HOMEbound Nature News - ISSUE 5

Happenings in the Substack Ecosphere || Prairie Dog

This month’s issue of the HOMEbound Nature News is brought to you by the Prairie Dog.

Image: Texas Co-op Power

When I was a kid in rural Tarrant County, Texas, prairie dogs seemed as common as pigeons. On the big interchange where our farm-to-market road fed into the interstate highway to Fort Worth, there was a prairie dog “town” in a chunk of what I now recognize as somewhat intact native Blackland prairie that had endured in the forgotten angles between roads. Because it was Texas, well, everything really was bigger; this wedge of left-behind habitat must have spanned several acres.

In the spring, it would glow cerulean from its carpet of bluebonnets, a native lupine species. I have a yellowed photo of myself, aged 3, posed in a pastel Easter dress in a sea of blue, with a few red paintbrush blooms and creamy buttercups scattered in. This was back in the days when dads would just pull over on the side of the highway and bustle the whole crew out of the sedan for a photo op. It was always boiling hot by Easter, the family itching miserably in their stiff clothes by the side of the road while dad fiddled with his tripod and rolls of film.

Bluebonnet field near Brenham, Texas; photo credit Jason Weingart, jasonrweingart.com

Later in the season, after the relentless Texas heat had baked the field brown, the highway department would come through with a mower. Then, driving past, you could see the big dark mounds of upturned earth from the prairie dog tunnels. And, if you were lucky enough to be pressing your sticky face against the greenish glass window of your mom’s Chevy Caprice at just the right time, you could see them poking their cute heads up to conduct various items of business, seemingly unbothered by the endless roaring of 1980s gas-guzzlers on the road nearby.

This whole arrangement seemed okay for the prairie dogs. Pre-colonization, they would have worked together with bison to keep the prairie mowed low enough for visibility and signaling. But, perhaps they’d adapted well enough to the services provided by tractors.

I admit I hadn’t given these commonplace companions of my childhood much thought until I came across a few lines about them in a book I’m reading. “Once, prairie dogs were the most numerous mammals on the continent, but both their numbers and their habitat have been reduced by 99 percent.”¹

Ninety-nine percent! Further research confirmed that these small beings are in dire straits, indeed.

I am still in shock: prairie dogs, once common as squirrels and unremarkable as starlings, are now diving toward extinction. I recently read that regular old, everyday hedgehogs are declining precipitously across Europe too, and, courtesy of Brandon Keim’s Hakai piece, I’m now aware that muskrats, another once-widespread North American animal, are on their way down as well.

Prairie dogs, hedgehogs, muskrats. Three data points, starting to come into focus as a severely alarming pattern that slams into my soul, setting my heart to stutter and race. It’s rare that a piece of extremely bad news about our natural world takes me completely by surprise. This one did. It feels as though there’s an acceleration here, in this century’s decline of once-common animals, that needs noticing.

I don’t write this to spread the bad feeling; goodness knows, I don’t want other people to feel as I do right now. But, I think I owe it to the ‘dogs, in some way, to put them front and center in a few more minds.

Prairie partners—bison and prairie dogs; image credit Texas Co-op Power

A truly remarkable keystone species, the black-tailed prairie dog once inhabited almost 60 million acres (24 million hectares) in what is now Texas. More broadly, the five prairie dog species once totaled perhaps 5 billion individuals engineering ecosystems in a vast continental swath from Canada to Mexico. Partnering with bison, they formed the backbone of the Great Plains biosphere.

Like other ecosystem engineers, the activities of these burrowing ground squirrels influenced both the biotic and abiotic realms: earthmovers on a massive scale, their tunnels infiltrated rainwater meters deep beneath the prairie soil, providing insurance against drought and steadying streamflow throughout the year. Their incessant nibbling on forbs (wildflowers) and grasses stimulated fresh, nutritious growth, and their underground seed stashes fed many other friends.

