#Shortgrass Prairie

[ghostoffuturespast]

8 November 2024 - Friday Field Notes

Got our first snow of the season this week.

Normally, I don't go off trail with this much accumulation, but one of my coworkers got to see three Coyotes take down a Pronghorn. We went to check out the carnage but were thwarted by the water in the creek.

This creek has been dry for the past two months, but it only took two days worth of precipitation to fill back up.

It was a lovely walk nonetheless. Don't have pictures but spotted a Great Blue Heron perched on a Cottonwood. Also got a stopover from a flock of Canada Geese.

I spent most of Tuesday planting seeds in the native plant garden at work. It was a gorgeous day and with the forecasted snow this weekend, it was the perfect time to do fall sowing. Mostly seeded species that were already established in the garden, included a couple extras too though. The freeze thaw cycles over winter help break seed dormancy for many native plants, and are required to help them germinate in spring. Because the climate is so temperamental where I'm at, seed dormancy is a survival mechanism and prevents plants from germinating at times that aren't optimal.

Hopefully, the stuff that was still green does okay. Not sure how much die back they experience with the fluctuating temperatures, some plants stay surprisingly green through the winter given enough precipitation. This Prairie Coneflower didn't quite get the memo. Gotta flower while the flowering is good, I suppose.

The plantings in the garden are rather sparse rn, so I'm hoping to fill out the garden so it looks more like a chunk of native prairie which will help deter herbivory.

The Rabbits and Pronghorn are awfully cute but they keep trying to eat everything lol. And I'm not installing a fence on principle, so more plants it is.

Coyote tracks and legs for days.

[incoramsanctissimo]

Oops haha I reblogged the thing about declining birth rates and then I posted the Wikipedia quote about the destruction of shortgrass prairie...we're on the doom train today folks, sorry 💁🏽‍♀️

[kagrenacs]

this also reminds me of my zelda glaciation theory I made a few years ago. With the times of goddess Hylia walking among her people occurring 10 000 years before Skyward Sword and occurring during an interglacial period. Skyward sword occurs during an ice age, having reduced livable area (the surface) and expanded deserts. The era of the Hero of Time saw flooding as glaciers melted, reshaping the landscape. My friend wanted me to put Hyrule Warriors in there, presumably during an ice age. Then the hero mentioned in Botw, Greg revival. And finally Botw is during an ice age, as indicated by the massive glaciers north of the map.

[lightgaswaterelectricityrent]

I don't like it when I'm in a good mood and then I'm exposed to a beautiful place that's been turned into a wind farm

[sassysousa]

Just wanna note that prairies also regulate water in their ecosystems without trees. If you walk through a prairie before the hottest part of the day or in evening, your head and chest will be dry but your pants and shoes will be soaked. Tallgrass prairies also keep moisture by the ground instead of it all baking off like in a lawn. And the roots of prairie plants encourage the water to filter down into the soil instead of rushing away.

There are so many tech startups with a Great Idea for indoor vertical farming and they keep crashing and burning and yet people keep investing in indoor vertical farming because it is "The next big thing" according to some ass backwards whacko conception of the universe where industrial monoculture agriculture is already the most efficient and sustainable possible use of land that could ever exist and its not even worth investigating foolish things like "Any of the agriculture systems practiced on the planet except modern industrial monoculture" or "Thousands of edible plant species that exist and could be used as crops"

the idea that will solve world hunger and preserve ecosystems, supposedly, is simply to stack plants in layers and layers on top of one another in these shelf type structures in a giant warehouse, shining electrical lights on them so they can grow.

Of course it is a glaring problem that it takes massive amounts of fossil fuels to run the electricity, basically replacing solar power used in normal agriculture (the sun) with fossil fuels, which is the opposite of what we need to be doing.

So they say, "Worry not! We can generate the electricity with solar farms!" at which point I perhaps need to study more deeply to comprehend the business model of building an array of solar panels to provide energy for a solar-powered facility in order to grow the already solar-powered plants (creatures which already have solar panels on them from birth)

[strangebiology]

Happy National Bison Day!

Buffalo (culturally and historically correct) / Bison (scientifically correct) were almost driven to extinction, but conservation efforts preserved them. From a treacherous 325 wild bison left to half a million today, we now have a sustainable population.

