My Prairie Journey

When I was in high school, my environmental science teacher had our class plant a prairie garden on campus. Inspired by the idea of ripping up sod and replacing it with the native plants that rightfully belonged there, I asked my parents if I could plant a prairie garden in our backyard. They said yes.

I rented a sod-cutter, bought a few native prairie plants, and grabbed a few handfuls of Sawtooth Sunflower (Helianthus grosserratus) seeds from my local Audubon nature center. After a few hours of muddy work one spring morning, my prairie garden was born.

The real joy came the following summer when I started to notice wildlife using the new habitat that I had created for them. Dozens of insects that I had never seen before materialized to drink nectar from my garden. American Goldfinches plucked seeds from the sunflowers. Rabbits and voles took shelter in the miniature forest of stems and stalks. These sights not only made my backyard more beautiful; they made me feel like I could actually do something to bring back tallgrass prairie, an ecosystem of which all but one percent has been destroyed.

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I carried this experience with me during college and my first year of fieldwork after graduating. One day while searching for my fourth field job, I came across a job posting from one of my favorite conservation nonprofits: The Nature Conservancy. However, it came with a catch. It was in Nebraska.

As a young naturalist growing up in Wisconsin, I had sworn to move away from the ecological desert that I had come to believe was the Midwest. Nebraska was nowhere on my bucket list, so I was hesitant to apply to the job. But then I thought about how rare prairies were, how much they needed my help, and how it had felt to create that oasis for wildlife in my backyard. I applied.

Later that year, I was (literally) up to my neck in prairie restoration. I learned with amazement how Nature Conservancy staff had figured out how to transform cropfields into beautifully diverse prairies in just five to seven years. And I got to re-live the experience in my backyard on a scale a thousand times greater.

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Our main project that year was to restore a degraded prairie from scratch. One of the first steps was collecting the seed that we would plant this prairie with.  That summer I spent many, many hours picking that seed. Even more importantly to me, I also recruited and trained volunteers to help us do so.

When winter came, it was time for us to finally seed the prairie. Part of the planting process required hand-sowing large amounts of seed across the wetlands and ridges of the unborn prairie. To do this, I organized my largest volunteer effort yet. Despite face-freezing winds and near zero-degree temperatures, more than 30 people showed up to volunteer. I still consider organizing that day one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done.

Despite the great turnout, I worried that the strong winds might have blown away our seed, dooming the restoration to embarrassing failure. So I waited for spring like an expecting father. May eventually came and my one-year job ended. I had done a lot for The Nature Conservancy’s prairies and had learned even more, but the prairie I helped create was by far my most treasured experience. As I drove to my next job in Montana, I stopped to get one last look at Nebraska’s newest prairie.

It was a gray day and the prairie had barely begun to grow. From a distance I’m sure people thought it was an ugly waste of space, but on my hands and knees I saw baby milkweed sprouting from soil that probably hadn’t known a native plant in a hundred years, and I thought about the wildlife it would feed.

In 2018 I moved to Colorado to work for the National Audubon Society, which everyone knows means one thing: driving distance to tallgrass prairies! Yes, I was excited for mountains and all, but I really was eager to return to the prairies that had made such a strong impact on my life. So last summer I drove back to Nebraska to see the prairie that I helped create. Here’s what I found:

Gone was dirtfield that I had seen two years before. In its place was a veritable jungle of sunflowers, grasses, and myriad other wildflowers. The wetlands we had seeded in the freezing wind were filled with beautiful species, and the sandy ridges were so dense you could hardly walk through them.

After a few seconds I found what I was looking for: insects using their new home. It was a dewy morning, and each bee, beetle, and bug that I found was like a gem glittering in the rising sun.

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The more I explored, the more I found. To my surprise, not only had the quick-growing pioneer plants gotten established, but some of the more conservative species had already started to grow too, far earlier than expected.

I know that I didn’t plant that prairie by myself. It took expertise from an ecologist and a land manager, funding from donors, and dozens of volunteer hands – plus the incredible resilience of the plants and insects themselves. But in being a part of that process I truly feel that I’ve created something wonderful and important. Tallgrass prairie may be all but extinct, but we showed that if people care enough about them, prairies will spring back almost as if nothing had ever happened to them.

What sparked this journey for me? It all began with two tiny prairies: one at a nature center, and one at a high school. I hope that with each prairie we plant, we not only create more habitat, but more prairie stewards.