Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve Podcast Library
Science:Nature
Tallgrass Bus Tour, Scenic Overlook to Visitor Center
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Alright, so here we go. So here's one quiz question for you on the way back, "How big is the park?" Has everybody been doing the math there? Yes? No? Maybe? Well, 10,894 acres, 17 square miles, or 44 square kilometers if you're a metric-minded person. And if that winds up being the only tallgrass prairie we can say we preserved and protected and defended, I would say that we probably failed in that overall mission, because again it's going to fall to those folks who live outside of the park who try to make a living on this landscape, the land owners, the land users, what have you, to find a way to make a living out here and do it in such a way that others who come later can make a living, because they probably more than most understand that there cannot be a functioning economy without a functioning ecology.
So if we can be of any benefit to the wider community, perhaps it is to be a place to demonstrate and educate into different methods of regenerative and restorative types of agriculture. Ways of growing and grazing that would return nutrients and resources to the soil rather than just continually extracting them.
And to pull that off out here, is mainly just to change up the fire cycle out here. The role of fire is well known and fundamental, but maybe we can change it up a little bit, the timing, the placement, the frequency of fire. Because in a natural setting, fire would happen every three to five years, when lightning would hit the ground or some other random act that would ignite a fire and burn across the landscape.
But these days, fire is far more frequent. It's generally kind of hemmed in at the beginning of the growing season, mid-March to mid-April. And then that is quickly followed up by about three to four months of cattle grazing, 90 to 100 days of intense cattle grazing. And that in the short term, that grows a lot of grass which ends up growing a lot of cattle, but when that pattern is repeated over and over and over again, it starts to have some long-term effects, very similar to say sharpening a knife blade over and over again.
I mean, you have to sharpen it to get it to cut well, and you use the knife, you go sharpen it, you use it again, you sharpen it up some more, you go bang some nails with it, open some paint cans, pry up some 2x4s, and then all of a sudden, many, many years later, you realize, "Wow, my knife doesn't cut as well as it once did. I have to work harder at it to get the same effect. I need a new one." Toss the old one and buy yourself a new one.
But it's a little hard to toss away and entire landscape, so maybe we can rebuild the edge on these pastures by just changing up when you burn. Maybe burn a little bit in the fall, burn a little bit in the spring, or move that burning around, burn one side of a road one year, the other side of the road the next year, the other side of a creek the third year, and just rotate it around.
Because that has a nice little side effect, the grazing animals are also inspired, they move, too. They follow the green grass, just like they always did. And cattle, for all of their domestication, still have that habit, they still seek out the fresh grass growth.
And another benefit of that rotational burning, is that the landscape that doesn't get burned or grazed as heavily, well that gets to simply rest. It's just as beneficial for plants as it is for people, because it has a very similar effect as going to the gym over and over again. The first few trips you're getting stronger, faster, healthier. But on and on, you start to get a bit beat up, a little weak, a little worn out. And many of these pastures are exactly that. They're still fairly healthy, but they're feeling a little stressed out and a little worn out by always being forced or challenged to grow up, to grow the green part of the plant, the stem, the leaf, the blade of grass that gathers the sunshine and the energy.
And then if the grass is always growing up, it's not growing down as much. And as the roots weaken, it cannot absorb as much resources and other plants will go after those resources. I mean, checks and balances aren't just for government class anymore. It's a very ecological idea. Ecologies that are balanced are kept in check. It can't even be described without saying the words.
But when some plants dominate over the others, when disturbances begin to take hold, well that's when ecosystems get weak and other plants begin to fill in the gaps. Like that yellow plant back there. That is what is often derided as a "weed." It's called broomweed, but it responds to disturbance quite well. So by moving the disturbances, that encourages other plants to grow. Cattle will not eat that. So, that's one reason why it grows so well.
But by moving the disturbance around, grazing can become a benefit, by moving the fire around, that spreads out the impact a little bit, let's other plants rest some. So, it strengthens the community of plant life as a whole, especially when considering invasive plants and any plant, any life form, can be invasive given the opportunity, especially if they have no natural competitors. And there is a particular legume, a forb out here, called Serecia Lespedeza, or East Asian Bush-clover. And that's a plant that has no real competitors in North America but had plenty back in East Asia.
So, it was a Depression-era experiment in animal forage and soil conservation. But it had the unintended effect of just becoming a real hazard to grazing, because it squeezes out many plants that grazing animals will eat. So it is a Public Enemy Number One out here in the plant world.
But, again, another benefit of all this rotational burning and grazing…I'll slow down for you to get a good look at the buffalo there...is that the habitat that gets left over becomes the home for the vast majority of tallgrass prairie animals, who are not the "charismatic megafauna." That's the name of my garage band, by the way. The buffalo, the elk, the pronghorn, the gray wolf, the grizzly bear, the animals that get all the magazine covers. The big, highly visible animals. They have the additional benefit of being able to make it in other parts of North America, which they do, much to their credit.