But they're not back in the numbers they once were--50 MILLION-- and they're not really back the way they were, an ecological keystone species that changed the landscape and fed the people in ways that they never would again.

In fact, that version of the west is pretty much a memory, a former glory impossible to re-create in a world where cattle and cattlemen reign.

That said, there are a handful of organizations that are trying to preserve some land to be somewhat like the old American shortgrass prairie, with some bison fulfilling their roles on those lots. Andrew McKean in Outdoor Life explains.

[nmirah]

Adopts for sale!!

Each adopt is $80 USD. You will receive 7 files of all the art included for all your needs~! I can also send over genetic details by request, as well as genetically accurate parent ideas and any kits.

Add-on deal! I will add a headshot to accompany your character for cheaper than normal at $7 USD. Any added art will be finished and sent within the next week.

General adopt rules: The rights of the design goes to the adopter, but the credit for the original design and art stays with me. I may use the artwork in my portfolio or to promote my art, but the character is yours and I will never use the designs for personal use. You are allowed to change the design in any way, however you are NOT permitted to resell the design.

Note that I retain the right to use the accompanying background art in any way except financially; I will never make money off the background art after the initial adopt, but I may use it for personal use. This ONLY applies to the BACKGROUND not the characters! (and I probably won’t use them but just in case!!)

Shortgrass Prairie: CLOSED

Snowy Aurora: OPEN

(please note that the Snowy Aurora preview with the text is not accurate as it was made before the completion of the design)

DM me to claim!

[kulapti]

Coyote & Pronghorn details, Dec 2023, inks.

Full piece here.

Pronghorn are the fastest land animals in North America, and are thought to have evolved this speed to outrun an ancient extinct cheetah-like predator. Despite how I have drawn this one, they are not very good jumpers and often cannot pass fences which are passable for deer. Wildlife management groups recommend modifications to barbed wire fences so they can more easily crawl under without getting stuck.

Northern Bobwhite are very sensitive to habitat disruption and easy targets for many predators, so reintroduction efforts are challenging for them despite widespread logistical and financial support from hunters and outdoor enthusiasts. I have shown them flying past flowers of Engelmann's milkweed, another species that is very vulnerable to habitat destruction, and Indiangrass, one of the prairie plants whose seeds they eat.

Coyotes are among the few species which have enough cleverness, mobility, and flexibility in their food and shelter needs that they are able to survive in areas with little to no remaining natural habitat. They are able to live in prairies but are less reliant on them than many of their former neighbors.

Rainbow grasshoppers, which I have shown here heavily stylized on prickly pear cactus, have patterns of bright spots which serve to warn potential predators that they taste bad. They live almost exclusively in desert and shortgrass prairie (see Sideoats grama, a shortgrass, in the full sized piece). They don't do well in modified habitat like typical yards and parks, so most people have never seen one even if they live in the correct geographic area.

[aaaghhhhhh]

yeehawgust day 2: greener pastures

It is nearing sunset before Law and Tang make it to healthy grass. It is a subtle, creeping event that had snuck up on him all the same. Tang had been picking her way through the dried, withered grass, Law half-asleep in the saddle, when the rush of energy had hit him. He’d bolted upright to a field of vibrant green shortgrass, the air crisp and fresh the way Punk Hazard had been caked in smokey gloom. He’d nudged Tang to a walk then and looked around and back, to the despairing brown fields with splotches of green that they’d passed through. Breaths a clean sigh of relief.

They make camp a short while later, in a clearing by the side of a boulder far from home. An odd spot out here, but Law’s grateful for the shelter all the same. Grateful to pitch his tent and build his fire and cook his rations with a windbreak. Grateful to be out here, in the greener pastures. Strong again.

Punk Hazard was a dead land, the grass struggling to survive, Caesar stripping the soil of all its magic for his—Doflamingo’s—schemes. The soil and Law with it, the Fruit within him drained. That was the bargain of the grass: you ate its fruit and tapped into the power festering within the roots. As long as you were in the grass, you were something more than human. The grass had saved his life, once. And in Punk Hazard he’d been without it, barren as the land. Empty.

