Latest news with #prairie
CTV News
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Relatable comedy on stage in Rosthern
Relatable comedy on stage in Rosthern Actors from the play "Stag and Doe" remind us about the comedy we've all experienced at small town prairie weddings
Daily Mail
05-07-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
It's the home of cowboys, rodeos and a peaceful way of life. But a startling new arrival is set to tear the state apart... and locals are terrified
For nearly 20 years, Tammy Higgins loved the view from her backyard: a working cattle ranch and sweeping prairie vistas stretching as far as the eye could see. Now, that idyllic scene has been replaced by towering cranes and a sprawling construction site - a hive of non-stop activity that represents how the landscape of America's least-populated state is changing.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The unlikely comeback of America's most endangered songbird
On the dry prairies of the Sunshine State, there's a tiny, camouflaged bird known as the Florida grasshopper sparrow. Each one weighs about as much as three U.S. quarters yet has to survive against a backdrop of torrential floods, herds of stomping cattle, and waves of ravenous fire ants. Not to mention the humans. 'We've lost over 90 percent of their habitat,' says Fabiola 'Fabby' Baeza-Tarin, a senior conservation ecologist with a Tampa-based consulting firm known as Common Ground Ecology. Florida grasshopper sparrows and many other organisms rely on the dry prairie for their entire life cycles, not even leaving to migrate, but humans have increasingly rendered the space inhabitable by clearing and draining it to make way for development, ranching, and intensified agriculture, such as orange groves. 'So, of course, along with the loss of dry prairie, we also lost a bunch of sparrows,' says Baeza-Tarin. There are now fewer than 200 known Florida grasshopper sparrows on Earth. And that's actually a considerable step up from where things were. Over the last three decades, an Avengers-like combination of federal and state agencies, military personnel, private landowners, and contractors like Baeza-Tarin have joined forces to snatch the birds back from the brink of extinction. 'Collaboration is key,' says KT Bryden, a conservationist and filmmaker at WildPath who directed the short film, 'The Little Brown Bird', which documents the sparrow's path to recovery. 'That's the way we can move forward: making an impact through collaboration and coming together to protect something bigger than ourselves,' says Bryden. Many of the Florida grasshopper sparrow's problems stem from the fact that, as birds adapted to a life on the open prairie, this subspecies nests on the ground. That puts the tiny avians within reach of native predators, such as snakes and skunks, as well as other, less natural threats. 'Sometimes it pours here, and then 200 meters down that way is completely dry,' says Baeza-Tarin. To combat the flooding, the team—which includes stakeholders at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Avon Park Air Force Range, the Archbold Biological Station, Common Ground Ecology, and White Oak Conservation, as well as private landowners—can actually cut the soil and vegetation around the nest, then raise the whole platform up by six to eight inches by tucking dirt underneath. They also put fencing around the nests to protect against wandering predators. And boiling-hot water, pumped into the ground by way of industrial pressure washers, helps ward off colonies of invasive fire ants, which can wipe out a nest of chicks within hours. Some treatments, such as the glorified, anti-ant squirt gun, are especially useful on what Baeza-Tarin calls 'working lands,' or areas owned by ranchers that the Florida grasshoppers have recently colonized. At first, most experts considered habitats grazed by cattle to be an ecological trap for the birds, says Baeza-Tarin. The worry was that the birds would be lured to such areas but not survive well, because the composition of plants is so different than what they're used to. 'But we quickly learned that by applying the same conservation methods that were being used on the native sites, they were equally as productive,' she says. What's more, the working lands appear to be serving as a corridor between the last five remaining natural populations of sparrows. 'It just goes to show that the ranchers can be good stewards for the land, and the sparrows and the cows can coexist in some of the areas down there,' says Archer Larned, an ornithologist who studied Florida grasshopper sparrows during her PhD at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and is not affiliated with the film. Perhaps the largest source of hope for the little brown birds comes from a relatively recent effort to breed the birds in captivity and then release them back into the wild Since May 2019, experts have successfully bred and released more than 1,000 captive-reared birds into the wild across two sites, says Baeza-Tarin, who formerly assisted with releases as an employee of the Archbold Research Station. What's more, both sites—Avon Park, which is owned and managed by the Air Force, and Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area—have seen upswings in their wild sparrow populations. While only 20 percent of the captive-bred birds stick around and establish their own breeding territories in release areas, experts remain hopeful that some of the birds are doing well in new areas not under observation. After all, it was only as recently as 2012 that scientists discovered the first population of Florida grasshopper sparrows surviving on working lands. 