Cameron Gaytan

American the beautiful

Kurt kruger
May 11, 2023

Something I learned from North land is that Musk Ox slow their metabolism by

30% in the dead of winter. Something I saw is a wolves hunting a herd of musk ox for

food. Something else I learned is that timing is everything for moose breeding. If they

breed early the baby will be in the middle of winter. Something else I saw was tons of

bears gathering at a rotting whale body to eat before winter and when bulking up for

winter brown bear can eat up to 20 hours. The Chillcat river in Alaska never freezes

because of geothermal vents, so 4,000 eagles gather there to survive the winter.

Something that was important about it,was the salmon run. When the salmon

run start at the ocean 98% of them make it past the sea lions,and when they lay their

eggs a lot of them die of exhaustion. Something I learned that was interesting is that

40% of bear cubs don’t make it past their first year. Another thing that was interesting is

that sea lions had to eat the salmon really fast or a bigger sea lion would steal it.

In 1805 Lewis and Clark found the plains,Lewis described “Beautiful in the

extreme”.when they rode west the grass got shorter it only brushed against your knees

and ankles. Grasslands cover more than one quarter of the earth’s land,they are found

on every continent beside antarctica. They go by many names: prairie,veld,savanna,and

steppe. They might look lush and green but they are quite dry,they spring up where

there is too little water for trees. The harsh weather can be very hard on trees but grass

is tough as nails,they bend and sway easily in the wind and are well adapted to survive

droughts,fierce storms,and extreme heat and cold. About 2 million years ago a

permanent winter settled over the plains ,when the glaciers melted wet spruce forests
with patchy meadows sprang up. As the ice age ended the land dried up, by 10,000

years ago the spruce forests disappeared and grass gradually took over giving us the

prairie we see today. Every grassland has its own special mix of animals,big and small

but grasses feed them all. If Lewis and clark came back today they would recognize this

palace, every square foot of the tallgrass prairies has been plowed and turned into

cropland, cows and sheep graze on the shortgrass prairie once homed of the bison and

pronghorn.The North American prairie has changed a lot over its long history,but the

ocean of grass waves on.