Birdwatching at Prairie Creek
“Early on, probably it was ’77 or ’78, I was exploring the county, trying to figure out what was where and where to go at that time . . . One day I drove by this prairie and I go ‘Oh my goodness! What have we here?’ It had birds that were familiar to me: Grasshopper Sparrows and Savanna Sparrows. There were Red-headed Woodpeckers there, over in the oak savana. At that time there were cattle there, it was private property, so I would just drive by on the road and stop and look.”
“It’s alarming to see the amount of native prairie that has been plowed to plant corn and soy beans.”
“There has been a slow decline in the number of birds showing up. Almost every species has fewer numbers . . . Everything has dropped. Almost everything”
Examples of declining bird species at Prairie Creek WMA. From left, Meadowlark, Western Kingbird, and Red-headed Woodpecker (photos courtesy of All About Birds, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/).
“We as a state and we as a nation have to both have the political will to do the big-picture things and the funds to carry it out. And to think through things like ethanol plants, that’s a state policy to subsidize ethanol which had a direct result in terms of land use. It has to happen at that level. And of course that is driven by the popular will.”