(Fleavance had been dead too, deader, the grass bleached white by the lead. They’d been proud of it, the streets lined with enough lead and iron to choke out even the greatest of roots. Hadn’t had a clue, sitting in the shadow of the mountains and their looming fate. Back then, he hadn’t eaten the fruit, hadn’t known what was waiting.)

Now, he twists his hand, DEATH flipping over, and lets the Room expand just for the hell of it all, blue stretching across the prairie. Lets the hum soothe him. There’s a lot left to do, a whole plan to execute. But at least now he has the grass on his side again.

[fatehbaz]

So 26 February 2023, Grist re-publishes a piece originally from InvestigateWest, after InvestigateWest got their hands on some sensitive emails/documents revealing that the EPA rather than fairly supervising mining companies “they’re supposed to regulate” has instead assisted the companies “by attacking researchers and smearing peer-reviewed science.” (Surprising nobody; Montana is a resource extraction colony.) The piece is titled “Newly revealed records show how the EPA sided with polluters in a small Montana mining town.”

So I’m like “oh, is this gonna be about the natural gas boom near Sidney on the North Dakota border right alongside the Bakken oil fields, an operation so big and extensive that it artificially lights up the night sky over the open prairies of the northern Great Plains in a way that, from a satellite view, makes the least densely populated and remote corner of the contiguous United States glow brightly as if it were a massive city or as if the entire region were on fire? Or is this gonna be about coal mining in the remote southeastern corner of the state in the badlands and shortgrass prairie near Crow and Cheyenne reservations, where coal companies in the Yellowstone River watershed traditionally have extracted millions from near the Powder River and Black Hills?”

But nope, it’s about Butte.

“Small Montana mining town.”

This city is still among top 5 or top 10 most culturally and economically significant cities in the state. “Significant city” would be more apt than “small town.” But beyond that.

This is the place known as “Butte, America.”

Butte was the epicenter, the home base, the foundation of the Gilded Age copper boom that electrified the world and lit the streetlights and parlors of turn-of-the-century London and New York.

All that copper wiring, that’s from Butte, or from the industries that Butte’s barons established. This was the city where mining magnates ran the Anaconda Copper Mining Company which spear-headerd the pillaging of Latin America (referenced in the “open veins of Latin America”). Anaconda established the century-long tradition of Canadian and US mining companies destroying lives and landscapes in the Andes.

By 1899, Butte was one of the most significant US cities between the Mississippi River and the Sierra Nevada. This was the home of the Copper Kings.

The Anaconda company, in 1919, completed construction on a smelter smokestack 585 feet high, which remains the tallest surviving brick structure on the planet.

The wealth of Butte in the Edwardian era is unfathomable. They had a rollercoaster. In a single year, merely just those local mines along the edge of the city could produce $23 million ($700 million today). And that doesn’t include all of the wealth stolen from Latin America or other mines in the western US.

Montana was a state that pioneered the “corporations are people” stuff. Its very statehood itself, the christening of Montana, was a gift to the Copper Kings. Every important state office was practically purchased, owned by those mining barons.

This is also why Montana was the site of some of the earliest and most important labor struggles. Because the entire state of Montana was functionally a copper mining company town. Among notable events: the 1914 Butte labor riots, the 1917 brutal assassination of Frank Little, and the 1920 “Anaconda Road Massacre” in which company guards shot and killed 17 fleeing people.

This is why, depending on who you ask, Butte is either A Company Town or A Union Town.

Butte claims to be the home of the “largest population of Irish-Americans per capita of any US city.” This may or may not be true, but this Irish influence evident in the local popularity of pasties. In the Edwardian era, Butte was also the site of an important Chinatown neighborhood and a large Chinese community.

Locally, Butte is famous/infamous for being the site of the Berkeley Pit. Or “The Pit.” The remaining scar of an open-pit copper mine. It’s one mile long, half-mile wide, almost 2,000 feet deep, filled with 900 feet of acidic water laden with cadmium, sulfuric acid, and arsenic.

Just sitting there. In the city.

“Oh, well, of course, back in the Gilded Age, in the 1890s, US businesses got a little out of control, and boom-town communities weren’t really thinking long-term, and they also didn’t know all The Science, so they allowed for the creation of, like, giant toxic death-pits in their residential areas,”

Nope. They built that open-pit mine in 1955 and operated it until 1982.

