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Bringing Back the Native Palouse Prairie
Staging a comeback with the help of landowners
© Joe Weaver FCC
In north-central Idaho, Kas Dumroese is restoring retired agricultural land to native Palouse Prairie, an ecosystem that’s been almost entirely wiped out. Kas seeds native plants like lupine. Some grassland birds, like the Savannah Sparrow, can thrive in agricultural landscapes, but other birds of the grasslands, like the Grasshopper Sparrow (seen here), are far more dependent on unaltered native habitat.
Hear more about this unique habitat on the Threatened podcast.
BirdNote®
Bringing Back the Native Palouse Prairie
By Monica Gokey
This is BirdNote.
In north-central Idaho, landowner Kas Dumroese is restoring retired agricultural land to native Palouse Prairie, an ecosystem that’s been almost entirely wiped out.
We walk through a retired pasture.
Kas: So if we walk over here -- this field has been out of production for, probably 20 years. And if you look on the ground… because I just noticed this the other day …
Monica: Ohhh!
Looking up at us is lupine, a splash of purple on the Palouse.
This is the fruition of Kas’s restoration work: Seeding native plants like lupine and then hoping they spread on their own.
Kas: If we look down, we’ll see that the Palouse Prairie is trying to stage a comeback. Right? Here’s lupine coming in. Lupine in front of us... And as we walk down here, we’ll see several species that are slowly making their way back into this grassland.
Leafy flowering plants like lupine are called forbs; they’re an essential element of intact Palouse Prairie.
Some grassland birds, like the Savannah Sparrow
[Savannah Sparrow-XC500425]
can thrive in agricultural landscapes. They’re what we might call generalists. But for the specialist grassland birds, like the Grasshopper Sparrow,
[Grasshopper Sparrow-XC501023]
they’re far more dependent on unaltered native habitat, or, in the case of the Palouse, what very little remains of it.
To hear more about the Dumroese family’s Palouse Prairie restoration project, subscribe to Threatened wherever you get your podcasts.
For BirdNote, I’m Monica Gokey.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Production Manager: Allison Wilson
Associate Producer: Ellen Blackstone
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Editor: Ari Daniel
Producer: Monica Gokey
Field Recordings by Monica Gokey
Additional sounds provided by xeno-canto. Savannah Sparrow XC500425 and Grasshopper Sparrow XC501023 recorded by Jacob Saucier.
© 2020 BirdNote December 2020 Narrator: Monica Gokey
ID# palouse-02-2020-12-03 palouse-02
Monica Gokey
Writer