Grasslands

Birdsong is a welcome sign of spring, but robins and cardinals aren’t the only birds showing off for breeding season. In many parts of North America, you’re likely to encounter male wild turkeys, puffed up like beach balls and with their tails fanned out, aggressively strutting through woods and parks or stopping traffic on your street. Wild turkeys were abundant across North America when European settlers arrived. But people killed them indiscriminately year-round – sometimes for their meat and feathers, but settlers also took turkey eggs from nests and poisoned adult turkeys to keep them from damaging crops. Thanks to this unregulated killing and habitat loss, by 1900 wild turkeys had disappeared from much of their historical range. Turkey populations gradually recovered over the 20th century, aided by regulation, conservation funding and state restoration programs. By the early 2000s, they could be found in Mexico, Canada and every U.S. state except Alask...

Strong winds spread the largest wildfire in Texas history across more than 1 million acres of rangeland in the Panhandle, the heart of the state’s cattle-producing region, and into Oklahoma in late February 2024. Light precipitation on Feb. 29 helped firefighters as they tried to contain the Smokehouse Creek Fire and other blazes threatening homes and livestock, but the heat and winds picked up again on March 2. At least two people died and scores of structures, including homes, burned. Karen Hickman, a grassland ecologist at Oklahoma State University and president of the Society for Range Management, explained why the fires spread so fast, the risks to livestock and how quickly these ecosystems can recover. How did the fires spread so far so quickly? This region of Texas and Oklahoma is mostly rangeland where cattle graze. A combination of higher-than-average temperatures and low humidity had dried out the dormant plants. When the winds picked up following a couple of ho...

Driving north on state Highway 66 through the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana, it’s easy to miss a small herd of bison lounging just off the road behind an 8-foot fence. Each winter, heavy snows drive bison out of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park – the only place in the U.S. where they have lived continuously since prehistoric times – and into Montana, where they are either killed or shipped off to tribal lands to avoid conflict with cattle ranchers. In the winter of 2022-2023 alone, over 1,500 bison have been “removed,” about 25% of Yellowstone’s entire population. The bison at Fort Belknap are refugees that have been trucked 300 miles to the reservation from past Yellowstone winter culls. Although bison are the U.S. national mammal, they exist in small and fragmented populations across the West. The federal government is working to restore healthy wild bison populations, relying heavily on sovereign tribal lands...

After three years of extreme drought, the Western U.S. is finally getting a break. Mountain ranges are covered in deep snow, and water reservoirs in many areas are filling up following a series of atmospheric rivers that brought record rain and snowfall to large parts of the region. Many people are looking at the snow and water levels and asking: Is the drought finally over? There is a lot of nuance to the answer. Where you are in the West and how you define “drought” make a difference. As a drought and water researcher at the Desert Research Institute’s Western Regional Climate Center, here’s what I’m seeing. How fast each region recovers will vary The winter of 2023 has made a big dent in improving the drought and potentially eliminating the water shortage problems of the last few summers. I say “potentially” because in many areas, a lot of the impacts of drought tend to show up in summer, once the winter rain and snow stop and the...