40 Fun Facts About Temperate Grasslands

Which icon of cowboy films is really an invasive plant that reached South Dakota from Russia in the 1870s?

Tumbleweed of the classic kind is Russian thistle, which arrived in contaminated flaxseed. The dry plant snaps off at the stem and scatters its seeds as the wind rolls it along.

Baikonur Cosmodrome, launch site of Sputnik 1 and Yuri Gagarin, stands on the open steppe of which country?

Kazakhstan leases the spaceport to Russia. The name Baikonur was reportedly chosen in 1961 to mislead the West toward a small mining town some 320 km away.

Which naturalist realised in Patagonia that a flightless bird his party had just eaten was a species he had long sought?

Charles Darwin rescued the head, neck, legs and a wing from the leftovers of the bird, which the expedition's artist had shot. The species still carries his name.

Burrowing owls of the American grasslands defend their underground nests by imitating which feared animal?

Rattlesnake-like rattling and hissing comes from inside the burrow when the owl feels threatened, a bluff that works on predators that have learned to fear the real snake.

Which pioneer vehicle of the American West was nicknamed the prairie schooner?

Covered wagon tops of white canvas looked like a ship's sails crossing a sea of grass, though oxen, mules or horses did the hauling, not the wind.

Prairie dogs, the burrowing 'town' builders of North America's grasslands, belong to which family of rodents?

Squirrels count prairie dogs among their ground-dwelling relatives, alongside marmots and chipmunks. Explorer Meriwether Lewis called the animal a barking squirrel.

Which shaggy grazer of the North American prairie was named the national mammal of the United States in 2016?

Bison once roamed in vast herds, but hunting in the 1800s cut their number to as few as 541 before conservation brought them back.

Which sprinter of the North American prairie is the fastest land mammal in the Americas, reaching about 55 mph?

Pronghorn cannot match a cheetah's burst but can hold top speed for far longer. Often called antelope, they are not true antelopes at all.

Which garden flower, a symbol of the Netherlands, grows wild on steppes and mountains as far east as Central Asia?

Tulip bulbs were first cultivated by Persian and Turkish gardeners, long before the flower reached Dutch fields.

Which Ice Age giant gives its name to the cold, dry steppe that was once Earth's most extensive biome?

Mammoth steppe stretched from Iberia across Eurasia and Alaska to Canada's Yukon during the ice ages, feeding huge herds of grazing animals.

What name is given to the skilled, wandering cattle herders on horseback of the Argentine and Uruguayan pampas?

Gaucho riders, reputed to be brave and unruly, became a folk symbol of Argentina and Uruguay, celebrated in legend and literature.

Which ruler united the nomadic tribes of the steppe in 1206 and founded the largest contiguous empire in history?

Genghis Khan was born Temüjin and took his famous title at a tribal assembly; what the title actually means is still uncertain.

Which round, portable tent, insulated with felt, is the traditional home of herders on the Central Asian steppe?

Yurt is a word from the Turkic languages, and the same felt-insulated home is also known as a ger.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a cyclone carries Dorothy and Toto away from a prairie farm in which state?

Kansas is home to Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, and getting back there drives the whole story, by way of a yellow brick road.

Which author turned her pioneer childhood on the American frontier into the Little House on the Prairie books?

Laura Ingalls Wilder published the novels in the 1930s and 1940s, half a century after the frontier childhood they describe.

Which 1930s disaster struck after farmers ploughed up the deep-rooted grasses that held prairie soil in place?

Dust Bowl storms blew away topsoil that native grasses had trapped through earlier droughts, after a run of wet years had convinced settlers the climate had changed for good.

Which blacksmith built a polished steel plough in 1837 that could finally cut through sticky prairie soil?

John Deere, born in Vermont, made the first commercially successful steel plough; its self-scouring blade shed the clay that clogged older designs.

Which North American prairie native, whose young buds turn to follow daylight, is grown worldwide for oil-rich seeds?

Sunflower buds stop turning once they mature and face east from then on. Native Americans grew the plant as a crop long before it reached Europe.

Which antelope of South Africa's grasslands, famed for stiff-legged leaps called pronking, is the national animal?

Springbok leaps can carry the animal 2 metres into the air, and the word pronking comes from the Afrikaans for showing off.

Which large flightless bird, resembling a small ostrich, roams the open pampas of South America?

Rhea fathers do the nesting: the male incubates anywhere from ten to sixty eggs. South Americans know the bird as the ñandú.

