COLUMN ONE : Rescuing a Shrinking Treasure : In 150 years, America’s vast prairies have been reduced to small patches. Now, nature groups are trying new ways to save native grasses and the wildlife they support.

Some strange things have been seen rolling down the highways of America’s heartland. But a 12,000-year-old prairie, ablaze in a mid-summer carpet of yellow, purple and orange wildflowers?

It happened like this: The one-acre swatch of virgin grassland covered a small hill that was to be mined for its gravel. Conservationists objected, but to no avail.

So, in a harried binge of activity, they rounded up about 300 volunteers and some heavy equipment and did the next best thing.

With the consent of the owner, they spent one weekend this month digging up the prairie and its topsoil lock, stock and root. Then they trucked it six miles down Route 25, past a tacky array of convenience shops and fast food joints, and meticulously pieced it back together atop a new gravel mound in a nature preserve southof town.

Going along for the ride were rare and delicate varieties of grass, such as lead plant, flowering spurge, blazing star, short green milkweed, Scribner’s panic grass and bastard toadflax--some capable of living hundreds of years from roots that go several feet deep. At the same time, rare beetles, wasps, butterflies and parasites were scooped into nets and carried in ice chests to their new home. In all, members of perhaps 100 species of plants and 1,000 animal species were moved.

Since no one ever performed an emergency prairie-ectomy before, no one is exactly sure what’s going to happen. “This is something that’s gone through very serious surgery,” explained Steve Packard, an official of the Illinois chapter of The Nature Conservancy, which coordinated the move. “It’s like doing an operation with a hoe and a pair of bulldozers. There’s very severe trauma to this ecosystem, and we don’t know how much we’re going to lose.”

That anyone would even bother with such a transplant underscores the wholesale destruction of the prairies--once vast, flat, near-treeless seas of undulating grass. In some places the grasses grew so high that pioneers on horseback feared getting lost in them. The prairies were thick with bobcats, wolves, deer, elk, rabbits and bison. Swarms of birds thick enough to darken the sky would hover, searching for food. Walls of fire, triggered by lightning or set by Indians, would often roll for miles across the vegetation.

“These are prairies three, six, ten and twenty leagues in length and three in width, surrounded by forests of the same extent,” the French explorer Louis Jolliet wrote after an expedition in 1673. “Beyond these the prairies begin again, so that there is as much of one sort of land as of the other. Sometimes we saw grass very short, and, at other times, five or six feet high; hemp, which grows naturally here, reaches a height of eight feet.”

Tall grass prairies once stretched from what is now Michigan and Ohio across large portions of the Midwest to the Dakotas and down over northern Texas. The nutrients the grasses produced gave birth to the rich black soil that has made Midwestern agriculture the envy of the world.

The Midwestern prairies that emerged from the last Ice Age covered as much as 125 million acres by some estimates, an area nearly as large as all of modern France. Yet less than two centuries of developing farms, roads, industries and subdivisions have virtually erased the original grasslands from many states.

Small Patches Left

Today, prairies are counted in mere smidgens, not broad vistas. As ecosystems go, they are far more endangered than the much publicized vanishing rain forests.

Illinois, which still calls itself the Prairie State, was nearly four-fifths prairie when the first white settlers arrived. What is now Cook County, which includes Chicago, was once 90% prairie. Yet a state survey taken a decade ago found that when all the fragments were added together, only four square miles of Illinois prairie remained--less than 1/100th of 1% of the original mass.

To a great extent, America’s prairies were victims of their own lushness. The topsoil they produced was so deep, black and fertile that farmers used to brag that they could grease the axles of their wagons with it. “This is where the Midwest’s roots are,” said Kim Chapman, a Minneapolis-based ecologist and prairie expert. “The prairies are an incredibly rich and diverse community of elements.”

Though most of the best prairie land was consumed by agriculture long ago, land that was rocky, marshy or otherwise hard to plow had been left alone. Then modern farming techniques and export-driven government policies that encouraged planting “fence-row to fence-row” led to accelerated cultivation of even marginal lands.

In recent years, conservationists have begun mobilizing to save what prairie is left. Their argument for preservation is more than just environmental.