Their sheer biomass, warming the air that flowed from their tunnels, kept parts of their ‘dog towns—which could stretch for miles—snow-free even in the region’s harsh winters. Grazers like pronghorn tended to overwinter nearby, assured of nearly year-round food and (relative) warmth. Prairie dogs served as the sole prey of the critically endangered black-footed ferret, and their tunnels provided homes for prairie species like burrowing owls, badgers, and rabbits.

Burrowing owl visitor at prairie dog burrow; image credit Texas Co-op Power

The myths that led to their near-eradication—that they carried disease, that cattle would break their legs in their burrows, that they’d compete with cattle for forage—are all well and truly debunked at this point, and not a minute too soon. Although hidebound holdouts still consider them varmints to be eliminated, a great many nonprofit and government groups are working to restore prairie dogs and their habitats.

I’m new to all of this myself, having failed to notice that these common wonders of my youth were slipping away. But a bit of research led me to a few organizations that are doing land conservation and restoration work on their (and the prairies’) behalf. I can’t vouch for any of them except the American Prairie Reserve, but perhaps others who are more familiar with prairie work can share information in the comments.

• Native Prairies Association of Texas

• American Prairie Reserve

• Prairie Dog Coalition

Happenings in the Substack Ecosphere

🌿 Announcements 🌿

Many thanks to all the folks who sent in their items for inclusion in this month’s edition. What great work you are doing. Occasionally, I supplement these listings with items I’ve gleaned from around Substack myself. If I’ve included anyone’s information in error, please send your corrections to ourhome@substack.com so I can update the listing.

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Quite a few members of the Substack nature community were impacted by Hurricane Helene just a few weeks ago, and Julie Gabrielli and I were able to gather and share some information from several of them in our post After Helene, which has been updated this week.

Writer Lauren Graeber of The Previvor Archives announces a writing guide for people who want to write about their experience of the storm and who are looking for help getting started. It’s designed to facilitate reflective writing, not necessarily meant for publication, but certainly for processing what happened. She set it up as a section on her Substack that will send out 6 newsletters full of prompts and exercises over the coming weeks. It’s free for anyone and she’d love to get it to as many people as she can.

The intro post with more information on how to join can be found here.

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Nina Veteto writes Flora & Forage from western North Carolina, and has designed beautiful bandanas that are field guides to Appalachian wildflowers. A portion of the proceeds will go toward post-hurricane wildflower restoration in concert with local conservation groups.

Please take a look and consider supporting botanical restoration efforts in the area with your purchase.

Image: Nina Veteto

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Several from our nature community were featured in recent editions of Substack Reads, now called “The Weekender.”

Anne Thomas’s fungal photography was a highlight of this edition, along with Michela Griffith’s gorgeous golden treeline photo right up top. Wendy Pratt’s poem was featured in this week’s. Lovely to see you all there!

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“Song of the Chesapeake” by Julie Gabrielli of Homecoming will be included in the upcoming print anthology Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, to be published by NatureCulture, a small woman-owned press in western Massachusetts specializing in books (mostly anthologies) that help people be in right relationship with the rest of nature: www.nature-culture.net. Fantastic good news; can’t wait to read it!

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Artist and author Rosalie Haizlett illustrated a piece on why and how leaves change colors in the Washington Post this week. I think I can share it here as a gift article, as many American readers will likely have cancelled their WaPo subscriptions, if they had one:

A Year in the Life of a Leaf | Kasha Patel and Emily Wright

🪺 A New Segment: Nature Discovery Series! 🪺

I’m excited to share a new series here on the Nature News. Each month, I’ll be highlighting posts from five randomly selected Substacks listed in the Home | Nature Directory. Besides being fun, it’s one way to help raise the profiles of some of our newer and/or smaller publications.

Please, take a moment to click through and discover some of the wonderful work I’ve found while poking through the archives of these five nature-loving colleagues. Then, let’s support their work by sharing or subscribing, or both.

