Tallgrass prairies disappearing across North Texas

I've always had a mental image of a family of pioneers that has trudged across mountains, forests and wide rivers finally reaching a plateau and looking across at the expanse of the Texas prairies as far as the eye could see.

What a huge sign of relief there must have been. Look at how many Texas cities and communities were named Prairieview or Plainview, and you can see how important that vista was to those pioneers.

It indeed must have looked like the Promised Land — miles and miles of open land, easy, accessible, and there for the taking, just waiting for the plow or the browsing herd of cattle. No more trees to girdle or cut down. No more mountains or rivers to cross.

That mindset of course led to the displacement of all the American Indians who then occupied and used the land and doomed much of the prairie itself.

Old maps of Texas show herds of wild horses that roamed the prairies. Early explorers de­scribed huge fields of wildflowers and prairie grasses taller than the bellies of the horses they rode and gave them the name — tallgrass prairies. Bison followed their annual migratory trails across the prairie, feeding on the lush native grasses.

Fires swept across the prairie, clearing it of encroaching trees and plants whose shallow roots couldn't survive the fire, while the deep-rooted prairie grasses survived to sprout again.

The prairie is a diverse ecosystem of mainly native grasses and flowering plants with wildlife, soil, geology and fire playing vital roles. Remove one part of the system and the other parts eventually are gone where the deer and the buffalo went.

Today, only a tiny percentage of the original prairie is left, particularly in the North Central Texas area that encompasses Denton County.

Denton County is located in the Cross Timbers and Prairies region defined by the Texas Agriculture Extension Service as the Cross Timbers, Grand Prairie and North Central Prairies land resource areas.

Native prairie vegetation was primarily big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass and switchgrass, plus a number of other species that could survive fires.

Today, brushy plants that invaded once the fires were controlled, farm and rangeland or concrete and buildings cover much of the old prairies.

Pastures and some farmland continue one of the most vital roles that the grasslands have played.

They serve as a watershed for the most important commodity in Texas — water.  Even well-managed grazing lands still fulfill this role because they slow the movement of surface water and increase the capacity of the soil to hold water.

You only have to look at the huge patches of concrete holding up a new shopping center or a housing addition to see how much water it can hold and how fast the water moves away.

There are still pockets of native prairie and several organizations dedicated to preserving and restoring them, including the Texas Native Prairies Association, the Texas Land Trust Council and Nature Conservancy.

The Native Prairies Association of Texas Web site — www.texa
sprairie.org — offers an assortment of information and resources, such as how to actually identify a prairie remnant from a common field of grass.

Look for diversity, the key to ecological health, is their advice.

"Look for a field of grasses and wildflowers that seems to have a lot of different kinds of plants,” according to the Web site. “In a good-quality prairie, different kinds of grasses abut against each other in a mosaic of textures and subtle color changes as one population of prairie plants yields to another."

The tallgrass prairie is a proud part of our heritage. It is the original unchanged land that the ancestors of this community walked upon. It is the landscape of our pioneer heritage. And it is invaluable in the education of our children. How can we speak of the tallgrass prairie in the schools and have none to show the children?