrology and soil type of each field.

The idea was to develop”strategic mixtures,” diverse native species the conservationists think will have value for seed, pasture, hay or biofuels, and thus to maintain an income stream; if the price of one commodity is low, perhaps another will be up. Using their soil conservation district’s grass drill, researchers planted the first 60 acres of switchgrass and 40 acres of a 15-species bluestem mix in 2008. They also gathered 8,000 plugs of prairie cordgrass to plant three acres of wetland.

That fall professors and students hand harvested seed and started more cordgrass to transplant the next spring. In 2009 they added 30 acres of big bluestem and other warm-season native grasses and flowering forbs and renovated 10 acres of Conservation Reserve land. 2010 saw the largest planting, 150 acres, including 100 acres of mixed grasses and forbs, another 40 acres of renovated CRP and 10 acres of switchgrass. The last hundred acres of cropland will be converted this year, a mixture of at least 100 native species, using seed harvested from The Nature Conservancy’s remnant of unplowed prairie two miles away.

Progress is documented in several ways, including production records, a video taken from an ultra-light airplane, a feature-length documentary film produced by Carter’s sons, Tellef and Tor, and a time lapse video of the 40-acre mixed species field. One shot was taken every 20 minutes from June to September, so each three seconds of video illustrate 24 hours of growth and flowering.

A major economic advantage of perennial prairie grasses is that once established, annual inputs are minimal; typically no tillage, pesticides or fertilizer are required. Some plots may not gross as much as corn, but corn inputs can cost $400 per acre. The group can harvest switchgrass seed worth $3 per pound and four tons per acre of big bluestem hay worth up to $400.

To many farmers, wetlands are a nuisance to be drained. Johnson sees them as an opportunity.”Instead of draining and planting corn, we are planting things where they belong,” he said.”There are no sub-optimal conditions. We are using the water to grow harvestable wetland grasses instead of draining it toward the Gulf of Mexico full of nitrates.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has helped fund restoration of the farm’s 35 small basins that had been drained into a 20-acre central wetland. The new managers plugged seasonal wetlands with berms, and by July of a typical year, most are dry. The large wetland, where prairie cordgrass stood 10 feet tall when I visited, also sub-irrigates the surrounding prairie. After cordgrass seed is harvested in November they bale the hay, up to 10 tons per acre. At $100 per ton the cordgrass hay could gross $40,000 from 40 sub-irrigated acres with very little input cost. The professors and research students also laboriously hand collect sedge, whitetop and other wetland plant seeds for sale to Millborn Seeds in Brookings, seeds that can retail for hundreds of dollars per pound.

The other big value of wetland restoration, of course, is wildlife habitat. The first wetland restored in 2008 attracted over a thousand ducks the first season, with lots of nesting.”Typically small wetlands are drained or farmed through or around and have little wildlife value,” Johnson said.”But they can produce a perennial crop of seed, hay or biofuel as well as nesting and wildlife habitat. It’s a win-win for everybody, and it also helps recharge the aquifer.”

Those engaged in prairie preservation and restoration know that the dream of complete natural rehabilitation is out of reach. Some species are gone forever, and some, lacking the deep-rooted hardiness of big bluestem or purple coneflower, hover on the brink of extinction and are difficult to reestablish. But necessity and desire are strong. Along with patience and humility, Mother Nature teaches persistence and hope.

Editor’s Note: Jerry Wilson, retired managing editor of South Dakota Magazine, lives near Vermillion. Prairie restoration is among the subjects in his book Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff, available online or from the S.D. State Historical Society Press. This story is revised from the March/April 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Autumn Grasslands

By Bernie Hunhoff

Photography by Stephen Gassman

Emily Dickinson was a great poet but she underestimated an important plant species when she lamented how she longed to be grass-like.

The grass so little has to do, — A sphere of simple green,

With only butterflies to brood, And bees to entertain,

And stir all day to pretty tunes, The breezes fetch along,

And hold the sunshine in its lap, And bow to everything.

