RICE COUNTY, Kan. (KPR) - Something has been happening on the Kansas prairie. Fewer animals. Less Wildlife. And every day Kansans are starting to take notice. Commentator Rex Buchanan is one of them.
(Transcript)
Some animals get stuck with an unfortunate name. Take the horned toad. Where I grew up in the middle of Kansas, we called them horny toads. They were pretty common, especially this time of year. Their technical name: Texas Horned Lizards.
And they are lizards, not toads. Reptiles. Maybe three or four inches long, about the size of the palm of your hand, with tiny horns growing out of their heads and the rest of their bodies. They looked like little dinosaurs.
Mostly they were just harmless, unusual little occupants of our part of the world, especially, it seemed, of the drier, more sandy soils of our pastures.
I haven't seen one out there in decades. From what I can tell, it's not just that their range is changing. That is, they're not simply moving away for some greener pasture. Instead, studies seem to show that their overall numbers are declining.
There are probably multiple reasons, but as is the case with many declining populations of plants and wildlife, some of their decrease is due to habitat destruction and pesticide and herbicide use.
So, what? You might say. Who cares about a small, funny-looking lizard?
The thing is, it's not just horned toads. The same story is true of the overall number of birds, especially prairie birds. Maybe I sound like a broken record, but I remember seeing magpies in central Kansas when I was a kid. These big black-and-white birds were hard to miss, in fact. I haven't seen one in central Kansas in I don't know how long. And many insect species, pollinators like honeybees and bumblebees and monarch butterflies, are in a similar decline.
Here's the point I really want to make: Horned toads, it seems, are just one part of a much bigger, disconcerting story of wildlife loss, and the causes are almost always the same: less habitat, more pesticides and herbicides.
Maybe now, on the country's 250th birthday, would be a good time to take stock of our legacy, not just human history, the politics and the wars, but our relationship to the natural world.
On the plus side of the ledger, we've developed an environmental consciousness that resulted in lots of good things, like cleaner air and water, recycling, renewable energy. And there are certainly wildlife success stories, like the recovery of bald eagles and a deer population that went from nearly nothing in Kansas, to too many today.
But on the minus side, I look at the less-noticeable species in decline and wonder if this part of the world is a poorer place, one less diverse, less interesting than it was 250 years ago.
We shouldn't just dismiss those declining species as collateral damage in the wake of our way of life. There's lots we could do, like protect prairies, fight habitat fragmentation, at least acknowledge the role of climate change.
At a very minimum, we ought to know our place. Know the land around us, and how we fit within it. Because a world with fewer animals is a poorer place, even if that animal is an odd-looking reptile with a funny sounding name. ###
Check out the Kansas Herpetofaunal Atlas at Fort Hays State University.
Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.
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