50 Fun Facts About Prairie

The word 'prairie' comes from which language's word for meadow?

French trappers' word prairie, meaning meadow, was borrowed by American backwoodsmen who had no word for the great grasslands they found beyond the forests.

To which biome do ecologists assign prairies?

Temperate grasslands and shrublands is the biome that prairies share with the steppes of Ukraine and Kazakhstan and the veld of South Africa.

Which of these South American grasslands is in the same biome as the prairie?

The Pampas, fertile temperate lowlands stretching across Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil, are South America's counterpart to the prairie.

Moving from west to east across the prairie, which type gives way to the others?

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.

Roughly how much rain does a tallgrass prairie receive per year?

Over 30 inches of rain a year sustains tallgrass prairie; shortgrass prairie gets only about 12 inches, and mixed-grass prairie falls between the two.

Which three Canadian provinces are known as the Prairie Provinces?

Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are the Prairie Provinces; their grasslands lie mostly in the south, while the north is boreal forest and shield.

Which dry southern Canadian region, once thought unarable, became a major wheat producer?

Palliser's Triangle, the semi-arid southern Canadian plains that Captain John Palliser judged unfit for farming in the 1850s, became a wheat belt once irrigation and dry-farming methods arrived.

What geological process spread the parent material for most prairie soils?

Glaciers depositing till spread the parent material for most prairie soils; the last ice sheets retreated about 10,000 years ago, leaving ground-up rock debris across the plains.

What created the rain shadow that helped form the Canadian Prairies?

The uplift of the Rocky Mountains created a rain shadow: air drops its moisture on the western slopes and leaves the plains to the east dry, favouring grasses over trees.

How deep can the roots of prairie plants reach?

Upwards of 20 feet is the reach of the deepest prairie roots; with most of a plant's biomass below ground, grasses resprout after fires that kill invading trees.

What was the overwhelming source of the fires that shaped the tallgrass prairie?

Native people burned the land annually for 10,000 to 20,000 years to aid hunting, travel and safety.

How many different grass species may a single prairie contain?

40 to 60 grass species can grow in a single prairie, with more than 300 species of flowering plants on top of that.

Which of these is one of the dominant grasses of the prairie?

Big bluestem, which can reach 8 feet and is nicknamed 'turkey foot' for its three-branched seed head, dominates the tallgrass prairie alongside Indian grass, switchgrass and little bluestem.

The Konza Tallgrass Prairie research site is in which state?

Kansas hosts the Konza Prairie Biological Station near Manhattan, a long-term ecological research site where scientists study the effects of fire and grazing on unplowed tallgrass.

Which large grazing animal is considered essential to the prairie ecosystem?

Bison act as a keystone species: their grazing, trampling, wallowing and dung shape the plant community, and their wallows hold rainwater that supports amphibians.

How does the prairie's great grazer differ from cattle in its diet, according to ecologists?

It eats more grass than flowering plants: the great grazer selects grasses, leaving forbs to flourish and raising plant diversity, whereas cattle take more of the flowering plants.

What was the estimated population of North America's great grazing animal in the late 18th century?

60 million of the great grazers are thought to have roamed North America in the late 18th century, before hide hunting and the railroads nearly wiped them out during the 1800s.

To how many animals had North America's great grazer fallen by 1889?

541 animals were all that remained in 1889, after hide hunters and the railroads had emptied the plains; wild numbers recovered to roughly 31,000 by 2019.

What was a 'buffalo jump'?

A cliff herds were driven over is what a buffalo jump was; at Head-Smashed-In, a UNESCO site in western Canada, hunters used the technique for nearly 6,000 years.

Prairie dogs belong to which animal family?

Squirrels (family Sciuridae) include these ground-dwelling burrowers, which are named for a warning call that sounds like a bark.

How many species of prairie dog are recognised?

5 species are recognised: black-tailed, white-tailed, Gunnison's, Utah and Mexican, all in the genus Cynomys.

What is a family group of black-tailed members of the burrowing squirrel genus Cynomys called?

A coterie is the family group of the black-tailed species, typically one male with several females and young; white-tailed, Gunnison's and Utah groups are called clans, and towns are divided into wards.

What does the genus name Cynomys, shared by the prairie's barking burrowers, mean in Greek?

Dog mouse is the literal meaning of Cynomys, from Greek kyon (dog) and mys (mouse), a nod to the bark-like call; Lewis and Clark recorded a 'village' of them in 1804.

Researcher Con Slobodchikoff claims prairie-dog alarm calls encode what about a predator?

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.

Which endangered mustelid gets up to 90 percent of its diet from prairie dogs?

Black-footed ferret numbers crashed as its burrowing prey was poisoned and hit by plague; declared extinct in 1979, it was rediscovered in 1981, and a cloned kit, Elizabeth Ann, was born in December 2020.

In which state was a surviving wild population of black-footed ferrets discovered in 1981?

The species had been declared extinct two years earlier; captive breeding has since returned it to eight states.

Which prairie animal is the fastest land mammal in the Americas, at up to 55 mph?

Pronghorn can sustain about 55 mph, second only to the cheetah among land animals; though called an antelope, its closest living relatives are the giraffe and okapi.

The mating display of the greater prairie chicken is known by what name?

