On Prairies, Woodlands, and Home

[kisota]

A little ode to my favorite sorts of habitats and how they relate to coyote.  

On Prairies, Woodlands, and Home

“This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.” 

• Robert Pirsig,  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I’ve lived a lot of places.  Chasing down the next opportunity has meant residing in a variety of biomes - everything from swamp to northern hardwood forest, subtropical islands, eastern deciduous forest, pinyon-juniper, sage steppe, or closed forests, deep and brimming with birdsong, thick with fir scent.  I can’t say I’ve ever felt out of place in nature. I love all these ecosystems, each so rich with their own assortment of creatures, plants, and abiotic features. And heck, I’m a coyote; we get along just about anywhere.  Even the remnants of natural spaces in cities can be places to get by.

But the wide open places have always called to me.  The grasslands, or prairies, as we say in North America, feel like home. I knew even as a teenager where I needed to be, but it took me years before I finally made it back where I belong. The local habitat isn’t always of major significance to people, even animal folk, but for me, much of being animal is in how I relate to the land and other life. 

My vision of paradise barely exists anymore.  What I love best are lush tallgrass prairies with mixed forests, waves of rippling grass between stands of trees and underbrush.  Highly arable, this habitat has largely been turned into farmland, the color and diversity trampled under by monoculture and manifest destiny. The remnants that survive exist along mountainous environments with enough moisture or along the edges of forests - transitional habitat, or ecotone. Luscious, thick grass grows in a patchwork of scrub and woods - oak savannah, scrappy evergreens, riparian refugia dense around the rivers. I savor the wet clean smell of cottonwood leaves and the sway of willows over thick underbrush. Coyote doesn’t exist in a vacuum for me - it exists alongside the plants and animals and natural features that give context to the experience and a sense of belonging. 

Edward Abbey speaks of the desert as the sort of place you have to be within to truly appreciate.  His estimation applies to the prairie as well.  It’s not the sort of landscape you can stand back and absorb from afar.  If you’ve ever been on a road trip and heard complaints the land is flat and boring, you know how quickly the enormity of it all is overlooked. 

To really experience a grassland, you have to move through it.  Go and look, listen, smell, feel.  Weave through the tussocks, dodge the spines and brambles. Flip over some rocks, for gods’ sake! Inspect some milkweeds for velvety beetles and striped caterpillars, watch for birds to dart between trees or flee from the brush. If the grass is long enough, you can crouch at any given moment and be invisible.  That’s the nature of the prairie - everything hidden right in front of you, if you’ll only go see it for yourself. 

The grassland is also home to extremes that are hard to understand without firsthand experience.  Rainfall tends to either be copious in a given year or scarce - an average over a period of years won’t tell you much about what the weather actually does.  And fire is not just incidental - it’s built in, part of the function of the whole.  In any given year, the temperatures reach intense heat and cold, with variations of powerful storms for every season. So the coyote and other denizens of grasslands are hardy, adaptable. Coyote is comfortable being uncomfortable and can roll with the punches.

Winters feature one variation on the storm theme, with wicked cold and ferocious blizzards that still kill people in the 21st century.  My picture of winter is snowy skies so cold and grey-white they are continuous with the blanketed ground. Guard hairs grow out to long black-tipped quills, crafting a dark halo against the freeze.  That crisply wet smell of snow and the soft silence, the weak, deep-slanted light - the permanent 4pm of the soul. Tiny rodents scuttle beneath the powder, morsels to be pounced and snapped up.

 

Spring dawdles.  Just when you think the days are warming, just when the first tender tips of new grass appear, you’ll wake to a fresh, sodden slump of wet snow. That’s mud season, the time of wet, chilled foot pads and nowhere dry to lay.  But one morning, you’ll wake up to a true chorus of birdsong and the vegetal smell of thaw.  The warmth starts to come back to the light, and I crave a good sunbath. 

Fall tends to skip out early - like spring, it is brief and tumultuous.  The cottonwoods glow gold, and any oaks and maple will put on a good show of color (admittedly nothing compared to the true deciduous forests). But it tends not to last - the wind will kick up one day and tear down every leaf as if to say “alright, enough of that.” Sumac flares blood red in the understory, while the fields bleach to mosaics of wheaten blonde, gold, dusty blue-green and bronze.  The prairie takes on a thick, faintly sweet scent of sequestered sugars.  Dead grass ferments in low spots and leaf potpourri seasons the dust with autumn. Time to carefully pluck cactus fruit from the cactus pads and find ripe pears and apples. My inner perception of myself grows a thick, plush coat and I curse that it’s not a physical reality. I pile soft wool around my throat, a makeshift ruff, while hoods down my back stand in for the thick cape of hackles - a little wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

And summer! I’m most nostalgic for summers in the prairie.  The extremes of the seasons play out in microcosm every day, particularly in summer.  In a grassland, you can tell time by scent. Many mornings, even in summer, start out brisk with the fresh smell of dewy grass and the crispness of transpiration.  In a tallgrass prairie, the smell can be grassy the way a lawn is, tinged with sweetgrass and herbal sage, maybe fresh like watermelon rind.  In a mixed or short-grass prairie, the smell is increasingly spicy and dusty - the skunky smell of fetid marigold.  I can’t help but wonder how many complexities of smell I miss with my weak olfaction. To sniff out the night trails of animals would seem so natural. 

