This collection of essays had its origins mostly by chance. At times, after a wonderful day out-of-doors in Nebraska, I have felt compelled to sit down and summarize some of my immediate past experiences. That is how the first of the essays came about, after a quasi-religious visit to an ancient Pawnee sacred site. Others, such as the essays on snow geese and the Platte River, were written only after months of growing concern over what I have come to believe is an increasingly short-range attitude about the value, beauties, and needs for preservation of our state’s finite natural resources of land, water, and ecosystems. Still other essays were written at the suggestion of friends or to comply with a magazine or newspaper editor’s request for a timely story.
In any case, nearly this entire collection of essays has, in large part, been extracted from my already published writings. The great majority of them were written for Prairie Fire, a monthly independent newspaper published in Lincoln. The progressive stance of Prairie Fire as to important environmental and political issues is so refreshing and welcome that I have happily complied with any suggestions by its editor, Cris Trautner, for submissions and have at times pestered her to accept still others. I also greatly appreciate her help in providing me with edited copy of all the essays that were first published in Prairie Fire, and the willingness of the newspaper’s publisher, W. Don Nelson, to let me reproduce them. The original essays and all my other pieces I have published there can be found on the newspaper’s website: www.prairiefirenewspaper.com.
Other than the Prairie Fire articles (which can be easily identified by their same or similar titles in the bibliographic sources section), I have, with permission, extracted parts or used all of three stories previously published in Nebraska Life magazine. These include the account of reproduction in the yucca and yucca moth (from “The Ancient Romance of the Yucca and the Yucca Moth”), the section of the prairie grouse essay that describes the interactions of a sharp-tailed grouse and prairie-chickens on a joint display ground (from “A Dozen Squaretails and a Sharpy”), and the descriptions of native grasses in an essay on tallgrass prairies (from “Autumn on the Prairie: Nebraska’s Grasses”). Additionally, I have extracted some historical information on irrigation and corn production in the Platte Valley from my book The Platte: Channels in Time (University of Nebraska Press, 2008). In all cases, there has been some trimming, updating, or other modifications as has seemed desirable. The final essay is entirely new, and I appreciate the advice that Jim Douglas and Scott Taylor of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission provided in fact-checking my comments about that agency.
Dr. Karine Gil-Weir kindly agreed to collaborate with me in writing two of the essays; her work at the Crane Trust has provided an important baseline for long-term population studies of both sandhill and whooping cranes in Nebraska and elsewhere. I also owe the Crane Trust thanks for letting me use their bunkhouse on many occasions, as well as using their crane blinds, and the same is true for the Rowe Audubon Sanctuary and the Nature Conservancy. And I would be remiss not to mention Tom Mangelsen and the entire Mangelsen family, whose cabin on the Platte River has often seemed like a second home to me and whose hunting blinds converted easily to photographic blinds, allowing Tom and me to often ruminate about the fate of the cranes, the Platte, and the natural world, and, while thus engaged, to often miss out on great photographic opportunities.
It is impossible to acknowledge all of the help I have directly or indirectly had in being able to write these pieces—they have grown out of a half century of roaming Nebraska’s back roads, trails, and half-forgotten places among our grasslands, forests, rivers, and wetlands. Writing these essays has brought back a host of memories of locations, events, and golden days afield with hundreds of students, friends, colleagues, and others. They will know who they are.