Originally Posted by Hal
Good to hear about the cattle. Grasslands worldwide evolved with fire and grazing. Not continuous, but cyclical as when herds large and small seek out and graze areas that have recently burned and bypass the areas waiting for the next lightning fire. The Komarek brothers from Tall Timbers showed the high correlation between the distribution of North American grasslands and areas with high lightning frequency. The study is a landmark in fire ecology. Now we know the same principals apply to huge areas in the western United States including mountain forests, chaparral, sagebrush, and pinyon juniper. Here on the northern prairies, grasslands or wetlands (basically wet grasslands) suffer the Smokey Bear Syndrome just as those habitats, with the affliction most severe on public lands, some with few large herbivores of any type, native or domesticated.

That's interesting, Hal. Do you have a link to the study you referenced? I would have thought that soil type and rainfall had more to do with the creation of grasslands than lightning frequency. I am at my farm in AL right now, and the rolling hills were originally part of the great longleaf forest. Fire was an important tool in keeping it going, and there is plenty of evidence that the Creeks who lived here routinely burned the forest and didn't wait on lightning.

But I can drive 4 miles west and cross the Cahaba river and I'm in the Blackbelt soil that is a strip of land across AL and MS. It has a much higher ph and was originally a vast grassland, inhabited by bison and other animals that you would expect to see in the Midwest. It is still open land today, though it is mostly pasture. It's one spot the timber industry didn't get, as it won't grow pine trees.

It was great quail hunting in the 50s and 60s, and the only place we could go that had good populations. But even back then it was hard to get permission to hunt the better places.