But other animals, the vast majority of these tallgrass animals, are specialists. They have adapted their entire lives and livelihoods to living in the tallgrass. And when the grass disappears, so do they. And a good example of that is the Greater Prairie-chicken. It's about as big as my hat, minus the brim, of course. About 3 pounds of bird that lives most of its time on the ground, hiding in the grass, laying its eggs, going after seeds and insects, roosting and raising the next generation.
But it cannot do that out in the wide-open spaces. That's just asking for trouble, it's only a matter of time before a red-tailed hawk or some other predator animal comes and nicks it away for dinner as the main course. So, as tallgrass has disappeared, so have their numbers. They've declined quite a bit. And they share the fate of ground-dwelling birds across North America, the sage grouse of Wyoming and the Dakota oil patches, the Lesser Prairie-chicken of the panhandle region of Texas and Oklahoma, southwestern Kansas.
But at least in our neck of the woods, maybe we can demonstrate some different methods of burning and grazing, changing up the way we do things in order that all life forms can have a better shot at life, having their cake and eating it, too. Maybe just not all at once.
But then we come around to the buffalo, one of the big draws out here is an opportunity to see the buffalo. And it's really cool that the park is playing a big role in maintaining the lineage and the legacy of North America's largest native grazing animal, the bison. Because at the end of the 19th century, there were less than a thousand left, down from an estimated 40 million at the start of the 19th century, so roughly within a lifetime, they went from a literal force of nature to functional extinction.
And that decline was probably, tragic though it is, it may have, in fact, been the wakeup call that got the attention of the culture at that time. And it was a culture that pretty much assumed that nature was infinite, and humans would never alter it and it was just had to take what comes.
But by the 1870s, it was becoming pretty obvious that human activity was starting to have a measurable effect. And fortunately, there were individuals at the time willing to stake their reputations on the speculation that if there is a human element to the problem, maybe there's a human element to the solution.
And that was kind of a radical idea, but they were willing to put their money where their mouths were, and yes I'm talking about Theodore Roosevelt and others, who formed an organization specifically aimed acquiring bison where they could still be found, transported them to the Bronx Zoo in New York City to just basically wait, wait out the time until a new time came along, when the bison could be safely reintroduced back to their homeland.
And that opportunity arose in 1914 at the newly established Wind Cave National Park. Wind Cave was established in 1903...1914, eleven years after that park was established it got its herd back. About a dozen bison were reintroduced up there, purebred stock living there in New York City.
And that population has been growing over time to the present number of about four to five hundred. But in order to keep that genetic lineage going, of course, you have to find good places to put the extras. And in 2009, after only 12 years of existence, this park had grown to such a mature state, that it could finally take on some bison of its own and be a part of that maintenance, restoration, rebuilding process. Probably not going to be 40 million anytime soon, but it beats zero any day of the week. Extinction is final, no matter what they say in Hollywood.
But it is nice to have the bison here. We have about a hundred these days, 87 adults, 13 newborns. And they'll probably be rounded up here in a couple of months to give everyone a good once-over, test who's related to whom, probably shuffle out about 20 or so to herds of similar genetics. Give this herd some more room to grow.
Which is good, because it's not every day that you get a chance to correct an error in your activity, even if it was an error born of sheer ignorance. They didn't know any better, perhaps. I mean, the word ecology didn't even exist until the 1870s. So, the whole idea of inter-relatedness of all life was still a bit of an alien idea in many circles.
But they're they are and a good portion of them there. Even when you stand 6 1/2 feet tall at the shoulder, these grasses can still do a good job at hiding you there, especially when you're sitting down there. Pretty cool!
But you've heard me call these animals both buffalo and bison and you might be wondering when I will make up my mind and fortunately that is a question that has two right answers, buffalo AND bison. I like the word buffalo; I like both words. But bison is the scientifically accurate term for that big brown animal back there.
But buffalo lives on. It's a nice remainder of this area's Hispanic lineage and legacy. Because again, it was Spanish speakers who came first and wrote down what they saw. And upon seeing that animal in the 15 to 1600s, to their understanding, they thought they were looking at a buffalo. It did not resemble "la vaca," the Spanish word for cow. It looked like "el bufalo," which, of course, becomes "buffalo" in English, two f's.
And that's the way it stayed for maybe 300 years, until the middle of the 19th century, when it became obvious that what we had been calling a buffalo had more in common with a European grazing animal, called a "wisent." And that translates to English as "bison."
And so "Bison bison," the scientific, Latinized name of North America's largest grazing animal. So how does the state song of Kansas go again? "Oh give me a home, where the bison roam, where the deer and the antelope play or deer and the pronghorn play?"
