Newsletter title

December 2013

In This Edition

2013 Bison Roundup Summary

—Bob Hamilton

Bison Roundup Summary by Bob Hamilton

Prairie Watching: Reflections

—Dwight Thomas, Ph.D.

For the past year, I have been writing about my prairie observations and my inferences from those observations. I have shared my appreciation for the wide open spaces, the expansive sky, the ever-changing weather, the geologic structure that makes the prairie possible, the complex interactions among the plants and animals, and the special adaptations that allow plants and animals to live successfully in the prairie. I have also shared the beauty and the science of the prairie. And of course, with the articles being photo-essays, I have shared some the beautiful and interesting scenes that are commonplace on the prairie.

I once had a conversation with a person from Tennessee who couldn't imagine liking the prairie. On trips through the middle of the country, he had just endured the endless miles of prairie so he could get from one forest to another or one mountain to another. I found that there are many people who feel this way. I realized then that perhaps the prairies are an acquired taste. You have to learn how to really see them and appreciate them. But even though there are those who don’t appreciate the prairies, there are many who do. There have been many prairie observers who have written about or painted what they saw when they passed through or lived and coped with the prairie's requirements. Here are some examples.

James Fennimore Cooper, The Prairie, 1827:

….the view was bounded by the gradual and low elevations…coarse but somewhat luxuriant vegetation…the eye became fatigued with the sameness of the landscape…the land was somewhat like the oceans, with the same waving and regular surface, the same absence of foreign objects.

Wine-dark sea by Dwight Thomas

Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, 1832:

Beyond the river, the eye wandered over a beautiful champaign country, of flowery plains and sloping uplands…. At one time we passed through a luxuriant bottom or meadow bordered by thickets, where the tall grass was pressed down into numerous deer beds, where those animals had couched the preceding night….The prairie is on fire beyond the hill…a profusion of tall flowering plants and long flaunting grasses…there is something inexpressibly lonely in the solitude of a prairie…we saw a variety of wild animals, deer, white and black wolves, buffaloes, and wild horses.

Deer in the tall-grass by Dwight Thomas

Randolph B. Marcy, The Prairie Traveler, 1859:

The largest and most useful animal that roams over the prairies is the buffalo. It provides food, clothing, and shelter…this gigantic monarch of the prairies.

Bison roaming by Dwight Thomas

Edna Ferber, Cimarron, 1929

…as the wagon rolled over the prairie, the sky was a summer white, and the tall grasses were endlessly waving in the wind with a rhythm of blow, wave, ripple, dip.

Rolling Prairie by Dwight Thomas

Michael Wallis, Oklahoma, A Sense of Place, 2012

Once upon a time, there was no state of Oklahoma, no Indian Territory…. There was always the land, this place…. The grassland meadows and the old-growth timber were the temples and cathedrals. The mountains, hills, valleys, and hidden hollows near clear creeks were the universities and schools. The best entertainment came from the prairie light shows—spectacular concerts of thunder, lightning, and wind.

Tallgrass by Dwight Thomas


I’m sure you can think of many other descriptions of the prairie in literature. And I’m sure you can think of a number of depictions of the prairie in artwork—Paintings by Remington, Russell, and Blue Eagle for example. Every time I am out on the prairie, taking photographs, examining wildflowers, watching insects or birds, marveling at the Bison, I am amazed at the beauty and complexity of this ecosystem. I am also fascinated with the idea that I am looking at a scene that might be the same one described by Washington Irving in 1832.

Docent Coverage Of Season Days

—Andrew Donovan-Shead

Docent Coverage of Season Days Docent Coverage of Season Days Summary

Other Places to Visit

Here we provide some links to other places worth visiting.

Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Visitor’s Center Latitude & Longitude

Here is the latitude and longitude of the Visitor’s Center that you can give to visitors for entry into their GPS navigation device.

Back Issues

Some printed back issues of the Docent Newsletter, to February 2009, can be found in the two green and one blue-black zip-binders, stored in the Perspex rack by the file cabinet in the office of the Visitor’s Center.

All back issues are available electronically via the links shown below. All newsletters prior to December 2007 are available in Portable Document Format (PDF), which means that you will need Adobe Reader installed on your computer to read these files. All newsletters from December 2007 onwards are in HTML format that is easily read using your web-browser.

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Selected Topics Index

This persistent index of selected topics should make finding articles of interest easier. The list will grow as I move further into the past and it will grow as I add interesting topics from each new newsletter. Iris McPherson lent me the paper copies of the newsletter from the very early years of the docent program; I ran them through a scanner equipped with a document feeder, saving them as PDF files, then added them to Back Issues section above. Let me know of any dead links that you discover. Also, please lend me any paper copies of the newsletter that are missing so that I can scan and add them to the list of back issues.

Newsletter Publication

Deadline for submission of articles for inclusion in the newsletter is the 10th of each month. Publication date is on the 15th. All docents, Nature Conservancy staff, university scientists, philosophers, and historians are welcome to submit articles and pictures about the various preserves in Oklahoma, but of course the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in particular.