Life hasn’t been that simple for grass, especially native grass on the prairies of the Great Plains that were once an ocean of green. In many regions, 99 percent of native grasses have succumbed to urbanization and agricultural development. Blue stem, wheat grass and other varieties have been buried by concrete and asphalt, replaced with domesticated cousins such as corn and soybeans, and swallowed by man-made lakes and forests.

South Dakota’s native prairie, though similarly threatened, has fared better than most. West River’s ranching culture depends on the shortgrass prairie; consequently, successful cattlemen develop great respect for the lands on which their livestock graze.

I once saw an old rancher kneel in the summer grass and point to a dozen different species of grass (there are 9,000 in all) that were growing within a few feet of his boots. He listed them by name and knew when they thrive — hot season, cold season, drought and drought-on-the-way.

Thousands of acres of South Dakota’s grasslands are under the auspices of the Nature Conservancy, a non-profit group that has protected over 119 million acres around the world. Its largest tract in South Dakota is Ordway Prairie west of Leola where over 300 plant species and 400 wetlands provide a lifestyle for a herd of bison and other plains wildlife.

State and national parks have also been helpful. Wind Cave National Park encompasses 28,000 acres of prairie grasses and ponderosa pine near Hot Springs in the southern Black Hills. But the National Park Service is the biggest single steward of South Dakota’s grasslands, supervising the 600,000-acre Buffalo Gap National Grasslands between the Badlands and the Nebraska border as well as the 125,000-acre Fort Pierre National Grasslands in the center of the state. Hunters, hikers, bird-watchers, photographers and naturalists frequent the grasslands, but others don’t count them on their”bucket list” of places to see before they die.

However Mary Lata, a self-proclaimed”grass geek,” says attentive visitors to any of South Dakota’s grasslands soon discover that there’s much more than meets the naked eye.”Think of it as a chocolate chip cookie,” says Lata, who spent two seasons as a ranger at Buffalo Gap and now works as an NPS ecologist.”The matrix is the grasses. That’s the dough. And it makes a difference whether you use butter or margarine. Butter is the species you want and margarine is what you don’t want. The chocolate chips are the flowers and forbs that make it look good. The thistles and other weeds are things we don’t want, like fake chocolate chips.”

Grasslands have always been changing — not just from season to season but even from century to century.”The grasslands of the Great Plains exist because of three frequent disturbances,” Lata says. They are fire, drought and grazing.”We might have had years or decades when we had a lot of grazing and lots of rain, and drier times when we had more fires.

“We don’t know what the composition of the grasses was when Lewis and Clark came through. It changed when the Lakota came because they had horses and they used fire differently than it had been used. Then the Europeans came and they did things differently, and they were soon followed by trains and the trains are still causing fires.”

Fire isn’t always bad, she says.”The forest service is very good at putting fires out, but we often don’t have the money to do prescribed fires because that can be very expensive even though it’s necessary to maintain a healthy diversity of grasses. Fire is as necessary as grazing. Some people ask why we don’t just graze rather than burn, but cattle won’t eat yucca or cactus so you eventually get the same imbalance as if you only burned and never grazed.”

The grass geek says grasslands are especially overlooked in autumn.”People don’t come to national parks to see the grass, but when they take the time to look they are usually surprised. They see the blue grama, the Indian grass with its fluffy golden heads, the turkey foot blue stem, and pretty soon they can see that each is different.”

Lata says the grasslands are especially striking in late fall before the first hard frost.”Then you’ve still got some flowers, mostly yellows and purples, on top of the grasses that are starting to change color. And then after the frost, you lose the flowers but the grass colors start to jump out even more.”

We owe a lot to grasses, she says.”As a species, we didn’t stand up straight until we got out of the trees and onto some grass.” So take a moment this fall to appreciate the grasses of South Dakota.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.