Monday, May 10, 2010

Taming the Wild Prairie


When the wind blows sometimes for days on end, the prairie grasses are a sight that calms and soothes like watching gentle waves quietly lap on a sandy shore. Horses and cattle graze the grasses where once the American Bison lived.

 


 
 
This antique hay rake once helped rake and gather hay for cows and horses' winter food. Fences made of barbed wire outline millions of acres of farm and ranch land. What was Oklahoma like before fencing, telephone poles and electric wires, paved roads and cities? I would have liked to have known it.



Creeks and ponds fill during the spring and dry during hot Oklahoma summers. Ranchers are dependent on these supplies since cattle need plenty of water every day.

Wild rose bushes, blackberry vines, and shrubs crawl the fences and eventually tear them down. The prairie is always attempting to return to its former self.

 
 Here in a tractor graveyard, old machines give up while the prairie lives on.

Wildflowers  like these Indian paintbrushes work their way up with the first warm weather 
along ditches and fence lines.
 
Like the ocean, always moving and changing and full of life, the prairie is filled with birds, flowers, grasshoppers,cactuses, rabbits, deer, coyotes, snakes, turtles and many other animals.
Like the ocean,  it is teeming with innumerable swarms of living creatures. 
You could never learn all there is to see and know of the prairie.  


O Lord, how many are thy works. In wisdom you have made them all. The earth is full of your riches. There is the sea, both great and broad, in which are hordes without number, animals both great and small. O, Lord, you have made them all. 
 Psalms 104:24-25



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