Swaying plumes of native grasses once stretched from Texas to the Canadian province of Manitoba, but today the tallgrass prairie gently rises and falls on only a few million acres in Kansas and Oklahoma. Aimee Guignon Larrabee and John Altman, a cousin of director Robert Altman's and maker of more than two dozen documentary films of his own. Singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett is host, and actor Michael Murphy narrates. Maybe next we can do one on paint drying. Ultimately, their film reflects the soil as it lives and breathes.
Cattle munch tender new shoots just as buffalo did centuries ago.
Streaks of fire zigzag through a black prairie night. The wind rustles grasses with names like little blue stem, prairie smoke, prairie blazing star. Nature created the tallgrass prairie over millions of years, as the earth shifted and glaciers froze and melted. The Rocky Mountains' emergence created arid land to the east, where grasses began to take root. Plants on the western plains remained shorter, and the region became home to shortgrass and mixed-grass prairie.