North Dakota landscape is changing
Energy development takes state in new directionBy KIM FUNDINGSLAND Staff Writer kfundingsland@minotdailynews.com
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Fact Box
Wind turbine impact discussion
The Souris Valley Birding Club will learn about the impact of wind turbines on bats and birds at its regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the small meeting room of the Minot Public Library. The main presentation will be made by Caitlin Coverly, an environmental consultant with experience in birding. The public is invited.
Ever since settlers begain moving into Dakota Territory, which later became North and South Dakota, the landscape of the region has been under a constant change. In what is present-day North Dakota, only a few small tracts of land in the Red River Valley had been turned by a plow and were producing food crops by 1870.
Outside of the earliest frontier military forts like Fort Totten near present-day Devils Lake, Fort Stevenson near present-day Garrison, and Fort Buford located south of present-day Williston, non-native inhabitants west of Jamestown were few.
Beyond the established presence of the United States Army on North Dakota soil, it wasn't until the Northern Pacific Railroad began laying track west from the Red River Valley that North Dakota would undergo its first major transformation. While the railroad itself changed the look and sounds on the North Dakota prairie, it brought with it an influx of settlers, land speculators and those seeking to begin a new life in the West following the tumultuous years of the Civil War.
By the time the railroad had reached the banks of the Missouri River, where construction was halted due to a lack of funding, it left in its wake the seeds of an expanding America. The tiny shanty town of Edwinton was established at the end of the railroad line. When the first passenger-carrying train arrived in the spring of 1872, Edwinton had been renamed after German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck. The name was changed by railroad officials to attract European investors.
Small communities naturally evolved along the track. The earliest residents were primarily those who earned a living because of the railroad. Early steam engines required water stops every 100 miles. Check the map today and you'll find the distances from Fargo to Jamestown to Bismarck to Dickinson are 99 miles apart, just far enough to insure that steam locomotives wouldn't run out of water.
General stores, hotels and restaurants sprung up at the same intervals. When gold was discovered at "Custer's Gulch" in the Black Hills in 1874, savvy Bismarckers quickly touted their remote community as the "jumping off" point for gold seekers. The news swept through the Eastern newspapers. As a result, Bismarck grew as rapidly as any young community on the frontier. Thousands of pounds of goods per day began being transported along the previously little used Bismarck to Deadwood, S.D., stage line. That route, often carrying several hundred teams of horses per day, carved through the North Dakota landscape.
It wasn't long before the most modern farming equipment of the day arrived in Bismarck and settlers began turning virgin prairie into profitable cropland. Woodcutters along the Missouri River felled so many trees for the purpose of supplying steamboats with fuel and builders with materials that the Army was forced to declare some areas off limits to the harvesting of trees for fear they would not have a large enough wood supply to meet its own needs. The look of North Dakota was changing.
Land that was proclaimed by renowned Civil War general William B. Hazen, an early commander at Fort Buford, to not be "worth one penny an acre except through fraud or ignorance" proved perfectly suited to raising crops and livestock. As the word spread that fertile land was available in North Dakota, homesteaders began arriving by the hundreds.
By the late 1870s, most residents of North Dakota thought bison to be extinct. Their disappearance was a noticeable change. The great sea of grass that covered much of North Dakota and had supported millions of bison for countless years, was now being turned into productive farmland. Farmsteads, fences and livestock appeared on the landscape with increasing frequency. Small farming communties sprung up virtually everywhere, supporting schools, churches and businesses. For the next half century North Dakota would be undergoing the most dramatic change in the land's history.
The remnants of North Dakota's golden age of family farms can still be seen on the landscape in the form of weathered farm homes and buildings long ago abandoned to the elements. Not far from a crumpled barn a creaking old windmill can usually be seen, a windmill that pumped water for the needs of the farm family and livestock. Small farms gave way to larger farms, a subtle change in appearance perhaps, but it meant fewer people were needed on the land. As a result, North Dakota's cities gained population as rural residents moved off the farm.
Today North Dakota is experiencing another change, perhaps not as dramatic as those undertaken by the earliest residents, but changes that might be longer lasting. The wind needed to turn the old windmill still sweeps over the countryside, but now it is being used to turn the massive blades of towering wind turbines. Clusters of multiple wind generators have sprung up at several locations in North Dakota and many more are scheduled to be erected. The setting sun once framed by the red barn, a windmill and an unobstructed horizon, now casts its rays through the churning blades of the wind turbine.
In much of western North Dakota the quiet evening on the shaded porch of the farm home has become a fading memory. The silence of the land has been replaced by the rythmic clatter of the oil well and the constant traffic on rural roads where a few vehicles a day had been the norm for many years.
Oil activity has also changed the look of the landscape. New roads have been cut to reach drilling sites and land has been cleared for storage facilities. Pipelines supporting the oil fields have been dug underground and new transmission lines stretch across the land to supply the electricity needed by the growing oil industry. It has created a "new look" for many parts of the state.
Changes to the North Dakota landscape are not limited to what is silhouetted against the horizon. The look of the land at ground level is undergoing a dramatic change as well. Conservation Reserve Program acres, land the government has paid landowners to keep idle, are disappearing rapidly and more big changes are considered very likely in the near future. Biologists say that CRP land has been one of the major reasons for an increase in pheasants and deer in North Dakota. Lose the CRP, they say, and game populations will decline. The landowner must choose between CRP and planting crops. The final choice often comes down to a fiscal decision.
"You can't blame the landowner for wanting to put it back into cropland. It actually makes sense if you are looking just at the bottom line," said Greg Gullickson, North Dakota Game and Fish Department outreach biologist.
