Wumple.com

From BioPact – "Tallgrass Prairie Center to study polyculture prairie hay for bio-electricity: combining conservation and restoration with bioenergy":

"The University of Northern Iowa’s Tallgrass Prairie Center is conducting a five-year project to research how prairie hay can be used to generate electricity, partnering with Cedar Falls Utilities, Soil Tilth Lab at Iowa State University and the Black Hawk County Conservation Board."

"The Tallgrass Prairie Center is a strong advocate of progressive, ecological approaches utilizing native vegetation to provide environmental, economic and aesthetic benefits for the public good. The center is in the vanguard of roadside vegetation management, native Source Identified seed development, and prairie advocacy."

There is another good article on BioPact, "Bioenergy, conservation and wildlife protection can boost each other" that discusses biofuel from native prairie plantings.  The article described how native prairie plantings can provide cellulosic biomass for ethanol and other bioenergy methods while simultaneously sequestering carbon in the soil, improving water quality, and providing habitat for grassland birds, other prairie wildlife, and native prairie plant communities.

Here is the first installment of what I plan to be a regular feature: great quotes, poems, and songs about the prairie.

Quotes, poems, and songs can evoke the emotional side of prairies, which I hope will help get more people interested in learning about prairie and prairie conservation.

Today’s quotes were spotted on Sioux City Art Center’s web page in a description of an exhibit by Jin Lee called Wind and Prairie:

On the prairie there is sometimes a quiet so absolute that it allows one to begin again, to love the future.

— Robert Adams, To Make It Home: Photographs of the American West, 1989

The prairie path leads to the sky path; the paths are one: the continents are two; and you must make your journey from the prairies to the sky.

— William A. Quayle, The Prairie and the Sea, 1905

From the MIT Technology Review article "The Price of Biofuel":

"Blooming Prairies: Whether ethanol made from cellulosic biomass is good or bad for the environment, however, depends on what kind of biomass it is and how it is grown.

In a series of tests, Tilman grew a mixture of native prairie grasses (including switchgrass) in some of the field’s plots and single species in others. The results show that a diverse mix of grasses, even grown in extremely infertile soil, "could be a valuable source of biofuels," he says. "You could make more ethanol from an acre [of the mixed grasses] than you could from an acre of corn." Better yet, in a paper published in Science, Tilman showed that the prairie grasses could be used to make ethanol that is "carbon negative": the grasses might consume and store more carbon dioxide than is released by producing and burning the fuel made from them." "

From the Dallas Morning News:

"UTA students win for park project: University of Texas at Arlington students won the Student Project Award from the Midwest Section of the Texas chapter of the American Planning Association. The project focuses on a proposed Fort Worth Prairie Park, a 1,983-acre section of prairie in southwest Tarrant County, some of the last remaining original Fort Worth prairie ecosystem."

Read the full article at the Dallas Morning News.  Also read more about efforts to create a Fort Worth Prairie Park to protect a ~2000 acre tallgrass prairie remnant in Tarrant County.

From the Hidden Trails blog:

"Renowned National Geographic photographer is considered one of the premier wildlife photographers in the world. However, this Minnesota-based artist doesn’t measure his success by the numerous national and international awards and honors he has received. Rather, he gleans a well-earned sense of satisfaction from a steadfast and long-term commitment to his almost mystical quest to explore and understand the wilderness. As he says, "Ever since I was a boy, I have had a passion for telling stories about the forest and the prairies." …

An abbreviated list of Brandenburg’s project for National Geographic include: "The Tallgrass Prairie," "The Canadian Rockies," "South Dakota Badlands," "At Home with the Arctic Wolf," and "Ellesmere Island Life in the High Arctic.""

See Jim Brandenburg’s prairie photos by going to his web page, clicking on "Gallery", then clicking on "Prairie".

Jim Brandenburg also helped found the Brandenburg Prairie Foundation which helped protect 800 acres of tallgrass prairie in Minnesota.

Butterflies like the Monarch have always been one of my favorite parts of the prairie.

MonarchWatch has some interesting prairie-as-habitat information on their web site and have even started a blog.  For example, in "Status Report on the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) in Canada" by Crolla and Lafontaine they state:

In the last 150 years there has been a major shift in the North American distribution of the eastern population of the Monarch (see Brower 1995). Until the 1880’s, the prairie region of central North America appears to have been the main breeding area of the eastern Monarch population. The native prairie flora includes about 22 species of habitat-specific milkweeds (Asclepias), many of which can serve as larval hostplants, and an abundance of flowering plants that provide a diverse array of nectar resources for adult Monarchs.

(more…)

From the Austin-American Statesman article, "State’s biggest park offers improved access and more campsites", about TPWD’s Big Bend State Park (not the national park):

"The state acquired the land for this park in 1988. Heavy grazing by sheep and goats from the 1850s to 1940s took a toll, diminishing the grasslands and giving shrubs an opportunity to take root. But it’s not as desolate as it seems. The park is home to three of the four highest waterfalls in the state and about 120 perennial springs."

Read more about Texas’ desert grasslands at the Native Prairies Association of Texas (NPAT) web site.

In Texas, prairie lives on only in name in many places.  In my experience, most people living in tallgrass prairie ecoregions aren’t aware they live in such a region, don’t know it is an endangered ecosystem, and have never seen the beauty of tallgrass prairie.

One method of helping people realize they live in former prairies is to show them how many places are names after the prairies that existed there.

Texas cities, towns, and other names with prairie, meadow, or another prairie related word in the name:

• Grand Prairie
• Prairie View (Nogalus Prairie)
• Bailey’s Prairie
• Prairie Hill (Washington County)
• Meadows Place (formerly Meadows)
• Mustang Prairie
• Prairie Chapel
• Prairie Dell

(more…)

A story on MyWestTexas.com talks about the possibility of the Mallet Ranch (Hockley County) in the High Plains becoming an outdoor education center. 

I don’t know if the author is referring to the whole 50,000 acre ranch or just an area around the ranch buildings, or if the Mallet Ranch still contains good quality shortgrass prairie like the adjacent 6,000-acre Fitzgerald Ranch recently purchased by TNC to protect habitat for lesser prairie chickens and other native wildlife found in the region.

Read the full story at MyWestTexas.com and let us know if you happen to know more about the Mallet Ranch.

An update: There is some additional information about the Mallet Ranch in the Handbook of Texas Online:

""In 1925 and 1926 about 6,000 acres of Mallet land were put into dry-land farming for cotton and feed crops." (meaning the prairie on that acrage was plowed under)

"The Mallet Ranch covered nearly 45,000 acres in 1990, when it was still active."

Texas Master Naturalist Marybeth Arnold volunteers to restore native coastal tallgrass prairie for the endangered Attwater’s Prairie Chicken at TNC’s Texas City Prairie Preserve.  From the Houston Chronicle story:

"The work of restoring a vanishing habitat can also be backbreaking, blister-raising labor, but Arnold doesn’t mention that. Nor does she brag about the fact that she and other volunteers have recreated one of the few examples of coastal prairie in Texas. …

You’ll find her most Tuesdays at the Texas City Prairie Preserve, where she is one of a handful of people working to return the 2,300-acre spread to the way it was when bison foraged and periodic prairie fires raged from the Mexican border to Louisiana."

Read the full article, "A home for Attwater’s prairie chickens to play", at the Houston Chronicle’s web site.