Which masked prairie predator was declared extinct in 1979, until a wild colony turned up in Wyoming two years later?

Black-footed ferret numbers collapsed along with prairie dogs, which make up as much as 90% of its diet. Captive breeding has since returned it to eight US states.

Which antelope of the Central Asian steppe is instantly recognised by its bloated, downward-pointing nostrils?

Saiga males alone carry horns, which are thick, wax-coloured and slightly translucent, with 12 to 20 pronounced rings.

Przewalski's horse, once extinct in the wild, was returned from zoo-bred herds in the 1990s to which country's steppe?

Mongolia's herds descend from a handful of horses caught for zoos around 1900. The animal has 33 pairs of chromosomes, one more than a domestic horse.

Which humus-rich soil of the Eurasian steppe, named from the Russian for its dark colour, gives very high farm yields?

Chernozem means black earth: the soil holds 4 to 16% humus and stores moisture well, which is why ploughed steppe makes such productive farmland.

The name of South America's pampas comes from a word for 'plain' in which Indigenous language?

Quechua gave Spanish the word pampa. The Pampas now take in parts of Argentina, all of Uruguay and the southern tip of Brazil.

The Puszta, a grassy plain of grey cattle and mounted herdsmen called csikós, lies in which European country?

Hungary's Puszta is also home to the woolly Mangalitsa pig and the horned Racka sheep, breeds bound up with its herding traditions.

Which mildly alcoholic drink of the Central Asian steppe is made by fermenting mare's milk?

Kumis turns out mildly alcoholic because mare's milk holds more sugar than cow's or goat's milk, giving the yeasts more to work on.

Which invention, patented by farmer Joseph Glidden in 1874, gave settlers a cheap way to fence the treeless plains?

Barbed wire was cheaper and quicker than timber rails or thorny hedges, and it set fence-building farmers against ranchers who were losing the open range.

Grasses survive constant grazing and mowing because each leaf blade keeps growing from which part?

Its base is where a grass blade grows, so a bite or a mower removes only the oldest part and the leaf simply lengthens again from below.

Which violent storms strike the United States, above all its central plains, more often than any other country?

Tornadoes are born there when warm, humid air meets cool, dry air from Canada, which is why the region is nicknamed Tornado Alley.

Which yellow-chested prairie songbird is the state bird of six US states, more than any bird except the cardinal?

Western meadowlark is a misleading name: despite the flute-like song that earned it, the bird is no lark at all but a member of the New World blackbird family.

Up to 450,000 of which birds pause on Nebraska's Platte River each year at the heart of their migration route?

Sandhill cranes are named for this very habitat: the Platte runs along the edge of the Sandhills, a vast region of the plains.

Which caffeine-rich herbal drink, sipped from a gourd through a metal straw, is the daily brew of pampas herders?

Mate is drunk through a bombilla, a metal straw, traditionally silver, that doubles as a sieve to hold back the leaves.

Which Soviet leader's Virgin Lands campaign sent young volunteers to plough up vast tracts of steppe in the 1950s?

Nikita Khrushchev's scheme began well, but harvests later fell and soil erosion turned it into an environmental disaster for the steppe.

The word prairie, adopted by English speakers for North America's grasslands, is which language's word for a meadow?

French settlers were already using the word when English-speaking backwoodsmen first met vast natural meadows they had no name for.

Which warm, dry wind sweeping onto the prairies of Alberta and Montana do the Blackfoot people call the snow eater?

Chinook is a name borrowed from the Chinook people of the lower Columbia River, near the Pacific, where it first meant a warm wind blowing inland off the ocean.

The Prairie Pothole Region is one of North America's most important breeding areas for which birds?

Ducks breed there in such numbers that about half the continent's main game species nest in the region, on only a tenth of the breeding habitat.

Monarch butterflies crossing the prairie lay their eggs on which wildflower, the food plant of their caterpillars?

Milkweed defends itself with hairs, toxins and sticky latex, yet monarch caterpillars are specialised to eat it anyway.

Big bluestem, a towering grass of the North American prairie, has a branched flower head likened to which bird's foot?

Turkey foot is the grass's nickname, because its flower head usually splits into three narrow spikes at the top of the stem.

Which bird of the Eurasian steppe has males that rank among the heaviest flying animals alive?

Great bustard males court on shared display grounds, tilting forward until their whiskery chin feathers point skyward and the head disappears from view.