To reach the Comanche National Grasslands in southeast Colorado, you’ll spend hours between a dusty windshield and a vast skyline. On the way, you’ll pass storefronts with names like “Cowpoke Feeds,” “The Buzzards Roost” and “The Historic Cow Palace Inn.”
Once the pavement ends, there are sparse signs to guide you — just dirt roads and barbed wire fence lines crisscrossing expanses of grass. From this point on, it’d be wise to have a can of “fix-a-flat” at hand.
And, don’t forget binoculars so you can spot the shallow “V” of a hovering ferruginous hawk, or the white flash of a bolting pronghorn. Or, if you’re really lucky, the dip-dance of a burrowing owl perched atop a dirt mound.
The Comanche is a subtle landscape. It is a place defined not by dramatic peaks, but by differences in grass height, variations in golden hues, and the steady erosion of the wind. Most importantly, it is a landscape whose very physical form is intimately interwoven with the wildlife that evolved here.
For millennia, these vast grasslands were engineered by the species that inhabited them. Herds of bison roamed freely and contributed to mosaiced, diverse habitat that supported many other prairie wildlife.
Through their dustbathing, bison created compacted soil depressions called “wallows” that caught rainwater, harboring unique plant communities and providing breeding habitat for amphibians. Their grazing created pockets of bare ground and low-height shortgrass that supported grassland birds like horned larks, thick-billed longspurs and mountain plover.
Along with bison, prairie dogs occupied extensive colonies and influenced the landscape through their sprawling underground tunnels, creating habitat for other species like burrowing owls and black-footed ferrets.
Beaver also helped shaped the grasslands by slowing water movement, encouraging groundwater recharge, and increasing the complexity of riparian areas. Because plains rivers and streams are naturally flashy, with highly variable flows driven by rain events, many beavers in the grasslands would build dens into the banks rather than building lodges. Beavers can still build dams to maintain stable water levels even where woody vegetation is sparse.
The Comanche National Grassland is also a landscape that has been profoundly shaped by people. Much of this land was once cropland, plowed and subsequently abandoned during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
While decades of reseeding and grazing management have restored most of the National Grasslands to prairie dominated by native grass and forbs, the plant communities we see today are still affected by the types of seed mixtures used during mid-century restoration efforts. Portions of the Grasslands have still not fully recovered from the severe disturbances of a century ago.
Today, the balance has shifted. Native species like the bison and black-footed ferret have been extirpated. Cows graze most of the National Grassland instead of bison, and they graze the land with a very different footprint. Prairie dog colonies, once vast, now struggle from recreational shooting and sylvatic plague, making populations unstable and vulnerable.
The iconic lesser prairie-chicken — once found here in the hundreds or even thousands — no longer has any active courtship areas (called “leks”) left on the Comanche.
Despite these challenges, hope remains on the vast horizon. The U.S. Forest Service, which manages the National Grasslands, is undergoing a land management plan revision. This process will determine how these lands are managed for the next 15 years or more.
Defenders of Wildlife is deeply engaged in this plan revision because of the importance of these lands for the conservation and recovery of plains wildlife. But we cannot do it alone.
To learn more about the Grasslands plan revision and how you can advocate for the restoration of this valuable landscape, read our Cimarron-Comanche National Grassland page. Together, we can help protect the wildlife that doesn’t just live on this land but actively shapes its future.
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