Close to the airport on the western edge of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, lies what appears to be a large overgrown field . In fact, this site is a rare survivor, a remnant of the original tall-grass prairie that once covered much of central North America. Today it is home to the Living Prairie Museum.
In 1968, a group of researchers came to Manitoba to look for good examples of remnant prairie. Of the 64 sites they examined, The Living Prairie Museum site was identified as one of the best examples of tall-grass prairie in the province. It had never been farmed and had few invasive, non-native species. It was also a prime piece of land in a growing city facing rising real estate prices . Nevertheless , thanks to three years of hard campaigning by local naturalists and environmentalists, in 1971 the City Council decided by just one vote to preserve the land and allow a museum to be built.
harmony with nature Formed in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, prairies are huge areas of flat grassland with few trees, generally moderate temperatures, and moderate rainfall. The fertile soil provides perfect conditions for grasses – and, of course, for growing modern agricultural crops such as wheat , barley , rye and oats .
Before the Europeans arrived, vast herds of bison fed on the tall-grass prairie that covered one million square kilometres, stretching from southern Manitoba down to Texas. First Nation tribes lived alongside the bison, bears, antelope, and wolves , their lives interdependent with the ecosystem and its abundant wildlife.
extinction Today, the prairies, like wild bison and traditional First Nation life, are almost extinct. Less than 0.05 per cent of the original tall-grass prairie remains in Manitoba, making The Living Prairie Museum a precious remaining fragment of this unique habitat. It is home to more than one hundred and fifty different grass and wildflower species, rare insects, including the monarch butterfly, and to a variety of animals and birds.
The museum was officially opened on 23rd June 1976 to show visitors a special landscape – and provide a glimpse of how most of Winnipeg would have looked after the last ice age some ten thousand years ago.
INTERVIEW: the little museum on the prairie Winnipeg is a city in Manitoba, Canada. Its name was given to a bear at London Zoo which later inspired A.A. Milne to write the story Winnie the Pooh . But that isn’t Winnipeg’s only claim to fame . It is also the home of the Living Prairie Museum, a piece of land where visitors can learn about the prairie’s complicated ecosystem. And there is certainly a lot that needs to be learnt. As Kyle Lucyk, the museum’s director, explains, the prairie has been severely damaged by modern agriculture:
Kyle Lucyk (Canadian accent): The ecosystem that filled the middle part of North America, so it would have gone, you know, Winnipeg was at the northern extent and it went all down to Texas and from kind of the Rocky Mountains over towards Indiana, Illinois in the United States. So a great big chunk of North America, you know, the middle part. And in terms of how much is left, it is a very endangered ecosystem. Underneath the tall-grass prairie is some of the best soil for farming. So here in Manitoba we’ve lost 99.9 per cent of the original remnant tall-grass prairie . So it makes it a very unique ecosystem for us to have a piece as large as we have in the middle of the city, still intact.
when the trains came... Farming was particularly bad for the prairie’s bison, as was the construction of the railways in the late 19th century:
Kyle Lucyk: The other bad thing to happen to the bison was the trains. They built a train from the east to the west, and if you’re driving a train across Canada, and there’s ten thousand bison standing on the tracks , you can’t really drive your train very well! So the people that had the trains and the farmers, the two of them, they didn’t like the bison. So in North America we killed ten million bison in about ten years. And they were very important, you know, they would eat... a lot of prairie seeds are big and heavy, so the seeds, to move around, they’d have to be eaten by a bison and then pooped out , you know, a couple of days later, and that’s how they’d move around. So, you know, if we replanted large pieces of prairie with 10 or 15 species, without the bison to eat the seeds here from the Living Prairie Museum and poop them out a couple of kilometres away, those seeds aren’t going to move around.
The big picture But Kyle Lucyk is relatively optimistic about the future:
Kyle Lucyk: As people, we need to think of ourselves as part of the ecosystem, not separate from these ecosystems. And if we destroy these relationships that most of us don’t understand, no one really knows how that’s going to affect even our ability to grow food . A lot of university professors and Masters students are studying the prairie to think about how we can integrate some natural systems, or manage a farm more like a natural system. You know, instead of growing annual crops every year, you know, there’s lots of prairie plants that have food and medicinal qualities that we can grow. So I think there’s a lot that we can learn about agriculture from studying the prairie, and lots of insects and animals that help, you know, people with agriculture that we can learn from it.