50 free Prairie trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This prairie trivia quiz covers the great temperate grasslands of North America, from the tallgrass country of Iowa and Illinois to the shortgrass steppe under the Rockies and the wheat lands of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The easy questions cover where the word comes from, the continent's iconic grazing animal, the burrowing 'dogs' that are really squirrels and the disaster of the 1930s. From there the quiz moves into the ecology: rainfall bands, deep roots, the role of fire, glacial till and loess, the dominant grasses and the keystone species that keep the system going. The hard end covers Palliser's Triangle, the Konza and Flint Hills preserves, buffalo jumps, the black-footed ferret's return from presumed extinction, prairie-dog 'coteries' and alarm calls, the biofuel research of David Tilman, the numbers behind the bison's near-extinction and the tiny fraction of tallgrass prairie that survives. A few questions cover prairie culture, from Laura Ingalls Wilder to a minor-league team called the Sod Poodles. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the prairie, tallgrass prairie, prairie dogs, bison and related topics before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our national parks and North American wildlife quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'prairie' comes from which language's word for meadow?
French
American backwoodsmen borrowed it because they had no word for the great grasslands they found beyond the forests.
Q 02To which biome do ecologists assign prairies?
Temperate grasslands and shrublands
The steppes of Ukraine and Kazakhstan and the grasslands of Argentina belong to the same biome.
Q 03Which of these South American grasslands is in the same biome as the prairie?
The Pampas
They stretch across Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
Q 04Moving from west to east across the prairie, which type gives way to the others?
Shortgrass to mixed to tallgrass
The drier expanse under the Rockies gradually becomes the richer, wetter soils of the east.
Q 05Roughly how much rain does a tallgrass prairie receive per year?
Over 30 inches
Shortgrass prairies get only about 12 inches, and mixed-grass prairies fall between the two.
Q 06Which three Canadian provinces are known as the Prairie Provinces?
Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba
Their grasslands lie mostly in the south; the north is forest with more varied terrain.
Q 07Which dry southern Canadian region, once thought unarable, became a major wheat producer?
Palliser's Triangle
Advances in irrigation turned it into one of the most important agricultural regions in Canada.
Q 08What geological process spread the parent material for most prairie soils?
Glaciers depositing till
Wind-blown loess is the other major parent material; the last glaciers retreated about 10,000 years ago.
Q 09What created the rain shadow that helped form the Canadian Prairies?
The uplift of the Rocky Mountains
Lower precipitation downwind of the mountains favoured grasses over trees.
Q 10How deep can the roots of prairie plants reach?
Upwards of 20 feet
Up to three quarters of a prairie plant's biomass is below ground, which is why fire kills trees but not grasses.
Q 11What was the overwhelming source of the fires that shaped the tallgrass prairie?
Humans
Native people burned the land annually for 10,000 to 20,000 years to aid hunting, travel and safety.
Q 12How many different grass species may a single prairie contain?
40 to 60
On top of that, prairies can host more than 300 species of flowering plants.
Q 13Which of these is one of the dominant grasses of the prairie?
Big bluestem
Indian grass, side-oats grama, Canada wildrye and switchgrass are the others usually listed.
The Konza Tallgrass Prairie research site is in which state?
Q 21How many species of prairie dog are recognised?
5
Black-tailed, white-tailed, Gunnison's, Utah and Mexican.
Q 22What is a family group of black-tailed members of the burrowing squirrel genus Cynomys called?
A coterie
Family groups of the white-tailed, Gunnison's and Utah species are called clans; towns are divided into wards.
Q 23What does the genus name Cynomys, shared by the prairie's barking burrowers, mean in Greek?
Dog mouse
Lewis and Clark's 1804 journals recorded 'a Village' of the animal, using the name they had picked up from local traders.
Researcher Con Slobodchikoff claims prairie-dog alarm calls encode what about a predator?
Kansas
It hosts 250 native plant species and more than 3,000 kinds of insect.
Q 15Which large grazing animal is considered essential to the prairie ecosystem?
Bison
Their grazing, trampling, wallowing and dung shape the plant community; their dung alone supports over 1,000 insect species.
Q 16How does the prairie's great grazer differ from cattle in its diet, according to ecologists?
It eats more grass than flowering plants
That preference increases plant diversity, while cattle seem to favour the flowers.
Q 17What was the estimated population of North America's great grazing animal in the late 18th century?
60 million
By 1889 the species had been reduced to just 541 animals.
Q 18To how many animals had that population been reduced by 1889?
541
Wild numbers had recovered to roughly 31,000 by 2019.
Q 19What was a 'buffalo jump'?
A cliff herds were driven over
Native hunters also drove herds into fenced pens called buffalo pounds.
Q 20Prairie dogs belong to which animal family?
Squirrels
They are ground squirrels named for a warning call that sounds like a bark; five species are recognised.
Its type, size, colour and speed
He describes the call system as a form of grammar; there are distinct calls for hawks and for mammals such as coyotes.
Q 25Which endangered mustelid gets up to 90 percent of its diet from prairie dogs?
Black-footed ferret
Declared extinct in 1979, a remnant population turned up in 1981 and a clone named Elizabeth Ann was born in 2021.
Q 26In which state was a surviving wild population of black-footed ferrets discovered in 1981?
Wyoming
The species had been declared extinct two years earlier; captive breeding has since returned it to eight states.
Q 27Which prairie animal is the fastest land mammal in the Americas, at up to 55 mph?
Pronghorn
Though called an antelope, its closest living relatives are the giraffe and okapi.
Q 28The mating display of the greater prairie chicken is known by what name?
Booming
Once abundant, the grouse is now extremely rare or gone across much of its former range.
Q 29Which Illinois blacksmith solved the problem of sticky prairie soil with a steel moldboard plow in 1837?
John Deere
Wooden plows bounced and clogged in the dense sod; the steel version cut the roots and opened the land to farming.
Q 30Roughly what fraction of the original tallgrass prairie land cover remains today?
Less than 0.1 percent
Much of what survives is in cemeteries, railroad rights-of-way and rocky or hilly spots unfit for the plow.