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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 trappers' word prairie, meaning meadow, was borrowed by American backwoodsmen who had no word for the great grasslands they found beyond the forests.
Q 02To which biome do ecologists assign prairies?
Temperate grasslands and shrublands
Temperate grasslands and shrublands is the biome that prairies share with the steppes of Ukraine and Kazakhstan and the veld of South Africa.
Q 03Which of these South American grasslands is in the same biome as the prairie?
The Pampas
The Pampas, fertile temperate lowlands stretching across Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil, are South America's counterpart to the prairie.
Q 04Moving from west to east across the prairie, which type gives way to the others?
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 05Roughly how much rain does a tallgrass prairie receive per year?
Over 30 inches
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.
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 07Which dry southern Canadian region, once thought unarable, became a major wheat producer?
Palliser's Triangle
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.
Q 08What geological process spread the parent material for most prairie soils?
Glaciers depositing till
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.
Q 09What created the rain shadow that helped form the Canadian Prairies?
The uplift of the Rocky Mountains
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.
Q 10How deep can the roots of prairie plants reach?
Upwards of 20 feet
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.
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
40 to 60 grass species can grow in a single prairie, with more than 300 species of flowering plants on top of that.
Q 13Which of these is one of the dominant grasses of the prairie?
Big bluestem
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.
Q 21How many species of prairie dog are recognised?
5
5 species are recognised: black-tailed, white-tailed, Gunnison's, Utah and Mexican, all in the genus Cynomys.
Q 22What is a family group of black-tailed members of the burrowing squirrel genus Cynomys called?
A coterie
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.
Q 23What does the genus name Cynomys, shared by the prairie's barking burrowers, mean in Greek?
Dog mouse
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.
Q 14The Konza Tallgrass Prairie research site is in which state?
Kansas
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.
Q 15Which large grazing animal is considered essential to the prairie ecosystem?
Bison
Bison act as a keystone species: their grazing, trampling, wallowing and dung shape the plant community, and their wallows hold rainwater that supports amphibians.
Q 16How does the prairie's great grazer differ from cattle in its diet, according to ecologists?
It eats more grass than flowering plants
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.
Q 17What was the estimated population of North America's great grazing animal in the late 18th century?
60 million
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.
Q 18To how many animals had North America's great grazer fallen by 1889?
541
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.
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, a UNESCO site in western Canada, hunters used the technique 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 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.
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
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.
Q 28The mating display of the greater prairie chicken is known by what name?
Booming
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.
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 clean in the sticky sod where wooden and cast-iron plows clogged.
Q 30Roughly what share of North America's original tallgrass prairie remains unplowed?
Under 5 percent
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.