Anatomy of a grasslandBy Sara Shahriari "There are two things that make for prairie," Faaborg said. "You have to have soils that make it tough for trees to grow, and you have to have some type of disturbance. Fire is the most typical one, and there's really no way to substitute for it. Fire takes all that dead material and converts it back into chemicals, into fertilizer." The importance of fire is one of the greatest lessons Tucker Prairie revealed to Kucera. By designating various tracts to be burned every one, two and five years, Kucera began to understand how fire enriches the prairie soil, speeds up the process of decay and keeps woody shrubs from taking over. Before Missouri was settled by European farmers, lightning strikes caused prairie fires that burned wildly over thousands of acres. Without these fires, the prairie is overtaken by trees such as elm and woody shrubs such as sumac. At first, Kucera's interest in burning met resistance in the growing conservation community of the 1950s. "I know he got some grief for it, but he was one of the first people to sit and say some systems require fire," Faaborg said. "I guess I had a tough ear," Kucera said. "I didn't pay much attention to that." When I-70 was built, it claimed 14 of Tucker Prairie's original 160 acres, despite Kucera's protest. The presence of the interstate made burning more difficult, but the burning continues today under Faaborg's supervision. Another discovery is the special composition of prairie soil and the adaptations plants make to thrive in it. "If you look at where the Missouri River is, that's pretty much determined by the ultimate limit of glaciers. There was a lot of water and silt and sand," Faaborg said. Finer particles, carried by glaciers more than 500,000 years ago, settled on the land they had scraped flat, leaving about 18 inches of clay particles. Today, there are about 18 inches of prairie soil on top of the clay. The warm-season grasses that dominate the prairie can handle the alternating extreme dryness and bogginess of the claypan. Seeds from Tucker are now collected and used to reclaim Prairie Fork in Williamsburg, where MU, the Missouri Prairie Foundation and the Missouri Department of Conservation have seeded more than 200 acres. Kucera spent Sept. 13, 2008, the 50th anniversary of Tucker Prairie's dedication, at Lenoir Health Care Center recovering from open heart surgery. At the prairie, as fall takes hold, prairie grasses are shedding their seeds and the greens of summer are yielding to soft gold and brown. "The prairie has many faces," Kucera wrote in 1966. "To try and understand it one must see it often. It is unique, interesting and worth saving." What the prairie Kucera saved tells us in the future depends on who is willing to listen. |
CAT SZALKOWSKI/MISSOURIAN
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