May 24, 2001

Plains Folk: Prairie Birds

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Its battered condition testifies to the high regard in which it is held in our house. It is Paul A. Johnsgard's "Birds of the Great Plains," an authoritative reference that is more than just a reference; between the maps and tables and sober descriptions you can sense the author's passion and reverence for his subject and indeed for all life on the plains.

Now from the University of Nebraska Press comes a worthy companion work that gives free rein to Johnson's love of the land and its creatures great and small, "Prairie Birds: Fragile Splendor in the Great Plains."

Johnsgard is Foundation Professor of Biology at the University of Nebraska and author of many books about Great Plains birdlife and wildlife. He is what I call a crossover writer. That's my term for a scientist, or poet, or historian whose understandings and prose are such that they transcend the narrow field of interest and become cultural touchstones. Johnsgard isn't just for birders. Prairie Birds is a joy for any self-conscious plainsperson.

We learn that the author has family roots on a homestead in the Sheyenne River valley (the present Sheyenne National Grasslands), grew up calling Wahpeton his home town, but never saw a live prairie chicken until moving to Nebraska. His mother's stories of chickens booming on the sandy savannahs of the Sheyenne then recurred. "I finally realized that until then my life had been incomplete," writes Johnsgard of that day in the Nebraska sandhills, "and that henceforth all Nebraska springs must be celebrated at least once in the company and presence of prairie grouse."

This writer's love of native prairie grouse -- prairie chickens and sharptails -- grips me. I spent large chunks of my life residing in the Flint Hills and Smoky Hills of Kansas. Today I live adjacent to those Sheyenne grasslands whose roots intertwined those of Johnsgard, haunt their chicken leks in spring, and tramp the Missouri Coteau for sharptails in autumn.

The kinship with prairie grouse is parcel to an interesting exercise in classification in one of Johnsgard's chapters. Here he attempts to catalog what should be considered the "characteristic birds" of the Great Plains. This, if you ask me, is not science. It's a matter of regional mythology, of choosing appropriate icons. I love it. Of the grouse Johnsgard writes, "These wonderful birds capture, in my opinion, the very essence of the prairie."

To renew your spirit as a plainsperson, absorb Johnsgard's treatise on the spring songs and flight songs of eastern and western meadowlarks. The song of the western male is a "flutelike array of notes tumbling forth like water from a bucket," the author tells us. "It is as typical of the western plains as a coyote's yipping howl or the flight of a long-billed curlew."

I don't like the title of the book, incorporating the phrase "fragile splendor." Prairie is not a particularly fragile formation. I also suspect that in the continuum of land use options on the plains -- ranging from prairie restoration to rank exploitation -- Johnsgard and I perch on different posts. We sit on the same fence, though–looking for some semblance of balance in regional life.

For too long we people of the plains have let ideological words like "wilderness" and "virgin prairie" rankle and delude us. There never was a wilderness. There never was a virgin prairie. These are (generally male) fantasies of the land. We all live in what Jeffersonian Americans called the "middle landscape," an inhabited place where we seek to draw inspiration and sustenance from nature without destroying it.

Paul Johnsgard calls on us to make place for prairie birds in our commonwealth and in our fields. There is a deeper call here, elemental as that of a booming grouse.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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