The Prairie Keepers

by Marcy Houle

The Prairie Keepers, by Marcy Houle, is as much a summer journal as a book about prairies; nevertheless Houle's love of the Zumwalt prairie in northeastern Oregon shines through in her clear writing, and both her travails and her studies are fun reading. The conclusion is perhaps slightly anti-climactic in prose form, but I can imagine that it was more than worth the summer for Houle, and she has left me wanting to visit the Zumwalt (what a great name!) should I ever get to Oregon.

Buteos are soaring hawks, like our red-tailed hawk and the more western ferruginous and swainson's hawks; they nest in the Zumwalt prairie, apparently in higher concentrations than almost anywhere else in the country. Houle's first day on the prairie provides a striking example of the omnipresence of prairie raptors:

I tried to follow the fleeting image - a golden-hued prairie falcon - that was shooting like a hurled boomerang in pursuit of a large red-tailed hawk. The poor lumbering red-tail flipped upside down, then righted itself in an effort to beat quickly away. The prairie falcon wheeled over, empowered by victory, then directed its aggression at a golden eagle circling west above a grove of aspen trees.

With the falcon gone, the red-tail again enjoyed a few minutes of peaceful, oscillating flight. Unfortunately, his sortie led him straight into the territory of a ferruginous hawk...

The mission Houle accepted was to explain this abundance. What about the Zumwalt, still privately owned primarily by local cattle ranchers, allows such richness? Houle, working alone, has the summer to survey the buteos in 200 square miles of prairie, map their nesting sites, measure their productivity, analyze their forage - and, of course, explain why they are all there.

That she comes anywhere near success in such a daunting task amazed me. Her efforts at a "buteo rodeo," for example, in which area residents, ranchers, and wildlife officials all helped for 3 days to band buteo fledglings in over 100 nest sites, earned my admiration for both resourcefulness and tenacity. Ranchers and wildlife officials are not normally known for working together, and Houle describes well both her nervousness at suggesting the idea, and the joy of success.

Houle began to know the people of the area as well as the prairie as the summer progressed. She attended an Elks lodge dinner, babysat her landlady's son, and came to understand that the ranchers, for all their initial hostility, shared with her a love of the land she was studying. And that understanding, as much as the explanation of the prairie's health, is well worth reading the book for.

For the Zumwalt is obviously healthy, more so according to Houle on the family-held ranch land than on the factory-style ranches; and that health, that amazing fecundity, is critically entwined with the way the ranchers treat their land. At the book's conclusion, Houle reports calls to turn the Zumwalt into a National Park. If as environmentalists we ask something of cattle ranchers, perhaps we owe it to them at the very least to understand what we're asking, and what their own problems might be. Would a National Park be, perhaps, too absolute a change, too uncompromising, both in its cost to people and in its consequent changes to the Zumwalt? That's food for another essay; Houle's book is food for thought.

© 1995, Greg Tillman.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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