Reading Pictures

Oh Say, Can You See

Once, when the prairie stretched as far as the sky, a person or a buffalo could roll around in a patch of pink and white shooting stars without a thought, other than: “This is my beautiful world.”

Today we’d have to bring back the buffalo for that, as thoughtful people wouldn’t want to massage their backs on even one body’s length of this rare ecosystem.

Yet this photo shows a struggle. The brush hungers to accomplish a much more profound obliteration than a buffalo’s hide could deliver. The brush can’t help itself; it’s in its genes.

Here, in early spring, we can see through those sticks of brush to tens of thousands more shooting stars on the other side, only because a fire has top-killed the shrubs. This little patch of dogwood brush had been on a mission to overwhelm hundreds of acres of highest-quality prairie. Shooting star is actually one species that survives for some years under the brush, because it finishes its photosynthesizing and goes dormant early in the year. (If you look close, you can see some blooming where the brush grew last year.)

Not so the yellow plant, hoary puccoon. It doesn’t recover from even a little shade. It would probably have to seed itself back in, a process likely requiring many years, or decades, in the heavy competition of a diverse and crowded ecosystem.

Actually, the fire top-killed only the outermost shrubs. Notice the leafy ones deeper in the patch to the left. Shrub clones like this advance many feet during periods of fireless years, only to recede many feet during a good fire. Those who’ve been following “Reading Pictures” for ten years will know that, beyond the reach of the brush, this ancient prairie is an incomparably rich ecosystem. The white, pink, and yellow prairie flowers are just the advanced guard of more than one hundred rare wildflower species (and a dozen noble grasses) that will rise here and bloom in turn as the season unfolds. Long may they wave!

Photo by Donald Bolak. Chiwaukee Prairie owned and burned by the Wisconsin Nature Conservancy.
Words by Stephen Packard.