Energy development and evolving farm practices are changing the look in all regions of the state. The change is well under way. While the economic benefits appear to be evident, the effects on the aesthetic beauty of North Dakota are already visible. There's also the question of what the changing landscape means to numerous wildlife species within the state.
"The changes out there makes it more of a challenge for us," said Terry Steinwand, Game & Fish director. "We're certainly going to have to work around it and keep as much CRP as we possibly can, but we have very little control. We're science based and will do the best we can to try and reduce the impacts."
The state has seen peaks in oil development before the recent push to explore the oil-rich Bakken Formation that lies underneath much of the western half of the state. Oil wells were previously drilled in a good portion of the Badlands terrain from Watford City to Bowman to Dickinson. In those areas it appears that initial activity had the most impact on wildlife, primarily on mule deer. However, mule deer populations in North Dakota are doing very well today. What is missing in many areas where oil development has occurred is the opportunity to experience a true wilderness hunt.
"The quality factor has gone down," said Steinwand, "but things are always going to change. Times are changing. Oil development certainly hasn't put an end to hunting."
"It is a little overwhelming, with all the different impacts coming at us from different directions," added Greg Link, Game & Fish wildlife division assistant chief. "We don't know the long-term outcome."
Energy development in the deep breaks and canyons of the Badlands differs greatly from the energy development that is currently occuring on the plains. Roads and construction sites are much more visible on the "flat land" and the land itself is comprised of a much different makeup than the Badlands. Rolling prairie hills that are difficult to farm provide ideal locations for wind towers.
"Oil has kind of caught us by surprise," admitted Ron Reynolds, project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Habitat and Population Evaluation Team in Bismarck. "Wind companies tend to be very cooperative with us and are willing to make some adjustments in sites. Wind towers change the aesthetics and are maybe not liked by some people. From our standpoint, the issue is whether or not they have a negative impact on conservation. We leave the emotional opinions up to other people. Landowners have an opportunity to benefit from these without the conservation community unneccessarily intervening with landowner opportunities."
While the sight of wind towers rising from the North Dakota landscape might not be well accepted by some, there appears to be little evidence to support an environmentally-based argument against them. Nevertheless, as North Dakota sees more and more wind turbines constructed, the long-time look and use of the land is changing.
"We can't show an awful lot of impact from wind towers," said Steinwand. "The prairie grouse and ground nesting species probably are impacted, but it is not significant now. Is it going to hit a point where it's a tip over point? We don't know at this point in time."
One possible impact from wind turbines that has already experienced extensive study is bird strikes the numbers of birds killed by blades of the wind turbine. Studies have shown that remarkably few birds actually fly into or are struck by wind turbines. The flying creatures most at risk are bats. Wind towers mean energy. As long as the demand for energy, particularly clean energy, continues to grow throughout the United States it appears that wind turbines will remain part of North Dakota's ever-changing landscape.
While oil derricks and wind turbines alter the look of the horizon, the fall browns of CRP acres might soon be replaced by the golden glow of wheat stubble. It is a change that North Dakota has experienced before turning idle farmland back into productive cropland. More than 700,000 acres of CRP acres have been put back into production in the past three years, 220,000 acres in 2009 alone.
"We've seen these lessons before," said Greg Link, Game & Fish assistant wildlife division chief. "You can go back to the 1966 Soil Bank program. We never got back to that until CRP. We can have our cake and eat it too. We have as much cropland as ever because of the breaking of native prairie and we are more productive than ever because of technology and varieties of crops."
Surprisingly perhaps, national statistics show that the amount of harvested cropland in the U.S. has increased right along with CRP acres. The 2008 Farm Bill reduced the number of CRP acres nationally from 39.2 million acres to 32 million. North Dakota currently has 2.9 million acres of CRP, but 1.5 million CRP acres is due to expire over the next three years.
"Hopefully we can get some of that back," said Link. "If this trend continues, our outdoor opportunities are going to get less and less."
Wildlife, from white-tailed deer and antelope to sharptailed grouse and ringnecked pheasants, has long been a part of the North Dakota landscape. Biologists say they are among the many wildlife species that were affected in a positive way by CRP. Take away the CRP, they say, and you take away an abundance of wildlife.
"We're not as taken aback as the West, so far," said Doug Leier, Game & Fish outreach biologist in Fargo. We have wind development and pipelines that change the landscape, probably not as dramatic as what you might see in Mountrail County. Maybe it's that the expectations of people in the Red River Valley is not as dramatic."
The eastern part of North Dakota, which has more competition for fewer hunting opportunities, has experienced a decline in CRP acres. However, as biologists point out, some wildlife will readily adapt to cropland. Perhaps not in numbers as large as they would on CRP acreage, but some will make the adjustment.
"In regard to the changing landscape out there with CRP loss, changes to corn and alfalfa will still provide some good habitat," said Gullickson. "We're already seeing the number of acres of winter wheat increase. That is undisturbed nesting cover with benefits for waterfowl and upland game as well."
Changes to the North Dakota landscape are as inevitable as they are visible. While current changes under way provide necessary benefits, they also tangle with the emotions of those who prefer to remember North Dakota as the land of rolling prarie where the steeple of rural churches could be seen on distant hilltops and the chuckling of sharptailed grouse was the only sound coming from the nearby prairie.
"It is inevitably naive of us to think everything is going to stay the same. You can't logically assume it's not going to change," remarked Leier. "Will it cycle around again? I have no crystal ball and I don't know."
