50 Fun Facts About Prairie

The word 'prairie' comes from which language's word for meadow?

French explorers called the treeless plains prairie, their word for meadow, and English speakers, who had no name of their own for such grasslands, borrowed it.

To which biome do ecologists assign prairies?

Temperate grasslands and shrublands is the biome the prairie shares with the steppe of Ukraine and Kazakhstan: lands that get enough rain to feed grasses but too little to raise a forest.

Which South American grassland belongs to the same biome as the prairie?

The Pampas of Argentina and Uruguay are South America's prairie and the home of its cowboy, the gaucho, whose roaming life ended once ranchers fenced the plains and railways crossed them in the 1800s.

From west to east, in what order do the prairie's three grass types appear?

Shortgrass to mixed to tallgrass is the sequence: the dry western plains give way eastward to richer, wetter soils that can support grasses taller than a person.

Short of timber, prairie settlers built their first houses from stacked bricks of what?

Sod: prairie grass grows so thickly matted that settlers could slice the turf into bricks and stack them into a 'soddy', quick and cheap to build but prone to wash out in heavy rain.

Which three Canadian provinces are known as the Prairie Provinces?

Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are the Prairie Provinces; their grasslands lie mostly in the south, while the north is boreal forest and shield.

Palliser's Triangle, a dry stretch of the Canadian prairie once written off for settlement, became a major producer of which crop?

Wheat. John Palliser's 1857-60 expedition judged the triangle too arid to settle, but the botanist John Macoun later declared it fit for farming, and newcomers turned it into part of Canada's great wheat country.

The former tallgrass prairie of Iowa and Illinois now forms the heart of which farming region?

The Corn Belt grew where the tallgrass once stood: thousands of years of decaying prairie plants left a soil so deep and rich that settlers plowed nearly all of it for crops.

Which range casts the rain shadow that keeps the Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies dry?

The Rockies force Pacific air to drop its rain and snow on their western slopes, so the plains downwind stay too dry for forest and grasses took over instead.

About three-quarters of a prairie's plant material is made up of which part of its plants?

Roots make up about three-quarters of a prairie's plant material, safe below the surface, so the grasses grow back after the droughts, frosts and grazing that strip everything above.

For thousands of years, Native peoples drew game to fresh growth on the tallgrass prairie using what?

Fire, set on purpose, killed tree seedlings but not the grasses, which quickly resprout, and the tender green shoots that followed drew bison and deer within reach of hunters.

Grasses dominate a tallgrass prairie, but which plants supply most of its species?

Wildflowers win the count: a tallgrass prairie may hold 40 to 60 kinds of grass but more than 300 kinds of flowering plants, even though the grasses make up most of the greenery.

Which grass is one of the dominant species of the tallgrass prairie?

Big bluestem, the signature grass of the tallgrass prairie, often tops 6 feet and is nicknamed 'turkey foot' because its seed head forks into three prongs like a bird's toes.

The Konza Tallgrass Prairie research site is in which state?

Kansas and Konza are two spellings of one name, that of the Kansa people who lived there; the research station near Manhattan has studied its unplowed tallgrass since 1971.

What name is given to the dusty hollows that bison leave across the prairie?

Wallows are where bison roll to shed winter fur and drive off biting flies, and in the mating season bulls wallow to show off their strength and leave their scent.

In 1907, which zoo sent 15 bison by rail to help restock the Great Plains?

The Bronx Zoo bred bison in New York City while only a few hundred were left in the whole country, then sent 15 by cart and rail to a reserve in the Wichita Mountains, where the herd still lives.

About how many bison are estimated to have roamed North America before the mass hunts of the 1800s?

60 million is the classic estimate, though others vary widely. Commercial hide hunters then cut the herds to a few hundred animals by the late 1800s.

Which US national park has been home to wild bison continuously since prehistoric times?

Yellowstone sheltered the country's last wild herd, which poachers had cut to about two dozen animals by 1902; the Army, which then ran the park, guarded the survivors, and bison brought in from private herds helped rebuild it.

What was a 'buffalo jump'?

A cliff herds were driven over is what a buffalo jump was: at Head-Smashed-In in western Canada, hunters funnelled stampeding bison between lines of stone markers and over the edge for nearly 6,000 years.

Prairie dogs belong to which animal family?

Squirrels (family Sciuridae) include these ground-dwelling burrowers, which are named for a warning call that sounds like a bark.

What are the large colonies of black-tailed prairie dogs commonly called?

Towns can be enormous: the largest on record, in Texas, covered some 25,000 square miles. One warning bark sends the whole neighbourhood diving for its burrows.

What is a family group of black-tailed prairie dogs called?

A coterie is a black-tailed family, typically one male, a few females and their young; its members know one another by a nuzzling 'kiss' and together chase other prairie dogs off their patch.

What does Cynomys, the prairie dog's genus name, literally mean in Greek?

Dog mouse is what Cynomys says: the Greek kyon, dog, joined to mys, mouse. English speakers had already been calling the rodent a prairie dog since the 1770s, for a warning cry like a bark.

Researcher Con Slobodchikoff claims prairie-dog alarm calls encode what about a predator?

Its type, size, colour and speed are all encoded, Slobodchikoff claims; Gunnison's colonies in his experiments even gave distinct calls for people wearing differently coloured shirts.

Which endangered mustelid gets up to 90 percent of its diet from prairie dogs?

Black-footed ferret numbers crashed as prairie dogs were poisoned and hit by plague; the last known animal died in 1979 and the species was given up for lost until a wild colony turned up in Wyoming in 1981.

Which prairie songbird is the state bird of six states, second only to the northern cardinal?

