Mind your manners ...

... Preparing to meet the prairie chicken. (Hat tip, Maxine Clarke.)

Some years ago, I spent some time visiting the Garfield Farm and Inn Museum and learned a good bit about the tallgrass prairie. They really were wetlands. What the farm settlers did was insert field tiles to drain off the water into nearby creeks and rivers. What they found at Garfield Farm was that, if you removed the field tiles, the water came back, and so, surprisingly enough, did the prairie. Seeds over a century old germinated.