Well, you wouldn't be wrong if you wanted to sing "Home On The Range" that way, but maybe it's a little poetically clumsy, lyrically, maybe, a little boring? And I've been accused of a lot in my 24-year Federal career, but lyrically boring and poetically clumsy are accusations I do not want on my rap sheet. So I'm going to stick with buffalo and let the chips fall where they may.
But here we are about, wow! We're really getting our money's worth today. About five minutes from the ranch headquarters where I'll unload you all, which gives me one last chance to unload, ruminate upon the state of affairs here on planet Earth. It seems there's all sorts of wild and crazy things happening on our planet these days.
Oh, you wanted to drop off! Yes, my apologies. There you go there, right up the road there. Thanks for the reminder there.
Alright, where was I? Rumination! Deep thinking. And I still like to think of our planet as the living embodiment of a Latin phrase you might know, "E Pluribus Unum," from diversity comes unity.
But if that's not quite your cup of tea, and that's alright. Maybe your car is a more acceptable or appetizing an analogy. I mean your car has got a lot of parts that make it go. Like let's take your water pump, for example. It might leak. You might know about it. You might not know about it. You might be ignoring the problem. Or you might think your mechanic is just making it all up and you're just going to go about your business.
And your car will get you there for a short amount of time. It will get hotter and hotter along the way, until one day when you're really needing to get somewhere, your car will be too hot to do it for you anymore. And life as you knew it from that point forward, just got a lot more difficult.
And I like to imagine the grasses of the world as like that water pump. They're not so flashy most of the time. They're meek and humble, not out there "doin' it for the 'Gram" or for the Facebook likes, or whatever.
But if you ignore them in any significant way, they will clap you right back and remind you that they are, indeed, the meek that have inherited the Earth. And that ain't braggin'. Because, grasses can be found on the average, 30% of the planet's land surface, one-third of our land surface on Earth is a grassland. And you know these areas already, believe it or not.
I mean, you have the Prairie of North America, French word for meadow and all that, taken from the Latin word "pratum" for meadow. Then you move south to Argentina and you find your way onto the Pampas region of Argentina, Uruguay, down there in South America. Then you move across the Atlantic to Africa, and now you're standing on the Savannas of Africa, 2.7 billion acres of grassland in Africa. Then you move north to Europe, where they share a grassland with Asia called the Steppe, a 5,000-mile green highway connecting the cultural East with the cultural West, one of the oldest, most ancient human highways are the Steppe. Beginning in probably present-day Hungary and Romania on the European side, stretching eastward through the rest of Europe into central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria in northeast China. Then you leap to the south and you wind up on the Rangelands of Australia, also known, of course, as the Outback.
And all of the plants of these grasslands, grasses included, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, measured in the megatons. And they, of course, blend it with sunshine and water and other soil minerals and create a carbon compound for themselves called glucose, energy, sugar.
And then they emit the oxygen as a by-product, which is all very beneficial for us air breathers. And then what happens to the glucose, to the carbon in the glucose? Well, it becomes part of the plant, it's organic. That's the definition there, carbon-based life form.
And then whatever grows, eventually must decompose. So, remember, now, where most of a grass plant is found? Underground? In the roots? So, all of that carbon that was in the atmosphere has been sequestered, captured, recycled into the living soil, making it more fertile and more able to support future generations of plant growth.
And scientists are only just now realizing how big a piece of the puzzle grasslands really are and it's not a moment too soon. Because grasslands have been nursing and nurturing humanity upon the Earth for maybe as long as there has ever been a humanity on the Earth. And now they look to us, their children, for our help.
So thank you for your help today, for choosing to be here today, because life is for "We The People," we are what we choose to be. And you can either choose to be reactive individually and then you get to suffer the consequences, or you can choose to participate in existence together as a group, in a larger, more ecological, dare I say, fashion.
And by being here today in some small way you have done exactly that as individuals, you have come together, collectively, proving and bravely demonstrating what "E Pluribus Unum" could still be in America and around the world.
So, congratulations, you have made your Kindergarten teachers very proud today, but now is not the time to rest, of course. Far more existential challenges await us all in the next few decades, so definitely use today and every day to strengthen your inalienable ability to choose. Because, ultimately, Mother Nature always bats last and she never, EVER, strikes out.
So, "Terra Alta Prata Robustior!" Oh, no, he's really lost it. He's not even speaking English anymore. Well, that's Latin. I promised you a Latin phrase, remember, and so with you being here today, the tallgrass is definitely stronger and more resilient. But, of course, that's just for today, the only day we every really get.
Destiny comes for us all eventually, so with apologies to dead poets, past, present, and future, I give to you, let's see..."Gather ye rosebuds; enjoy their perfume. But pay heed to this omen-tide. Tomorrow lives not for us to bloom, but for our fruit's florescence to abide." In other words, "Carpe Diem Cordate." That's your assignment for today. Look that up. I think "Carpe Diem" we can all figure out already, but "Cordate" that's your challenge here. Thank you very much, you all. Thank you.
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