Western meadowlark: despite the name it is no lark but a member of the blackbird family, told from its eastern twin mainly by a rich, flute-like song.

Which prairie animal is the fastest land mammal in the Americas?

Pronghorn are not as fast as a cheetah in a sprint but can keep up a fast pace for miles, which no cheetah can, so they simply outrun every predator left in North America.

What is the greater prairie chicken's mating display called, after the sound the males make?

Booming is the name for the display: males inflate the air sacs on their necks, stamp their feet and emit a low hooting boom on traditional leks each spring.

Which Illinois blacksmith solved the problem of sticky prairie soil with a steel moldboard plow in 1837?

John Deere, a blacksmith in Grand Detour, shaped a polished steel moldboard in 1837 that scoured itself clean in the sticky soil where wooden and cast-iron plows clogged.

Because they were never plowed, which places shelter some of the Midwest's last scraps of original prairie?

Pioneer cemeteries were set aside before the plow reached them, so their grasses were never turned under and they became accidental nature preserves; less than 4 percent of the tallgrass prairie is left.

What are the seasonal wetlands of the northern Plains, home to over half the continent's migratory waterfowl, called?

Prairie potholes fill with snowmelt and rain each spring, some only for a season, and draw ducks by the million to breed; yet more than half of them have been drained or altered for farming.

Which invention, mass-produced from the 1870s, brought an end to the open range on the Great Plains?

Barbed wire suited a land short of timber and stone for fencing; Joseph Glidden's 1874 design sold so fast that by the early 1880s Texas ranchers and farmers were at war over cut fences.

Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joad family as they flee the Dust Bowl for California?

The Grapes of Wrath was the best-selling book of 1939, yet that same year it was also banned from some libraries and publicly burned, even as the rest of the country read it.

Which folk singer lived through the Dust Bowl's Black Sunday storm in Texas?

Woody Guthrie wrote 'So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh' after that April day in 1935, when his neighbours took the black cloud for the end of the world and began saying their goodbyes.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was centred on which region?

The Oklahoma Panhandle and the Texas Panhandle beside it were hit hardest: farmers had plowed up the native grass that held the soil, and when the rains failed the wind carried the bare earth away.

Which architect pioneered the Prairie style, with long, low houses inspired by the flat Midwestern landscape?

Frank Lloyd Wright wanted an American style free of borrowed European fashions, so he stretched roofs, eaves and bands of windows sideways to match the long horizon of the land around Chicago.

What term describes grassland that has never been plowed?

Virgin prairie cannot simply be replanted: grassland reseeded after plowing lacks the full range of plants and wildlife found where the ground was never broken, which is why even tiny surviving patches are prized.

Which hill country of the Great Plains holds the largest surviving expanse of tallgrass prairie?

The Flint Hills kept their grass because bands of flinty limestone lie just under the soil: settlers could not plow them, so they grazed cattle there instead.

Which non-profit group owns most of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Strong City?

The Nature Conservancy took over the land from the trust that first held it; the law that created the preserve requires most of it to stay in private hands, so the Park Service runs a park it barely owns.

What label did Stephen Long's 1820 expedition put on the treeless plains it judged unfit for farming?

The Great American Desert went onto Long's map, and his chronicler, Edwin James, wrote the region off; the verdict aged badly, because much of that land is now cropland and pasture.

Which explorer identified the 100th meridian in the 1870s as the line where the arid West begins?

John Wesley Powell, the Grand Canyon explorer, drew a line that still shows on the ground: to the east rain feeds close-packed farms, to the west the farms are fewer and bigger, given over to ranching or leaning on irrigation.

What is the huge underground water source beneath the Great Plains called?

The Ogallala Aquifer lies under parts of eight states and is pumped for irrigation far faster than rain refills it, so scientists class parts of it as water that, once gone, will not come back.

Research since 1979 suggests tornadoes are growing rarer in Tornado Alley and more frequent in which nicknamed region to its east?

Dixie Alley, the tornado belt of the Mid-South, already suffers more tornado casualties than anywhere else in the country, so the shift is carrying the storms toward the people least able to bear them.

Which author wrote the Little House on the Prairie books, based on her Midwestern childhood?

Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the stories first: her family moved again and again across the frontier, and at 15 she was already teaching in a country school.

Which 1862 law granted settlers 160 acres of prairie after five years' residence?

The Homestead Act became law once the Southern states had seceded and left Congress; by the time it was repealed in 1976 it had passed about a tenth of all the land in the country into private hands.

Which far-western region was native prairie before settlers plowed nearly all of it for grain?

Washington's Palouse was turned over to crops almost completely; the scraps of native prairie that survive are mostly on ground too awkward to reach with a plow.

Besides glacial till, which deposit is the parent material of much of the prairie's richest soil?

Loess began as rock ground to flour beneath the glaciers, washed out onto mudflats and then carried off by the wind; in western Iowa it lies deeper than anywhere else outside China.

Drumlins, the streamlined hills left in swarms by ice sheets, take their name from the language of which country?

Ireland's word druim, a back or ridge, is the root of drumlin. Each hill was streamlined by moving ice, so its long axis still points the way the vanished ice sheet flowed.

Which rugged corner of the Upper Midwest did the last ice sheets pass by?

The Driftless Area is named for drift, the rubble glaciers leave behind, which it lacks; its steep, shaded slopes stay so cool that a rare snail left over from the Ice Age still lives on them.

The world's largest protected tallgrass prairie, near Pawhuska in Osage County, lies in which state?

Oklahoma's preserve was a working cattle ranch until 1989; bison were later brought back, and a free-ranging herd of about 2,500 now does much of the grazing.