Anyway, that’s kind of what the 2023 investigative report is about. There is a newer mine (copper and molybdenum) currently open and operating in the city, right next to The Pit.

And the current mine is owned by the richest man in the state of Montana, Dennis Washington. And the EPA is like, “Don’t worry. The mine in the city is fine, it’s all good.” Because that’s what US government land management agencies do: File due diligence paperwork for land-owners while others get poisoned.

The largest open pit copper mine (by extracted volume) on the planet, and the second-deepest open-pit mine of any kind on the planet, is at Chuquicamata in the Atacama region of Chile. This mine was the property of the Anaconda company.

The towering smokestack. The Pit on the edge of town. The gaping wound at Chuquicamata. The legacy of the Copper Kings lives on with the continued theft and poisoning of those in both Montana and the Andes.

[study-with-aura]

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

The start of the day and almost the entire day was rough. I did not know if I was going to complete everything today or not. I did not sleep well last night because I had a bad dream, and I think that led to my mood. It also did not help that it was cloudy and a bit dreary outside besides the warmth of the air.

Either way, I managed to complete everything I needed to do, and I felt so much better after dance. It allowed me to get out of my head and socialize a little with the people I love being around.

Tasks Completed:

Geometry - Learned about standard equations of circles + practice

Lit and Comp II - Reviewed Unit 19 Vocabulary + read chapter 28 of Emma by Jane Austen + completed poem assignment and emailed to Mom for grading (50/50)

Spanish 2 - Watched lecture video on formal commands + quiz (95% I forgot ce -> que) + reviewed vocabulary

Bible I - Read Joshua 20-21

World History - Read the introduction to the new unit + read about the Schlieffen Plan + quiz (100%) + explained the plan and what happened with plan and the circumstances surrounding it + watched a video on trench warfare

Biology with Lab - Learned about the prairie biome + played a game to help the shortgrass and tallgrass prairies + wrote about the biomes

Foundations - Read more on resourcefulness + played 5 minute mystery + read about the message of advertising + answered advertising message questions based on an ad

Piano - 60-minute piano lesson + practiced for one hour

Khan Academy - Completed High School Geometry Unit 7: Lessons 1-2 (already assigned)

CLEP - None today

Duolingo - Studied for 15 minutes (Spanish, French, Chinese) + completed daily quests

Reading - Read pages 286-358 of A Door in the Dark by Scott Reintgen and completed the book

Chores - Laundry

Activities of the Day:

Personal Bible Study (Ezekiel 36)

Ballet

Pointe

Journal/Mindfulness

-

What I’m Grateful for Today:

I am grateful for ballet tonight and all of my friends there because I did not have a good start to the day. I felt much better after I got to class.

Quote of the Day:

Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose.

-We are the Ants, Shaun David Hutchinson

🎧Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2. (Moonlight Sonata) - Ludwig van Beethoven

[ghostoffuturespast]

A late night at the office but I can think of worse ways to start the week.

[jumping-jackalope]

shortgrass prairie in October

[drabmakyo]

Art by Iris Jay

Ey stretched eir way out of bed and padded to the door of eir room, closed.

“Wait,” ey commanded emself. Hand on doorknob. A count to three. A promise to emself. I will open this door and will find the open space across the road instead of the hallway.

Could one dream within a dream? Do so with such a detail that ey would not notice the transition? Had ey dreamed the trip to the clinic? Had ey perhaps slept through the return?

“I do not know. I do not know.”

A supplication. A mantra against hopelessness.

Ey turned the knob and stepped out into the shortgrass prairie of the open space. The packed dirt of the trail welcomed eir paws. The scent of dust and rattle-dry stalks of grass washed over em. Warm, yellow light hemmed em in through the fog of war.

“Wait,” ey said once more. Kept eir hands at eir sides. Loose. Relaxed. No menu to reach for, no gesture required.

A promise to emself. I still have will.

The fog receded upon eir request, thinned, disappeared. Mere breath. The prairie of the open space stretched out before them. A valley, and then a ridge of hills to the east. The mountains behind eir back.

