Note from Tony Dean: I wrote this piece for the Outdoor Writers Association's monthly magazine, as a member of the Circle of Chiefs, the conservation conscience of OWAA.
The Importance of Wetlands and Prairie by Tony Dean
When former OWAA member, Jim Fuglie, headed North Dakota’s tourism office back in the 1980’s, he developed a billboard campaign that poked good-natured fun at neighboring Montana.
One billboard read, “Custer Was Healthy When He Left Here.” That bit of billboard buffoonery could apply nearly as well to President Jefferson’s personal scouts, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. As long as they traveled the prairie, they ate well, dining on deer and elk, but after reaching Montana’s mountains, they damn near starved to death. Problem was, the mountain majesty couldn’t compare with the abundant wildlife on the plains.
Then there’s the story of Earl, the radio-tagged bull elk that wandered out of Montana’s Sweetgrass Hills, not to be seen for two years until he was discovered living in an urban Kansas City, MO neighborhood. Biologists figured Earl merely reacted to ancestral urges, following grass that was restored on the plains during the early days of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). Elk were, after all, prairie critters, that were finally driven into the mountains by man and his plow. Earl’s story is told in Richard Manning’s marvelous prairie study, “Grasslands.”
The mind-set that resulted in the plowing of the prairies is the focus of the epic novel, “Giants In The Earth,” by O.E. Rolvaag. It traces the journey of Per and Beret Hansa, young Norwegian immigrants, during their struggle to homestead in southeastern South Dakota.
It’s difficult to plan for the future if you learn no lessons from the past. But if you travel the Great Plains these days, you will wonder how they came up with that name, for in spite of small towns carrying names like Blooming Prairie and Prairie City, little grass remains on a landscape where it once covered nearly all of the middle United States. The prairie fares better once you cross the Missouri River, but even here, this rich ecosystem that produces a diverse array of life, remains under siege as a federal Farm Bill helps America’s biggest farmers squeeze out their smaller neighbors, and continues the erasure of the Great Plains. The prairie known as the Great Plains has been altered more than any landscape in America.
We treasure mountains, ancient forests, lakes and streams, but unfortunately, few stand in awe of grass. Yet, on an acre-per-acre basis, it is more productive than the “prettier” ecosystems, and in some ways, more spectacular than even the Grand Canyon.
Three types of prairie make up America’s mid section; tall grass, mixed grass and short grass prairies. The tall grass variety has nearly vanished, preserved only in postage stamp-sized parcels, with what remains of the countryside, devoted to making the world safe for corn and soybeans. In Iowa, farmers plowed every possible inch of the tailgrass, and where wetlands stood in their way, laid tile and drained them almost to infinity. What they left for future generations of Iowans is recorded in James Dinsmore’s “A Country So Full of Game.” Because Iowa was almost covered with tall grass, no state has seen its landscape changed so dramatically. Even timbered areas in northeastern Iowa are a shadow of what they were.
If prairies form Middle America’s crown, then certainly the wetlands are its jewels. The prairie potholes of the Dakotas, carved by glaciers, make up what’s left of America’s duck factory, a sparkling myriad of gems which once extended from the prairies of Iowa and Minnesota, across the Dakotas, and northward into the Prairie Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Unfortunately, Canada has no laws preventing drainage and much of the pothole country there resides under section after section of wheat fields. And the wetlands that once covered Southern and Western Minnesota and northern Iowa, have almost completely vanished. Some biologists say that the Dakotas are producing about 50 percent of the ducks that migrate across our skies each autumn. There was a time when Canadian duck production dwarfed that of the Dakotas, but today, duck production linked with the Prairie Provinces has become a cruel oxymoron. We can complain, but as bad as the situation is, the United States has set aside more land for wildlife than any nation on Earth.
But let’s complain anyway. Neither the Clinton or Bush administrations were kind to prairie potholes. We saw drainage intensified under Clinton, and his Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) nearly succeeded in rewriting the rules on wetland delineation in South Dakota. Had they been successful, we could have lost most of the wetlands most critical to ducks and other species, tiny marshes of less than an acre in size. Meanwhile, President Bush, still stinging from a defection of normally conservative sportsmen, promises to restore wetlands. However, even though the promise has been made, the regulations that made it easier to drain that were put in place by his administration following the US Supreme Court’s SWANCC decision, remain there.
You can also complain about what some call the “left-leaning stance” of sportsman-conservation groups as the Izaak Walton League and the National Wildlife Federation. But if it weren’t for they and their state rod and gun affiliates, who joined environmental groups and an Indian tribe at a grass roots level, the NRCS would have succeeded in laying the groundwork for the drainage of the Dakotas. And in the end, it was the National Wildlife Federation’s willingness to take the government to court, that forced an out-of-court settlement between the drainers, their Farm Bureau backers and the conservation groups.
And here is where we’re at today.
Giant agri-business companies know how to play the political game. They, more than any other group, write the Farm Bill, and the legislation they produce puts the premium on production. It isn’t enough that they receive the benefit of taxpayer-supported research at land grant colleges. They see “idle” land, as potential profit. Thus, the pressure to till more acres and drain wetlands under the guise of feeding a hungry world, even though poor countries cannot afford our bounty. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, and you can expect farm state congressmen of either stripe to support nearly any version of a farm bill because it’s political suicide if they don’t.
Farm groups loudly protest environmentalists, claiming they are keeping this “good land out of production.” But are they? A close look reveals that these “idle” acres are already producing crops of birds, and animals; a group collectively called “wildlife.” In fact, scientists maintain that you can easily link the reduction in the populations of many ground-nesting songbirds to the disappearance of prairie.
But the loss goes beyond that, and there is an old soil conservation axiom that’s worth repeating.
If you have a parcel of prairie that is maintained in high stands of grass, even following a heavy rainfall, there will be little or no runoff. But if that same land is overgrazed, runoff doubles. Plow it and runoff quadruples. And that runoff, laden with nutrients and soil particles, ends up in lakes and streams, ultimately impacting water quality, altering fish and marine life, and even drinking water, as happened not long ago in Des Moines, IA.
All of which begs a question. Is current agriculture sustainable?
Probably not, especially if fishing, hunting, and drinking water are important to you. Clean water is the connection to good fishing. Prairie grass is the habitat connection to good hunting in farm country, and in the case of migratory birds such as ducks, even if you live far from the Great Plains, you have a stake in maintaining prairies and wetlands.
But to understand prairie, to realize what the loss of that which remains means to America, you need to experience it. You need to visit the Eastern Dakotas in March when the northward migration is in progress, especially at a place like Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota, or near Lake Alice National Wildlife Refuge in North Dakota.
If you carry a shotgun, you need to visit the Dakotas in October. Hunt sharptails in the rolling prairies of western North Dakota. Or prairie chickens on the Fort Pierre National Grasslands. Or gaze in awe as a thousand pheasants explode from a cattail marsh in South Dakota, where the pheasant numbers this fall might be the best since the war years. Or on your back in a North Dakota wheat stubble field as clouds of mallards whirl overhead in pre-dawn light.
All made possible by water and grass.
Sidebar:
Learning About Prairie… “Grasslands” by Richard Manning “Giants in the Earth” by O.E. Rolvaag “A Country So Full of Game” by James Dinsmore
