An Interview with Suzanne Winckler: Part 2

What areas do you return to constantly?
There are two places. I try to make a pilgrimage once a year (more often if possible) to Hayden Prairie State Preserve near Chester in northeastern Iowa. It’s the largest (240 acres!) remaining black soil prairie in Iowa, which in a way is a heartbreaker. What must the unbroken Iowa and Illinois black soil prairies—waving in tallgrass, spangled with wildflowers—have looked like? It was one of the first prairies I visited after being taught how to look at a prairie. And it is named for my hero Ada Hayden (1884–1950), a botanist, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. at Iowa State University, and an early proponent of saving Iowa’s prairies. My other pilgrimage grassland is the Nebraska Sandhills, which takes up a big chunk of north-central Nebraska. It’s the opposite of the tiny jewel of Hayden Prairie—three times the size of Massachusetts, a huge expanse of unbroken grassland growing on the largest dune formation in the Western Hemisphere. The first time I visited the Sandhills, I came home and told my husband we should move to Nebraska. He followed my advice. We lived in Omaha for seven years and got to the Sandhills two or three times a year.

How long have you been working to conserve natural areas and their inhabitants?
I can’t claim to have made much of a difference in conserving natural areas. Making a lasting impact in this arena requires a level of patience and fortitude I’ve never attained. I would categorize myself as an enthusiast, and maybe my random breathless bursts of enthusiasm for a particular landscape have touched the random bystander, but I rather doubt it. The conservationists I most admire are the ones who quietly, doggedly, eloquently make a landscape their cause. What they do is often exhausting, at times monotonous, and seldom applauded. Two small nonprofits that fit this description, and which I hold in high esteem, are the Iowa Prairie Network and the Prairie Plains Resource Institute in Nebraska. 

What advice would you give to beginning conservationists?
Have more patience and fortitude than me. Pick a landscape you love and focus on it. Don’t expect the whole world to rally around your cause. Don’t be shrill. 

What are the particular challenges of being a conservationist in the Midwest?
For a long time, I thought the biggest challenge was convincing everyone that prairies have intrinsic value. While that would be nice, it isn’t going to happen, and neither is it all that essential to conserving prairies. The challenge is organizing a critical mass of scientists, professionals (including government and private-sector people who know about agribusiness and real estate and farmers and ranchers who really know about agribusiness and real estate!), enthusiastic volunteers, and dedicated philanthropists. Fortunately, those critical masses exist and are thriving in the Midwest. They do face a challenge somewhat peculiar to the Midwest—which is the enormous challenge of reconnecting prairie fragments and restoring land back to prairie to create large, biologically robust grasslands. When I was working for the Nature Conservancy of Nebraska in the mid-1990s, the restoration ecology movement was gaining momentum across the Midwest. It was a great time. My personal high point, however brief, in restoration ecology was helping to organize some Nature Conservancy and Prairie Plains Resource Institute volunteers and together walking up and down some fallow fields along the Platte River, tossing locally harvested native prairie seeds from buckets we carried in the crooks of our arms. I moved on, but my Conservancy and PPRI friends are still out there restoring Platte Valley prairies, acre by acre. 

Suzanne Winckler, author, Prairie: A North American Guide

Plant of the Week

Small white lady slipper
Cypripedium
candidum Muhl.
other common names: little white orchid, ducks
Cypripedium: an incorrectly Latinized version of ancient Greek words meaning generally “Venus’s shoe”
Candidum: from Latin, meaning “white”
Orchid family: Orchidaceae

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

An Interview with Suzanne Winckler: Part 1

What was the catalyst that brought you to appreciate prairies?
So much of what we come to love and appreciate occurs by happenstance.  I happened to be born in Colorado City, Texas, which is out in a nowhere of flat land, big skies, and long views. Years later, it finally dawned on me that the accident of my birthplace spun me into a big-sky, long-view person. I love a good tramp in the forest, but I’m most at home—breathe easiest—in  open country, which is what prairies are. A series of other lovely happenstances sealed my fate as a prairie lover. One of the most important was meeting a soil scientist in Minnesota named Kathy Bolin, who taught me the first imperative of getting to know (and love) a prairie—walk slowly, look down. Ambling in this way through a prairie is the terrestrial equivalent of snorkeling in a coral reef.

You’ve been watching birds for many years. How do you merge your love of birds with your love of grasslands?
For me, watching birds is like the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song—love the one you’re with. A bobolink gurgling and tumbling in mid-air over my beloved Hayden Prairie is a gift more valuable than a hundred new life birds. (I’ve never been much of a lister or chaser of rare birds, I suppose because I’m pathetically uncompetitive.) The joy of grassland birding is definitely about the music— call it prairie chatter or prairie symphony—the bzzzz of grasshopper sparrows, the tick-tick-tick of sedge wrens, the fluting of upland sandpipers, the deep-throated trumpeting of sandhill cranes. Then, of course, prairies in the glacial Midwest are often associated with wetlands, so there’s the avian extravaganza during migration of ducks, geese, swans, sandpipers, curlews, stilts, avocets. The thought of it makes me swoon.

What are your favorite natural areas in the Midwest?
Not an easy question to answer. There are dozens of Iowa’s pocket-sized prairies I love. I’m partial to prairies with a river view—so that would include the prairies in the Loess Hills overlooking the Missouri River in western Iowa and the goat prairies perched above the Mississippi River in southeastern Minnesota. I’m terribly sentimental (some would say maudlin) about cemetery prairies—something about the poignancy of the departed sharing space with a last gasp of native prairie. And, then, my prejudice for certain prairies is connected to time of day and who I’m with. I love all the prairies I’ve visited at sunset in the company of my husband, David, and a few dear friends. These places and moments are often commemorated with a bottle of champagne.

Suzanne Winckler, author, Prairie: A North American Guide