Kansas Wheat Field, William Judson Dickerson

Food crops like wheat are grown on farmland that looks much like this painting but was once covered in different plants that made up the tallgrass prairie. The tallgrass prairie got its name from grasses like Big Bluestem, which can grow up to eight feet tall! Only about four percent of the original 170 million acres of tallgrass prairie remains undamaged. Most of this undamaged prairie is in the Flint Hills of Kansas.

Imagine what the land in the painting looked like before it became a wheat field. What plants and animals do you think lived in that tallgrass prairie?
What else can you imagine in the tallgrass prairie? What colors and sounds might be there?