(also known as Sericea lespedeza ), an exotic variety of bushclover that wreaks havoc on natural habitats. During the blazing afternoons, he usually switches to the air-conditioned cab of a skid steer outfitted with a mowing deck to blitz stands of unwanted saplings. The Habitat Strike Teams plan to ramp up with two or three seasonal employees each during fire season. But full-timers Tanner and his counterparts in the Western and Eastern Ozarks each serve as teams of one in the months in between. At Wah’Kon-Tah, he uses a GPS map on his phone to track his progress spraying and mowing. A series of squiggly lines showing where he has been. The zoomed-out view of the map can hide the on-the-ground work that goes into each of those lines. As if to prove the point, a fieldstone hidden in a dense cluster of sumac and wild plum trees bangs up one of the skid steer’s wheels, cutting short the afternoon’s mowing while Tanner figures out how to repair or replace it. Similarly, a storm the next morning proves too breezy for spraying. Higher winds make it too difficult to spray the Lespedeza cuneata without wafting the spray onto neighboring natives, and protecting those is just as important
as removing the unwanted ones. Tanner takes advantage of the rare bit of downtime to scout out a few of Wah’Kon-Tah’s far-flung units as prep for future prescribed fires. He passes units burned within the past seven to eight months that have returned, bursting with flowers and thigh-high grasses. Another, located at a distant corner of the sprawling preserve, shows signs of succession on the rise. Rounding a bend, Tanner spies a swath of young oaks, ranging from saplings standing roughly two feet tall to juveniles cresting eight feet. “Wow, look at that!” he says. “That really wants to be forest.”
If allowed to take over, the trees would quickly overwhelm the nearby grasses, erasing badly needed habitat for hundreds of prairie-dwelling species. To preserve biodiversity, it’s important that the grasslands stay grasslands, especially with so few remaining. Crossing the road between the units, Tanner pauses at a gate where he spots a hopeful sight. Vines of American bittersweet curl around an old wooden fence post, their yellow berries adorning the entrance in a cheerful welcome. Their exotic cousins, known as Oriental bittersweet, have become a noxious weed in the Midwest—a harmful invasive that Tanner had grown intimately familiar with in a previous conservation job. The exotic bittersweet has become so common that it is a surprise to find the native species. Tanner pauses to appreciate this unexpected sighting before driving on. “I’m really kind of buzzing about that American bittersweet,” he says after a while. “I can’t tell you how many Oriental bittersweets I’ve killed in Southern Illinois. They’re almost like kudzu, like this apocalyptic plant. So, to see an American bittersweet, just one, is kind of nice.”
THIS PAGE BOTTOM LEFT Rattlesnake master is among more than 300 species of plants at Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie. © Doyle Murphy/TNC RIGHT Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie covers 4,040 acres near El Dorado Springs, Missouri. © Doyle Murphy/TNC THIS PAGE TOP Protecting native species from invasives is an ongoing battle in the grasslands. © Doyle Murphy/TNC
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