Excerpts from:
Prairie Isn't Prairie Without Sky
By Linda Hasselstrom

To begin to see the prairie, walk away from buildings, power poles, asphalt, away from the sound of motors, away from anything electronic, especially anything that beeps.  Walk in the grass that reaches perhaps to your ankles, lithe, whippy grass that has evolved with fewer than 16 inches of moisture a years.  Walk until the only sounds is the wind combing that grass and the chitter of a flock of horned larks somewhere above and behind you: the invisible birds of the plains.  Walk and breathe deeply, inhale clear down to your toes, that clean, indefinable smell of grass that has never known chemical fertilizer, grass that holds man's fate in its slender stems.

Prairie grass stands close to its ancestors; grass specializes in simplification.  Wind-polluted, grass flowers need no heady fragrance.  No honey, no splashy colors.  Some grasses do reproduce by flowering, but others spread by underground stems that creep sometimes through the grittiest, grayest, least fertile soil on the planet.

Only standing in undisturbed prairie grass can you truly appreciate prairie sky.  Stand tall. Tilt your face to the sky; open your eyes wide. Turn your head from one shoulder to the other, and then turn around and do the same so you can see the whole bowl of blue, frothy white clouds.

The prairie sky.  Standing with your eyes open, you must be able to see a harrier hawk rise up from that ridge to the south, wings extended and gleaming bronze in sunlight.  Watch her fly, swoop, dip, glide and hover across the face of the ridge and down a half mile to the dam where the ducks scatter under her shadow.

Then the harrier tilts her wings and is lifted up by the wind to soar over your head, turning one eye then the other to see you clearly.  Turn your head and watch as she leans first one way then the other against the wind, circling, pitching, angling down along fence lines until finally she drops on a vole or mole in the grass.

The hawk rises, lifts great wings, ascends to the top of a tree at the very edge of your vision.  With binoculars you can see the smooth neck bend as she begins to feed on a morsel of prairie life, a morsel of grass made flesh.  Like yours.

Breathe deeply.  Look around again.  A few power poles may trace a lacy filigree at the edges of the blue, and a few trees may gather like seashore foam fringing the blue world overhead.  But that's all.  A true prairie sky is clean, without neon, without smog, without the chatter of aircraft.  no artificial lights shatter the perfect darkness of the night.

Only with the whole sky as background can you really see the great horned owl drop from the cottonwood near the house, swing around behind the windbreak junipers and alight on the branch of another cottonwood where she instantly looks like a broken-off stump.  Only by watching for a long time will you see her glide out over the grass, drop on a rabbit, hold it down with one taloned foot while she turns her head, scouting for danger.

In the whole sky, you can really see the flock of redwinged blackbirds leap out of the cottonwood by the dam, and swing a mile around the hayfield, their gold and red wing patches signaling in the sun.  Then they swoop, calling and whistling, into the branches of the two dead cottonwoods by the house.  You can see barn swallows demonstrating their daring flying, zipping under the deck of the house, through the broken pane in the barn window, between the bars of the corral gate.  And nighthawks hanging in the dusk like crescent wind, penning as they search for their mosquito or miller prey, booming as they drop into the killing strike.

Only the whole prairie sky allows you to properly see clouds.  Look up: when you see flat-bottomed cumulus clouds with puffy heads arranged as evenly as sheep in a pasture or as tiles on the floor, find your umbrella.

Late in the summer, look forward to the towering cumulus clouds called "cauliflower" because their crowns are boiling upward into blue sky like bubbles in a bathtub.  Then watch out for the revealing shape of an anvil against the dark blue: ice crystals building into a thunderstorm likely to bring hail that can flatten a hayfield in minutes, killing birds, rabbits, damaging man's possessions.  After hot days, beware of the pouch-like formations called "mammy" clouds that may signal a tornado.

In the wide prairie sky, you can spot the undulating wing beats from a distance, and watch until they come close enough to identify a great blue heron, flying from the nesting spot on Battle Creek six miles to the north to this shrinking pond on the prairie where it will stand on one leg for a few hours, while hunting frogs.  In summer, the heron may be almost invisible among the crowds of sunflowers along the edges of the pond.  In winter, the heron is a cultural icon, a Chinese painting against the silver water as it slowly freezes in the falling snow.

Only the whole sky is large enough so you can hear the shooping and chortling and chuckling of the sandhill cranes miles away.  You turn your head this way and that, eyes straining for a sight of the wavering V shapes.  Lie down; relax.  Let your eyes slide over the sky. There: far to the north, the line thinner than a pencil leaves, growing closer and thicker as the sounds drop to you: hooting and cooing and laughing.  The shifting line of birds, mighty wings outstretched, is headed south to gather on the ...river...  Only the whole sky is enough so you can see several V's of them - 20, 60, 200 cranes at a time, breaking into groups, circling up the sky until they hit a fast wind that shoots them south, deploying into another ragged arrow shape.

The whole sky must be visible for proper appreciation of a sunset.  I may be facing east when I notice puffy clouds turning from gray to pink.  Instinctively, I look west, where the sunset is supposed to be.  It's there too: golden rays shooting up into the sky or turning the underside of a sky full of clouds pink and gold.  When clouds are heavy in the west, sometimes the sunset can't be seen at all where it should be and the reflection in the east is so vivid I distrust my sense of direction.

The decisions that can protect the prairie sky rests with us.  Without the grass, without the harrier and the owl, the whooping cranes and the redwing blackbirds, the prairie can't exist.