Saturday, September 26, 2009

"Wild" Prairie: A Prairie Remnant

In the 'driftless' region of southwest Wisconsin, a land skipped by the last glacier, hills are frequent. And hills mean valleys, and sometimes the valleys are narrow and winding, but some, like these, are flat broad floodplains of thousands of years of sediment or maybe just a great deal of sediment during the runoff from nearby glaciers; I do not know geology well enough to say for sure. But a floodplain like this will have somewhere within it a winding ox-bowed creek or small river. This portion of a favorite plain has mixed prairie. Last year's dried remains could use a burn, but there are are various species from the sunflower and goldenrod families aglow on this mid September evening.