Prairie Trivia
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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
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.
Q 02To which biome do ecologists assign prairies?
Temperate grasslands and shrublands
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.
Q 03Which South American grassland belongs to the same biome as the prairie?
The Pampas
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.
Q 04From west to east, in what order do the prairie's three grass types appear?
Shortgrass to mixed to tallgrass
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.
Q 05Short of timber, prairie settlers built their first houses from stacked bricks of what?
Sod
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.
Q 06Which three Canadian provinces are known as the Prairie Provinces?
Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba
Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are the Prairie Provinces; their grasslands lie mostly in the south, while the north is boreal forest and shield.
Q 07Palliser's Triangle, a dry stretch of the Canadian prairie once written off for settlement, became a major producer of which crop?
Wheat
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.
Q 08The former tallgrass prairie of Iowa and Illinois now forms the heart of which farming region?
The Corn Belt
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.
Q 09Which range casts the rain shadow that keeps the Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies dry?
The Rockies
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.
Q 10About three-quarters of a prairie's plant material is made up of which part of its plants?
Roots
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.
Q 11For thousands of years, Native peoples drew game to fresh growth on the tallgrass prairie using what?
Fire
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.
Q 12Grasses dominate a tallgrass prairie, but which plants supply most of its species?
Wildflowers
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.
Q 13Which grass is one of the dominant species of the tallgrass prairie?
Big bluestem
Q 21What are the large colonies of black-tailed prairie dogs commonly called?
Towns
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.
Q 22What is a family group of black-tailed prairie dogs called?
A coterie
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.
Q 23What does Cynomys, the prairie dog's genus name, literally mean in Greek?
Dog mouse
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.
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.
Q 14The Konza Tallgrass Prairie research site is in which state?
Kansas
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.
Q 15What name is given to the dusty hollows that bison leave across the prairie?
Wallows
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.
Q 16In 1907, which zoo sent 15 bison by rail to help restock the Great Plains?
The Bronx Zoo
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.
Q 17About how many bison are estimated to have roamed North America before the mass hunts of the 1800s?
60 million
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.
Q 18Which US national park has been home to wild bison continuously since prehistoric times?
Yellowstone
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.
Q 19What was a 'buffalo jump'?
A cliff herds were driven over
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.
Q 20Prairie dogs belong to which animal family?
Squirrels
Squirrels (family Sciuridae) include these ground-dwelling burrowers, which are named for a warning call that sounds like a bark.
Q 24Researcher Con Slobodchikoff claims prairie-dog alarm calls encode what about a predator?
Its type, size, colour and speed
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.
Q 25Which endangered mustelid gets up to 90 percent of its diet from prairie dogs?
Black-footed ferret
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.
Q 26Which prairie songbird is the state bird of six states, second only to the northern cardinal?
Western meadowlark
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.
Q 27Which prairie animal is the fastest land mammal in the Americas?
Pronghorn
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.
Q 28What is the greater prairie chicken's mating display called, after the sound the males make?
Booming
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.
Q 29Which Illinois blacksmith solved the problem of sticky prairie soil with a steel moldboard plow in 1837?
John Deere
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.
Q 30Because they were never plowed, which places shelter some of the Midwest's last scraps of original prairie?
Pioneer cemeteries
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.