Restoring the prairie

By Amy Geiszler-Jones

As Don Distler maneuvers a decades-old pick-up truck, its red color faded from too many summers in the hot sun, around a 330-acre tract of Kansas prairie, he recalls his reaction when he first saw the land.

It was 1983 and the landowner wanted to donate the land, which borders a mile of the Ninnescah River in southwest Sedgwick County, to a university willing to use it for research.

"I thought it was the sorriest piece of land I'd ever seen in my life, and then I thought, 'What a wonderful opportunity,'" he says, pulling off a dirt road and onto the restored prairie. "We couldn't get any worse land. I think I made the statement that it was the most cow-burnt, plow-burnt piece of land in Sedgwick County."

In the 16 years since, the land is slowly healing, thanks in large part to Distler, associate professor of biological sciences at WSU.

For years, he had been telling WSU students about the ways humans have been abusing our natural resources. He had read about projects to conserve those resources, but had little experience in contributing to such efforts.

His work on the Ninnescah Experimental Tract, WSU's biological field station which is as large as the university campus itself, has been his way of giving back to nature.

"To me, it's been a labor of love. Certain things just fall to certain people," he says. "When I first started out here, I had all these ideas about what I wanted to do, but the prairie knew what it wanted to do. So it tolerated me for awhile. I used to get frustrated about it and worry about it. I don't anymore. I've learned. If I don't understand it, at least I've learned to accept it." 

He's thrown himself into developing this field station wholeheartedly. He moved into a trailer that until this summer sat about 10 feet from the Ninnescah River. Recently, the trailer was moved back several more feet to avoid tumbling over the slowly eroding bank. At any given time, chunks of the bank slide into the river.

He gave up spending his summers "tooling around" on a motorcyle, seeing rivers he's heard about, taking in what nature had to offer and observing what humans had altered.

He spent the first decade on the tract doing periodic, controlled burns on the land and planting native grasses on the 205 acres that had once been wheat fields.

The land will never be fully restored to its once natural state because it has lost too much topsoil.

"In 150 years of farming, we've managed to remove, at least from this area, 60-80 percent of the topsoil. It took 27 million years to build and we got rid of it all in about 150," he says. His efforts to restore native grasses - big and little bluestem, Indian grass, side oats grama and blue grama - have at least stopped any further erosion.

Signs of the abuse linger. Several patches of the purple-flowering Baldwin ironweed wave among the grasses in one section. "That's usually an indicator of badly abused or overgrazed prairies," Distler explains. "That's our heritage of overgrazing." 

In some areas, the grasses will never be a vibrant green, even under the best of weather conditions, because nutrients have been stripped from the soil.  Plus the soils are too thin to support lush growths.

But Distler's efforts have given Mother Nature a boost. 

By planting the grass and plugging the natural waterways that meander through the property, Distler has restored a second habitat. "I've started marsh restoration in my second decade," he says.

The return of water and grasses have brought a return of wildlife. Muskrat, beaver, quail, turkey, mice are among the animals coming back. "Look at that," he says to a visitor, pointing to the water pooled in one of the marshes. "There's a green-backed heron, a blue heron and snowy egrets. They're feeding on the fish concentrated in those marshes. Sometimes they get so full of fish they can hardly fly.

"We've had, in the fall, thousands of mallards down on these marshes at any one time. It looked like there wasn't any swimming room between them."

Along with the prairie and marshes, the tract supports other habitats, making it unique among other research stations.

A woodland area bordering the river provides shelter to deer. The cottonwoods and willow trees provide sustenance to beavers. 

The ecosystem of a sand prairie can be seen along the flat of the Ninnescah River. The flat had been the north bank of the river and now is on the south side, an indicator of how much the river has moved over time.

Buried in the fine sand are shells of ancient mussels. "This river once had 20 different species of what are called unionid mussels. Now it only has two," says Distler as he stops to pick up a shell remnant.

The riverbed has yielded other discoveries, as well. Among the buffalo skulls and other bones, Distler once found the skull of a female wolf, a species that was last seen in Kansas a hundred years ago. He keeps it in the station's trailer, along with his latest bug collection that is pinned to the kitchen ceiling.

The 71-year-old Distler, whose name in German means thistle, sees himself working this prairie for several more years. He hopes by then the university will have someone else to tend the field station and will have put it in a land trust forever.

"All they have to do is find another crazy person to take care of it," he jokes. "I call myself more of a caretaker than director. I see that as an essential thing.

"We've got to take care of this world we live in. It's our only life support system. We've got to have the oxygen (the prairie) produces. It cleans toxins from the air and purifies it. The grasses support the land from water and wind erosion.

"These prairies are essential for our well being. I guess most of us have lived in the cities too long to realize that."