Erik Espinoza

America the beautiful

National Geographic

May 11, 2023

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As I was watching the episode of America The Beautiful, I liked it a lot. I learned

a lot about wildlife and how they live. One thing I learned was how animals like

wolves hunt and they’re newborns watch from a distance, And as they watch

their parents they pick them up and learn how to hunt and act which is pretty

cool. Another thing I learned is that Female Moose only want to mate with the

male moose during winter because they don't want to risk the chance of giving

birth in the winter if they do it sooner.

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In the episode to me something that was important was when all the animals

before winter try their best to collect a lot of food and try to prepare, which is to

me important because it shows how intelligent those animals are to tell when

winter is coming. Another thing that's interesting is when the salmon go to

reproduce they sometimes die so it's creepy just seeing all the dead salmon all

together. And it's perfect for the bears and the cubs to go eat all the dead salmon

that's in the river.

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AN explorer named Meriwether Lewis described the North American Prairie as

“beautiful in the extreme”. He explains that the more you travel the lower the
grass goes until you see colorful windflowers. And you see the rocky mountains

on the horizon. There are Grasslands on every continent except Antarctica.

Grass grows in any temperature it has adapted and most of the times the tall

grass don’t have that much water. They were built to survive every climate and

that's why they move smoothly in the wind. Grasses have few stomata compared

to leaves. Prairie Grasses have very long roots that find hidden water. Prairies

are hard to kill because they grow bottom upward so if they burn they shoot out

fresh new grass. The North American prairie used to be a rainforest but for

millions of years the crust has been crumpling to make rocky mountains that

went so high up it blocked rain clouds. When the glaciers melted they made it

into a forest which all the extinct animals came to like the sabertooth and

cheetahs and pronghorn antelope but when the land dried up the spruce forest

disappeared and it turned into the prairie. The prairie supports lots of nutrients for

the animals like the elk bison and cattle and also mice, birds and gophers.

Animals even make homes with the grass. Lewis and Clark in 1805 met bears

and saw native people following bison. Lewis and Clark if they saw the place

today they wouldn't recognize it since it has been turned into a national park.