Close Encounters with Nature at Spring Creek Audubon Prairie
Spring Creek Prairie shimmers like a newly woven copper-colored blanket in the brilliant sunlight of late October. Covering more than eight hundred acres of glacially sculpted land in southeastern Nebraska and located less than twenty miles southwest of Lincoln, its high hills represent the western limits of the last great glacier reaching this far south. Spring Creek’s hilly ground is intermixed with rich soil materials carried in from the north and blown in from the west, but its undulating surface and rock-strewn substrate have protected it from the plowing and cropping that were the fate of nearly all of eastern Nebraska’s fertile lands.
Many scattered boulders, transported by the ice from as far north as South Dakota and Minnesota, are visible near the tops of some of the highest hills, where ten thousand years of more recent erosion has gradually exposed them. Yet even the largest of these boulders become seasonally hidden by the tall perennial grasses after they have attained maturity in early fall. The tallest of these grasses, big bluestem and Indiangrass, grew as high as eight feet after the generous summer rains of 2011. These impressive grasses effectively hide most of the other 370 species of plants that have been identified in this relict prairie, one of the two largest remaining tallgrass prairies in all of Nebraska. Biologists have also documented at least 27 species of mammals, 220 birds, 53 butterflies, and 35 dragonflies and damselflies at Spring Creek.
Because of its diverse plant and animal life, Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center has been a magnet for naturalists ever since the National Audubon Society acquired it in 1998. Its educational value was greatly enhanced with the completion of a beautiful interpretive center in 2006. Its hay-bale construction and low-slung architecture allow it to fit appropriately and inconspicuously into the prairie surroundings.
In recent years Spring Creek and Lincoln’s Pioneers Park Nature Center have expanded their educational programs to encompass all of the fourth-grade children in Lincoln’s public schools during the fall period. During spring, fourth-graders from other towns within a roughly fifty-mile radius are also brought in to spend most of a day on the prairie. As a result, over the years several thousand students have been able to see the prairie firsthand and, under the guidance of Deb Hauswald and other staff and volunteers, learn about both its natural history and human history.
There are also other seasonal educational opportunities for both children and adults at Spring Creek, such as participating in one-day “BioBlitz” surveys of plants and animals in late June or attending early fall festivals such as Twilight on the Tallgrass (2010) and Harvest of Traditions (2011). During the Prairie Festival in 2011, visitors could walk the Prairie Appreciation Trail and stop at sites where they could catch live grassland insects with nets and identify them, capture and examine aquatic invertebrates from one of the prairie wetlands, draw or color images of prairie plants and birds, or learn about some of Nebraska’s endangered species.
During two days in late October 2011, I accompanied nearly 150 students from Lincoln’s Roper Public School as they ventured out on the prairie, most of them probably having never before set foot on the grasslands that were so familiar and vital to earlier generations of Nebraskans. Divided into small groups, each with about a dozen students, their teacher, and a Spring Creek mentor, the kids were soon literally immersed in the tall grasses, some of which were twice as tall as them.
At an early stop the children learned about the complex grassland composition of a tallgrass prairie, with its hundreds of kinds of grasses and other plants, many of them wildflowers. They also heard about the prairie’s interdependent populations of insects, which often exchange pollination for food in the form of nectar, pollen, or vegetation.
The students also learned of the poison juices of the common milkweed. These chemicals (alkaloids) protect it from being eaten by nearly all insects except the larvae of monarch butterflies and milkweed beetles, both of which have developed ways of neutralizing the plant’s lethal effects. The children also enjoyed seeing the dispersal abilities of milkweeds, by releasing their parachute-like seeds into the air and watching them drift away in the breeze.
Another early stop was at the bottom of a long hill, marked by depressions that are the remnants of wagon ruts formed during the late 1800s. At that time wagon trains from Nebraska City cut through the then-virgin grasslands and passed directly over the middle of Spring Creek Prairie, carrying supplies to Fort Kearny, some 120 miles west along the central Platte River.
From the bottom of this hill the kids worked their way slowly upward, sometimes stopping to look at grasshoppers or other insects or to gaze at the seemingly limitless expanse of prairie all around them. About halfway up the hill they assembled on a grassy slope, where they were asked to sit, relax, and close their eyes. They then were told to imagine that the time was the 1860s and that each of them was a badger, living in a burrow and surviving amid the quiet of the prairie landscape. The kids were next asked to imagine hearing the sounds of an approaching wagon train for the first time, and how from that time onward their lives were forever changed, as were those of all other prairie inhabitants and, eventually, the prairies as well.
Later, small groups used nets to capture insects and, with the help of mentors, learned the basics of identifying them. Others used plastic hoops to mark a small circular patch of prairie and then closely examined the variety of plants that were found within it. Still others drew on blank postcards and then colored them using natural pigments squeezed from the berries of prairie plants.
After two hours on the prairie, the kids returned to the education building for picnic lunches. They then returned to the prairie for a brief afternoon session before taking a school bus back to Lincoln, tired but filled with memories likely to endure for a lifetime.
It is impossible to know if these unique experiences will permanently alter the children’s perceptions of Nebraska’s prairie heritage, but letters received later by Spring Creek provide some evidence. One of them reads, “Thank you for teaching me about the prairie. I learned about insects, different kinds of plants, and grasses. I liked drawing pictures with berries, flowers and leaves. I also enjoyed catching insects with a butterfly net and a jar. Now I want to go there again with my family, to see many insects and animals! Your friend, Hee Jo.”
I hope that not only Hee Jo but also many of the other children will indeed return to the prairie again and again. It will help them to become emotionally attached to the natural world and to understand the value of preserving habitats such as Spring Creek Prairie. The prairie is an ever-changing and ever-fascinating tapestry of life, teaching important ecological lessons not so easily found in books, or so willingly assimilated. It is one of Nebraska’s great natural jewels, which, like the Missouri and Platte Rivers, Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff, provide visual reminders of who we as a state and nation are, and quite literally where we came from. It should also remind us of the importance of preserving and protecting all these great icons of historic America.