'I was down there from 2013 to 2016,' says Larned, 'and it was a pretty depressing project to work on for a while, because every time I would go down, there were fewer birds.' However, Larned says the documentary paints the birds' outlook in an uplifting light. 'It brought back a lot of memories,' she says. 'It was good to see how well the captive breeding program is doing and how it's really helped to boost the population.' For the film's executive producer Carlton Ward Jr., a National Geographic Explorer, the film is about even more than that. 'I want people to fall in love with the Florida grasshopper sparrow, but ultimately, I want them to fall in love with the prairie and the rare ecosystem it needs to survive. There's a magic to that bird that is really an emblem for small, underappreciated wildlife that are really hidden in plain sight all around us.' Ward is also the founder of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation; the corridor itself is made up of 18 million acres of wilderness and working lands crucial to the survival of more than 100 imperiled species throughout the state. 'A lot of people live on the [Florida] coast, and they're not really aware of the habitats in the center of the state,' says Bryden. 'This is where the majority of Floridians are getting their drinking water from. So, protecting the sparrow also means protecting us.' While much less celebrated than coral reefs or tropical rainforests, Florida's dry prairies also sustain innumerable creatures—plants and animals that also benefit from sparrow protections. That makes it what scientists call an umbrella species, but it's also an ecosystem indicator. 'The Florida grasshopper sparrow may seem very small and unassuming, but the bird's survival is directly tied to the health of the habitat,' says Bryden. 'If this bird isn't doing well, there's something wrong. Something that we should all be paying attention to.'
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- Yahoo
Readers and writers: A sobering look at the vanishing prairie
A sweeping look at the vanishing American prairie and two crime novels set in Minnesota are this week's offerings to our readers. 'Sea of Grass': by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty (Random House, $32) Agriculture has altered — and damaged — the very biological and chemical cycles that created the extraordinary prairie in the first place, from the creation of soil to the flow and purity of water, to the ebb of wildlife and the circulating of elements in and out of the atmosphere. It's created intractable pollution problems that endanger human health and cripple other ecosystems, from its damage to insects to the dead zone in the Golf of Mexico. — from 'Sea of Grass' In this timely and important book, subtitled 'The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie,' award-winning former Star Tribune writers Hage and Marcotty explore and explain the environmental crisis caused by the disappearance of thousands of acres of American prairie that once stretched from Montana to Illinois, eastern Minnesota to northern Texas. The North American prairie, they write, is one of Earth's four great temperate grasslands, the others being the steppes of Central Asia, the Pampas of South America, and the veld of southern Africa. It is also one of the most threatened ecosystems on Earth, home to small insects and big grazing mammals. Before the Industrial Revolution took hold in farming, the untouched prairie grasses created a web of roots that could grow as deep as two feet into the ground. When white settlers arrived in the 19th century they brought with them plows that tore up the prairie for the first time. These pioneers used rudimentary plows, but when steel plows became available farmers were able to plant and harvest much more food per acre to feed a growing population. This affected the prairie's biological diversity as rivers were rerouted, synthetic nitrogen became a standard fertilizer and the delicate symbiosis of the prairie was uprooted. Over decades the prairie was converted into some of the richest farmland on Earth, but the country paid a terrible price The authors help us understand what that price means in chapters examining river, dirt, bugs and water. For Minnesotans, the discussion about rivers might be the most important as we learn how the Mississippi picks up fertilizer runoff from rivers that flow into it, growing more polluted as it rolls through the Twin Cities southward until the pollutants create a 'dead zone' of chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico. Now industrial agriculture is plowing up the remaining grasslands at the rate of 1 million acres a year If the sea of grass is to be saved, the authors argue, it will take cooperation between farmers who care about the land, help from the federal government and efforts by eco-conscious consumers. Although we are losing everything from bees to oysters, 'Sea of Grass' ends with hope that comes from people like South Dakota writer and buffalo rancher Dan O'Brien, who sees the great creatures that once roamed the prairie as far as the eye could see as a way to restore the animals' ancestral home. Books about environmental devastation are increasingly common as we watch the natural world we once knew disappear. 