March 6, 2003

Plains Folk: Great Wildlife

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Winter is hard on certain volumes in my home library. Late winter is particularly severe on titles devoted to nature and wildlife, for cabin fever prompts frequent armchair expeditions. The frustrations of confinement wreak broken spines and tattered pages.

Some books, like egrets in the days of women’s hats, pay the price for their beauty. The stunning plates in Fishes of the Central United States, by Joseph R. Tomelleri and Mark E. Eberle, can transport me for a whole evening. The rich illustrations in J.T. Collins’ Natural Kansas make it subject to predation by those most destructive of omnivores, grandchildren.

Other volumes suffer for their utility. As a constant traveler the length of the plains, I treasure the Flora of the Great Plains for its authoritative scope. It speaks to Oklahoma as well as to Montana. The Handbook of North Dakota Plants, by O.A. Stevens, represents another approach, focusing on a particular province of the plains. This book I also love for its evocation of the author, one of those botanists so planted in a place that his feet grew roothair.

That book reminds me, too, that I have come to read such works not merely as references, but rather as biography, for the vicarious experience proffered by writers who have spent rich lives contemplating a rich country. That must be why I keep adding the works of Paul A. Johnsgard to my shelf and why I keep thumbing them. His latest offering is Great Wildlife of the Great Plains (University Press of Kansas).

His career at the University of Nebraska was energetic; his pseudo-retirement has been even more productive. Too, the fellow gets better and better in his descriptive powers, seasoned with an admixture of contemplation. It’s the sense of time, mortality and all that. "Years seem far too short for naturalists," Johnsgard writes, "and single seasons are even briefer."

Great Wildlife is an excursion the length and breadth of the plains. The diverse environments within the region organize the work. The chapter "Box Turtles, Blowouts, and Old Boots" is devoted to sandhills. "Waders, Dabblers, and Divers" does wetlands. I’m beginning to suspect, too, that these titles have another level of meaning. In Johnsgard’s catalog of wetland types, I think I’m a wader. Or maybe I’m thinking too much about this, but then, winter does that.

Two particularly notable chapters set the book apart from other offerings. One is "Cowbirds, Coyotes, and Cardinals," a chapter devoted to species that interact closely with humankind and have prospered with human settlement of the region. Barn swallows and backyard grackles are the creatures we live with day to day, and to embrace the wild in them enriches our lives. The other unusual chapter is "What Is Still So Great About the Great Plains?" It doesn’t exactly answer the question, but it encourages all of us to go out and see for ourselves.

Which will be great once things thaw out a little, but in the meantime, we can travel with Johnsgard. It’s interesting to learn that turtledoves are not drab-gray to other turtledoves, that in the spectrum of ultraviolet light, they exhibit sublime colors. It’s the more fascinating to share in the author’s delight when he illuminates one of the birds and discovers the iridescent purple beauty marks on its cheeks.

It’s equally fascinating to go back to the boyhood of the biologist in Christine, N. D., where he chafed under the sermons of a "black-frocked preacher preoccupied with the prospect of forthcoming damnation and hellfire" and escaped to greet the marbled godwits of spring in the sandhills. It’s time, I think, for Johnsgard to produce a full-fledged memoir.

"It is increasingly and unfortunately true," he mourns, "that ever more of the people who call the Great Plains their home, and perhaps were even born and raised here, have little or no conception of its natural attractions or inherent values." Preaching to the choir, I suspect. But preaching the best sermon I’ve heard in a long time.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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