Wednesday, March 31, 2004

I've been waiting for Spring. I suppose we all have, particularly those who have born the brunt of a hard winter, but I have been waiting for spring rains to ease the burden of a relatively mild and very dry winter. I see the birds returning from the South: the White-crowned sparrows, the Harriers coursing the prairie, performing their mating ritual display flights, the great swirling flocks of Sandhill cranes migrating back to us and beyond, the huge flights of geese: Canadas, Blues, Whites, the Pintail ducks and Widgeons, Scaups and Mallards. I see the horses shedding their ruffed winter coats on the way to becoming sleek and shiny again; I see the trees and shrubs budding, the crocus blooming, the peonies in the yard starting to break through the surface of the earth; but most of all I look for that gentle cast and shading of distant green from the grasses in the pastures. We need moisture in the ground that winter did not supply, but we got grass in spite of the dryness.

On this Cheyenne River Ranch, as on the ranches of our neighbors and the surrounding Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, the resurgence of grasses from their winter dormancy marks what might be called the Vernal Imperative, the irresistibility of Spring.

Late last Summer and Fall Elaine Ebbert and Mark Keffeler from The Nature Conservancy office in Rapid City conducted a study to identify individual species and plant communities on the ranch. Reading the lists can be like a litany and like a poem somewhere between: The "Great Plains Freshwater Wet Prairies and Meadows," where you will find Nuttall's alkali grass, Saltgrass, Foxtail barley, and Sea Blite and the "Great Plains Mixed Grass Prairies," where lives Western wheatgrass, Sideoats grama, and Little bluestem. Then there is Needle and thread, Threadleaf sedge, Kentucky bluegrass, Prairie sandreed, and Buffalo grass--just to name a few on this not quite complete listing of at least seventy-seven species of trees, shrubs, forbs, and grasses, of which twenty-four are grasses and thirty-eight are forbs with names like Vetch, and Mustard, Curly dock, Scarlet mallow, and Clover, False pennyroyal, Broom snakeweed, and Blue flax. The lists go on, but I won't for now.

As Dan once wrote in Equinox (to paraphrase) "grass is the product of the prairie, meat is just the way to get it to market." We try to graze the best grasses at the best times for both the grasses and the buffalo, hence our rotation of the herd to different pastures on different ecosystems in divergent areas of the ranch, which sometimes keeps us busy, trying to do the right thing for the right reason in the right way at the right time--'cause folks, this Spring, "We Got Grass."