'Sea of Grass,' written clearly and with passion, is one of the best. The authors will introduce 'Seas of Grass' during a free program at 7 p.m. Thursday at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls. 'Rattlesnake Bluff': by Cary J. Griffith (Adventure Publications, $16.95) '..they hadn't anticipated a rattlesnake's denning instincts, the keen skillset of a wolf dog's nose, the remarkable aptitude of a DNR herpetologist, DNA analysis of isolated rattlesnake populations, or the use of implanted chips to track rattlesnake specimens. Or that an apparently forged confession might contain the details of what actually happened. — from 'Rattlesnake Bluff' A rattlesnake found on the seat of a Bobcat at a construction site sends U.S. Fish & Wildlife Special Agent Sam Rivers and his wolf dog Gray into investigating a 23-year-old crime in the fifth book in this appealing series. This is no ordinary rattler; it's an eastern massasauga, an endangered species that doesn't belong in Minnesota although it might have escaped from a Wisconsin research facility where a scientist is implanting snakes to track their movements. Rivers is joined by local DNA personnel as he tries to figure out if he needs to shut down the site where the snake was found, holding up construction of expensive homes. When Gray tracks the scent of two bodies buried in the bluff, everything changes. The readers know how the decayed bodies of a young brother and sister got to their rocky resting place but Sam does not. Meanwhile, Sam's boss in Denver is not happy with him staying in Minnesota and getting behind on paperwork he avoids. The cast includes a mysterious person who called himself Der Furher as a teenager, Sam's fiancee who just wants him to come home, and a woman contractor working hard in a business dominated by men. 'Rattlesnake Bluff' gets more complicated and dangerous as Sam and others get closer to figuring out what the snakes have to do with the building site and learn new details about the night the young siblings were killed when hit by a car. Rivers is a smart guy who knows his flora and fauna as well as his duty to wildlife, even snakes. Readers who can't stand the thought of snakes, even on the page, will be happy to know that the creatures are not described in great detail and one of them is dead. The author, who also writes nature-based nonfiction, grew up roaming the woods, fields and waters of eastern Iowa, where he developed a lifelong love of wild places. 'Payne Avenue': by M.T. Bartone (Modern Prose Press, $13.99) Eddie laughed as he tightened his grip on O's wrist before quickly yanking out the little screwdriver. O screamed as he pulled his mangled hand away from Eddie. He held it gingerly in his other hand, close to his chest. — from 'Payne Avenue' Set in the neighborhoods surrounding St. Paul's Payne Avenue, this is the story of the rise and fall of Eddie Bracchio, a gangster who returns to St. Paul from Brooklyn and sees ways to build a criminal empire while betraying his powerful boss. A wave of new owners brings fresh energy to independent bookselling Readers and writers: Immersion, writing from the heart help non-Native novelist access the culture 12 new books to send restless readers on a summer road trip Literary calendar for week of May 18: 'Weird, Sad and Silent' Readers and writers: Selections for Mental Health Awareness Month Eddie begins slowly, recruiting two teen boys to become his drug dealers. Carefully and sometimes violently, he replaces the neighborhoods' low-level crime bosses and builds a successful illegal business, siphoning money that's rolling in through the books of a restaurant he helps an old woman open. What Eddie wants most, though, he can't have — beautiful Kate De Luca, who's married and has no idea Eddie wants to control and possess her. When Kate suffers a tragedy, the plot becomes hers as she ponders revenge. 'Payne Avenue' is long at 154 pages, which sometimes slows the plot. But the author does a fine job of giving readers a sense of place, with characters moving along the streets that surround Payne Avenue in this tale of a killer whose ambition is his ruin.
CTV News
30-05-2025
- Climate
- CTV News
CTV National News: Canada seeking wildfire aid from international community
Watch States of emergencies in two prairie provinces over wildfires has prompted Canada to request assistance from international partners. Abigail Bimman has more.