Not a sim. No limitations other than those eir dreaming mind had set upon them. Ey had spent so long in sims, lived eir life out in worlds bounded by the edges of invisible properties that, upon getting lost, ey had imagined the same must be true inside. More so, eir unconscious reasoned, for was ey not constrained by the processing power of eir exocortex?

But it was not a sim. It was a dream, eir dream, eir exo a mirror, and in the end, ey held control.

No commands, then. No promises. Ey knew that, were ey to take a step forward, eir foot would come down on the dinged hardwood floor of eir London flat. Priscilla would meow her hellos and twine around eir ankles.

Ey did not rush. Ey stood still. The breeze fingered eir fur and teased along the hem of eir skirt as a breeze must. There were the turbines on the far ridge, three blades turning laconically as turbines must. There was the highway across the valley, the gas station squatting low alongside it as gas stations must.

No commands in dreams. No promises required. Ey would take that step and all would be as it must.

And then ey took the step.

And then Prisca meowed her hello and twined around eir ankles.

From Qoheleth.

[strigops]

blooming tea

blooming tea: favourite flower?

prairie fire (specifically pink variants of Castilleja angustifolia) my beloved

the ones that grow at our collecting sites are primarily BRIGHT pink and i love them so much, semi-parasitic gems of the desert and shortgrass steppe

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Thoughts on peneplains in landscape evolution?

(I'm not 100% sure I understand the question, but I'll try to summarize.)

First of all, there's no one kind of "peneplain." The word itself was first used by the French geographer Henri Jaubert in the 1830s, to describe the flatland of Egypt (where the Nile flows through the desert) and Ethiopia, but it came to be mostly associated with the drylands of North America – and especially the Great Plains.

These drylands are pretty different from one another. In the East, you have the Great American Desert, which is like the Sahara's wider, wetter cousin, the sandstone canyons of Utah, and the sand dunes and seas of the Mojave (not to be confused with the oceanic Mojave, which is a desert region). (The Great American Desert is pretty old – and it still covers a substantial chunk of New Mexico and Texas.)

Overlapping, but non-overlapping, are the Great Plains, the shortgrass plains, and the tallgrass prairies, which are distinguished by the types of grasses present (and by other things, like rivers and streams) [1].

Now, over the course of history and human evolution, there have been some big changes in human populations and environments. The East, in particular, has had a dramatic population growth, starting in the late Pleistocene when the glaciers retreated. In the meantime, the Americas became colonized by the ancestors of modern humans about sometime between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago [2], and the people who inhabited the Great Plains region at that time didn't look very different from the people living there today (apart from the fact that some of them were anatomically modern humans and others were not). This was a period of rapid population growth and expansion.

Meanwhile, in the Americas, there have also been some big changes in population size and in the environment, in what I've called "environmental feedback cycles" – for example, from the end of the last Ice Age to about 12,000 years ago (a period I have called the "Pre-Boreal," because there was a corresponding "Boreal" period at the very end of it), the climate of North America was colder, drier, and more wooded than it is today, and so on.

So, when those Pleistocene people were colonizing North America, the climate was pretty different, and the "Pre-Boreal" environment looked more like something like this (the "Boreal" environment is cooler and wetter, with more "peneplains" – this is where you get the term) [3] than it looks today, and that environment led to the colonization of North America [4], while the same "Pre-Boreal" environment that was causing the colonization of North America also produced the "Boreal" environment, which led to another colonization of North America.

Peneplains were the environment in the region of North America around the "Boreal" period of cooling, and the first colonists arrived there, in the Pre-Boreal period. Then, the "Boreal" environment gave way to the "Pre-Boreal" environment again, and so the North American colonizers moved on to another region.

And so on.

In this model, the "Boreal" period, when people moved to the "Pre-Boreal" period and so on, is also known as the "Dryas Age" because the climate cooled around this time and made the ground more arid – and some "Boreal" environments have the name of the region they're in ("the Prairie Grasslands" or "the Sand Hills," etc.).

You'll also see that the "Boreal" and "Pre-Boreal" periods were covered by conifer forests, with some areas having big thickets of grass. There's also a kind of "tundra" in the "Pre-Boreal" period, and this eventually gave way to the grassy "tallgrass prairies" and so on.

There