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What is it about a prairie that seems to seep into one’s soul? If any ecosystem symbolizes the American spirit, the prairie is it — not the great forests that had a counterpart in Europe, but the great grasslands which did not. When the European settlers left the shadows of the expansive Eastern forest and emerged on the edge of the prairies — they were looking into a strange and sun-drenched world. Learn birdcalls and you soon discover that each place in the world has its own distinctive music. Northern birdcalls are almost always high-pitched, sweet, and liquid. They sound like they belong hidden amidst spruce and pine forests. They whisper of evergreens singing to themselves, songs so tiny and fragile they sound like they have snowflakes in them.
If you took the calls of the
north woods, stretched them out, made them clearer and stronger, and stirred
them up with the wind and sun — you’d have the song of the prairie. The
bobolink’s call is so long and enchanting it wraps the whole sky in its song. A
meadowlark’s melancholy query holds the loneliness of infinite grass-scapes. To
turn the essence of Ka-ma-ma Prairie Preserve into words on paper is as difficult as describing
songs, but every bit as real. It is a place of intricate tapestries of
relationships — as complicated as a forest, but condensed into a thriving sunlit
ecosystem that hugs the earth
The
beauty of Ka-ma-ma is incomprehensible without at least some understanding of
prairie history. A few centur When the plow was invented with the power to cut prairie sod, all native grasslands began to rapidly disappear, going the way of the bison, black-footed ferrets, prairie dogs, jack rabbits, badgers, wolves and prairie chickens. Today, prairie remnants are most often found hunkered down in unplowed ‘forgotten’ places such as railroad tracks, pioneer cemeteries, and scarred lands with soil so poor that no one bothered to put them under a plow. In Illinois, the quintessential prairie state — less than a tenth of one percent of the 37 million acres of tall-grass prairies remain today. Intact American prairies are now as hard to find as old-growth forests. But unlike forests, once plowed under, prairies don’t come back — not unless painstakingly planted and restored.
To a forest-dweller, Ka-ma-ma Prairie at first feels like a very strange and exotic place — distinctively and richly southern. It is not until you follow Ka-ma-ma through several cycles of seasons does it begin to feel familiar, revealing a huge cast of recognizable characters. Beginning in May the prairies start to bloom in earnest. Every two weeks new species cycle in as others depart; the floral show reaching a heady crescendo in mid-August. Partly because the sunlight shines at our feet, the life in a prairie seems extraordinarily abundant compared to the aloofness of a forest canopy, especially in wildflower, reptile, amphibian, and insect species. Scores of butterfly species, both common and rare, are the hallmark species of Ka-ma-ma — commonly seen floating above the grasslands and sipping nectar from the many flowers.
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ies ago contiguous prairies were found in the great
interior of our continent, bounded by the broadleaf forest to the East, and the
Rockies to the West. Traveling westward across this expanse, rainfall
continually decreased, then as now. Approaching Indiana, when the annual
rainfall dropped below 32 inches, patches of tall-grass prairies began to appear
with grasses up to 12 feet tall. In Illinois the native tall-grass prairies more
completely displaced the forest in a waving sea of grasses — a complex ecosystem
boasting 400 plant species. As rainfall diminished further west, the tall-grass
prairie in turn was replaced by more drought-resistant mixed-grass and
short-grass prairies. Today, Ka-ma-ma Prairie is most similar to these shorter
prairies of the far west, with grasses rarely taller than 2 1/2 feet.