Many mornings, almost precisely at dawn, you’ll hear the wild chorus of coyotes.  When I’m alone or unlikely to disturb anyone, I sometimes join in.  And if there’s a moderate amount of clouds, you’re likely to be treated to some of the best sunrises you will ever see, fire in slow motion burning through every hue from smoky rose to crimson to flame-orange and blaze gold.  

Not uncommonly, though, morning is also a gusty time, with steady winds that will tear the breath right out of you.  My ears should be furred inside and out, able to be pinned protectively flat.  But they aren’t, and I’ve learned the hard way that the wind in bare ears isn’t just annoying - I’ve had an osteolith knocked loose in one of these morning windstorms and had vertigo for two weeks!

By mid-morning, the wind has usually settled, and the moisture deserted.  The smells are steady and clear.  It’s a good time to feel the sun warm your back before it gets too hot, and to see the last of the more nocturnal wildlife bedding down for the day.  This is among the most refreshing time for a good long amble. You might see prehistoric-looking pronghorn gliding smoothly across the ground, or bison with fluffy thundercloud heads.  Snakes and lizards warm themselves on stones or open ground, rapidly growing too fast to catch. Summer food, if you’re quick enough - the animal in my brain cues in on any small scampering thing during these sort-coated, lean days. 

In afternoon, the heat sets in and wobbles the air above the ground.  Sun-baked ground acts like a pizza stone, radiating back blazing heat.  You can watch the cumulonimbus clouds build upon themselves all day, blooming and rolling taller as they scud across the skies.  By evening they’re crackling fit to burst and hurl down earth-shaking lightning and torrential rain.  But many afternoons are simply sunny, hot, abuzz with grasshoppers, and seemingly endless. Now is a good time to seek shade in the dense underbrush or work your way down to streams, rivers, and lakes to slake thirst and sniff around.  The mud and vegetation smell of freshwater is proper to me, much moreso than the briny mist of the ocean.  Here you might snag a frog, a musky garter snake, a shining trout. The humid air hosts a rainbow fleet of dragonflies.  There’s always so much to see around water sources.

Sundown in a grassland can bring the same explosion of colors as a sunrise if there are clouds to catch the fire.  Without that cover, the sky will gradually fade to hazy orange and dusty purple.  As the colors deepen, the cool breath of plants rises as mist, releasing moist, grassy, crisp scents.

This is when the first stars flicker on in the deep blue portions of the burgeoning night.  If you’re lucky, they’ll be mirrored on the ground by the living glow of fireflies.  Summer nights as a kid were alive with fireflies, fresh and thoroughly invigorating.  I want to feel cool grass under paws and trot at a vigorous pace, refreshed by the night air.  The chorus of crickets brings the night alive. I feel I should slip into the darkness, wish my eyes had the tapetum lucidum, that shimmering layer that grants effective night vision.  How many more insects and small creatures could I see, smell, hear, and hunt with proper senses?

My mind will sometimes traverse these landscapes in dreams - both familiar and new locales.  If I’m really lucky, I’ll even get to explore them in the body my brain thinks I should have.  For quite a few years, dreaming was the only time I would get to be in these habitats, as I spent my days in the claustrophobia of cities or closed, skyless deciduous forests. I’ve been able to appreciate so many dramatic landscapes, the sort you can stand back and take in, or simply take a photo to admire.  But for me, home will always be deep within those subtler places that must be explored on foot.  The mountain announces itself, but the prairie beckons. 

Comments

[elinox]

Thank you for sharing this. I can practically smell the dusty sweetgrass and sage as the sun sets across the waving grasses.

However, reading this also makes me again realize that I'm an indoor kitty. I enjoy exploring the outside world, but I'm always ready to go back home at the end of an adventure.

[kisota]

(Lol, I accidentally posted this while not signed in the first time).
Thank you!!

I am definitely obsessively an outdoors critter. Sometimes I resent how much STUFF it takes to be comfortable outdoors. Shoes, coat, hat, what is this madness?

I was out in -5F weather this morning during active snowfall because I couldn’t stand being cooped up anymore. Only ran 2 miles (toes getting chilled), but man, it felt great. Now if only we’d get a full blizzard like the kind I remember from way back when. ^^