“The culture and the history of this part of the country is being lost in 150 years,” said Valerie Spale, a member of the state-sponsored Illinois Nature Preserves Commission. “You’re talking about 150 years to devastate an ecosystem that took millennia to build.”

To date, the most ambitious preservation scheme is that of the National Audubon Society, which wants to set aside nearly 11,000 acres of bluestem grass in the Flint Hills of southern Kansas as a national monument.

The wind-swept land, studded with bands of limestone that jut through spectacular green plateaus, is pasture on the Z-Bar cattle ranch. The nature group has taken an option to buy the ranch for $4 million. Then it proposes to turn over the land to the National Park Service.

With the land under federal control, the plan would be to end grazing and let the grass grow long and lush, restore native wildlife and offer visitors a taste of what the early settlers saw as they crossed the plains. The Park Service is studying the idea, and is to deliver a report on it by next March.

Hoping for a tourist boom, many residents of the Flint Hills area are enthusiastic about the proposal. Ranchers, on the other hand, are fighting it. They contend that any park service beachhead on grazing lands would continue to grow and might eventually annex their property, or saddle them with nettling and expensive land use restrictions.

“What do the American people want--good, cheap food, or do they want to preserve everything?” asked Chuck Magathan, one of the opponents.

Daring Rescue Plan

The latest preservation effort in Illinois was clearly on a far more modest and less controversial scale. Ecologically speaking, however, it was quite daring.

The area to be saved, known as the Healy Road Prairie, was a rare, dry-gravel prairie that grows only on uncommon features known as kames. They are high, rounded hills, overlooking the surrounding plains, that were formed thousands of years ago when cracks developed in glaciers and allowed large quantities of rock and gravel to accumulate.

Originally 2.4 acres, gravel mining over the years has whittled down the Healy Road site to less than half that size. The operator offered to sell the remainder to the local chapter of The Nature Conservancy, but it couldn’t meet the price.

Since it couldn’t save the prairie as is, the group came up with an ingenious, albeit ecologically risky, fallback plan. It decided to transfer as much of the Healey road ecosystem as it could to a place called Bluff Spring Fen, a 90-acre preserve of wetlands and kames near a cemetery south of Elgin.

“It’s not so different from trying to save a precious art work or the Pyramids or the Sphinx,” said Packard, the Conservancy official who came up with the transplanting idea.

Complex Moving Job

The group enlisted the help of a commercial nursery and a construction company, rounded up its members and set them to work in a feverish exercise of industrial-strength gardening.

Everything had to be done quickly to keep as much of the plant life and wildlife as possible from dying.

First, an earth-moving crew built an artificial gravel kame at Bluff Spring Fen. At the same time, a team of about 20 volunteers with butterfly nets was over at Healy Road gathering leaf hoppers, froghoppers, spittle bug beetles, butterflies and other insects. The insects were carried in ice chests to Bluff Spring Fen and released, in the hope that at least some insect life would migrate to the transplanted prairie once it took hold.

On moving day, tree spades and bulldozers scooped up 8 to 12 inches of topsoil from Healey Road, complete with grasses and other plants. It was all dumped into trucks and carted to Bluff Spring Fen, where hundreds of people took turns sodding the new hill with clumps of the old.

“A lot of this is trial and error,” said Thomas Aranow, an environmental consultant who helped coordinate the project. “ . . . there is no particular field of established science to tell us how to do this.”

Aranow said the transplant process would surely kill many plants, but many varieties would eventually be rejuvenated by seeds laced through the soil. “You’ll be looking at 3 to 5 years before anything we plant here looks like anything you would call a prairie,” Aranow explained.

Those who helped out on moving day said the wait would be worthwhile. “Hopefully, future generations will be glad we saved something here,” said Bob Kruschka, a suburban maintenance administrator, as he pawed through the dirt.

Cradling a tender yellow coreopsis plant in one hand, Hilda Joy, a systems analyst for a defense contractor, said that pitching in to save a prairie was part of a long family legacy.

“My grandfather was a farmer in Austria,” she said. “He always said if the world isn’t better when you leave it than when you came in, you shouldn’t have been born at all. He passed that on to my mom, and she passed it on to me.”

Free-lance writer J. Duncan Moore contributed to this story from Cottonwood Falls, Kan.