Featured this month (my descriptions, not theirs):

• Myconeer | fantastical fungi, no psychedelics required to blow your mind

• Protozoa Princess | tiny, beautiful worlds brought to life in illustration

• The Earthmonk Journal | conversations with a planetary sage

• Crafty Green Poet | wild poetry and practicality

• Heather in the Blue Mountains | feral wanderings with religious wisdom

🌱 Welcoming New Substack Nature Listings 🌱

Welcome to the following Substackers, added or updated since our previous issue was published. We are now at 275 nature-based publications here—what a delight it is to be a part of this force of love and attention for the Earth!

• Outdoor Simplicity by Hayley (England)

• The Weekly Anthropocene by Sam Matey (United States/Global)

• Mythic Living by Heidi Wedd (Australia)

• The Northern Naturalist by Dave Benson (United States)

• The Earth House by Jo Hanlon-Moores (England)

• Bee-Witched by Jessica Maybury (Europe and UK)

• Catechism of Kinship by David Pritchett (United States)

• Yolanda Bella by Yolanda McAdam (Canada)

• Earth Hope by Amanda Royal (United States/Global)

• Let’s Nerd Out About Gardening by Tanith Perry-Mills (Canada)

• Vermont Ridgerunner by Kristina Stykos (United States)

• This Party’s Over by Iain Robinson (United Kingdom)

• Nature-Positive Notes by Wedgetail (Oceania)

🌲 Books and Book-Related Items 🌲

A quick welcome to Caro Clarke of Portobello Literary. Caro represents several of the artists listed on Nature’s Bookstack and will be offering musings and insights on “publishing, writing craft and book news.”

Through Caro’s newsletter, I realized that I’d neglected to add Moving Mountains, edited by Louise Kenward, to the book directory. It’s below.

📚 Find more books written by nature directory authors at Nature’s Bookstack:

Gratitude

Let me express here an infinite ocean of prairie’s worth of thanks to the folks who’ve contributed to the care and feeding of this slightly feral nature writer. Your kindness is overwhelming. Special thanks to those taking out paid subscriptions:

• 🐾 A cozy, fur-lined den fully stocked with the season’s seeds to you, Sally Gillespie, for supporting the work of the directory and for the wisdom you share with us at Psyche’s Nest. Sally does beautiful work that “holds our belonging in the living world, creatively sustaining engagement with climate and ecological crises.” So necessary.

• 🌻 A sea of wildflower blossoms across a rolling prairie landscape to you, Diane Garver, for your kind generosity in keeping this project afloat.

• 🌾 And the wild whisper of wind across the tall grasses to you lovely ones who supported all this with a bit of cash to the tip jar:

  • Jason Anthony, who publishes Field Guide to the Anthropocene

  • Mary Dansak, who publishes Riding with Jasper

  • Peter Shepherd, who publishes The Nest

  • David E. Perry, who publishes In the Garden of His Imagination

I thank you all from the bottom of a very full heart.

And that’s a wrap for this month!

Please feel free to send me your news items for next month, or any corrections, at: ourhome@substack.com

See you all next month,
🌲🦉

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🐌 Treat yourself: spend some time at Homecoming, where Julie Gabrielli hosts NatureStack, gathering works of nature writing, interviewing Substackers, and more! It’s always a delight.

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The HOMEbound Nature News and HOME | Nature Directory are labo(u)rs of love. It is important to me that these resources remain free in perpetuity. And yet, they represent many long hours of work, so any contributions are received with great gratitude.

You can subscribe for free below, or choose a paid option. Alternatively, feel free to drop a tip of any size in the tip jar! Many thanks.

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💌 If you have a moment, please send this newsletter to a friend, share on your site, or put a link in Substack Notes or another social media outlet. These actions go a long way toward helping our Nature community grow!

1. Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert, Bright Green Lies. 2021.