Booming is the name for the display: males inflate orange air sacs on their necks, stamp their feet and emit a low hooting boom on traditional leks each spring.

Which Illinois blacksmith solved the problem of sticky prairie soil with a steel moldboard plow in 1837?

John Deere, a blacksmith in Grand Detour, shaped a polished steel moldboard in 1837 that scoured clean in the sticky sod where wooden and cast-iron plows clogged.

Roughly what share of North America's original tallgrass prairie remains unplowed?

Under 5 percent of the original tallgrass prairie survives, much of it on rocky hill country that defeated the plow; remnants elsewhere hide in cemeteries and railroad rights-of-way.

What are the glacier-carved seasonal wetlands of the northern Plains, nicknamed the 'duck factory', called?

Prairie potholes are shallow depressions left by retreating ice sheets across the northern Great Plains and Canadian Prairies; the region rears over half of North America's ducks in good years.

What 1870s invention helped convert the open-range shortgrass prairie into fenced pastures and cropland?

Barbed wire, patented by Joseph Glidden in 1874, let settlers fence the treeless shortgrass plains cheaply, ending the open range and turning it into pastures and cropland.

The 1930s 'black blizzards' of airborne prairie soil were known collectively as what?

The Dust Bowl is the name for the 1930s drought years when plowed-up topsoil blew in 'black blizzards' that reached the East Coast and drove hundreds of thousands from the Plains.

In which year did 'Black Sunday', the worst storm of the 1930s dust storms, strike?

Black Sunday, 14 April 1935, sent a towering wall of dust across the southern Plains, turning day to night; a reporter's dispatch the next day gave the era its enduring nickname.

The 1930s soil-storm disaster was roughly centred on which region?

The Oklahoma Panhandle and the adjoining Texas Panhandle formed the core of the disaster, which also took in parts of four neighbouring states, from south-eastern Colorado to north-eastern New Mexico.

Which University of Minnesota ecologist found that mixed prairie-plant biofuels could yield 51 percent more energy per acre than corn ethanol?

David Tilman's 2006 Science paper reported that diverse prairie plantings yielded 51 percent more energy per acre than corn ethanol while growing on infertile soil and competing with no food crop.

What term describes grassland that has never been plowed?

Virgin prairie is grassland that has never felt the plow; restored or reconstructed prairie has been reseeded after disturbance, and fallow land is plowed ground left unsown.

The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, north of Strong City, is in which region of its state?

The Flint Hills, a band of limestone and chert hills running north-south through the eastern part of the state, were too rocky to plow, so they hold the largest expanse of surviving tallgrass prairie.

Which conservation group owns most of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Strong City?

The Nature Conservancy owns nearly all of the preserve's roughly 11,000 acres, bought in 2005, while the National Park Service manages the site under a partnership agreement.

What did early settlers call the prairie region they later turned into farmland?

The Great American Desert was the label Stephen Long's 1820 expedition put on the plains west of the Missouri, a region settlers later plowed into farmland within a century.

The 100th meridian splits the Great Plains into areas getting more or less than how much yearly rainfall?

20 inches of annual rainfall is the rough dividing line along the 100th meridian; west of it the High Plains are semi-arid steppe better suited to rangeland than crops.

What is the huge underground water source beneath the southern Great Plains called?

The Ogallala Aquifer, stretching under eight states from South Dakota to Texas, has been pumped for centre-pivot irrigation far faster than rainfall recharges it.

The twister-prone south-eastern Great Plains are popularly known as what?

Tornado Alley is the nickname for the plains from north Texas to the Dakotas, where cold, dry mountain air meets warm, moist Gulf air to spawn more tornadoes than anywhere else on Earth.

Which author wrote the Little House on the Prairie books, based on her Midwestern childhood?

Laura Ingalls Wilder drew on her own childhood moves from Wisconsin to the Dakota Territory; eight Little House novels appeared in her lifetime, starting with Little House in the Big Woods in 1932.

Which 1862 law granted settlers 160 acres of prairie after five years' residence?

The Homestead Act, signed by Lincoln in 1862, granted 160 acres to any adult who lived on and improved the land for five years, pulling waves of settlers onto the prairie.

Which far-western region, along with California's Central Valley, is singled out as prairie?

Washington's Palouse, a region of rolling hills in the state's south-east, is a native bunchgrass grassland now famed for wheat; with California's Central Valley it is the main far-western prairie.

Besides glacial till, which wind-blown deposit is an important parent material for prairie soils?

Loess, wind-blown silt picked up from glacial outwash plains and dropped across the Midwest, forms deep fertile blankets over the till left when the ice retreated about 10,000 years ago.

Elliptical glacial hills up to 200 feet high found on the prairie take their name from which country?

Ireland gave the word: drumlin comes from Irish droimnín, 'little ridge', and the hills run parallel to the old ice flow, with large fields in western New York and southern Wisconsin.

Parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota untouched by the ice sheets are known as what?

The driftless zone, better known as the Driftless Area, escaped the ice sheets as highlands to the north split the glacial lobes, which passed on both sides; its rugged bluffs and coulees lack glacial drift.

The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska, the largest protected tallgrass remnant, lies in which state?

Oklahoma's Osage County holds the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska, about 40,000 acres of unplowed grassland grazed by a free-ranging herd of the prairie's great grazer.