What’s Good for the Bird is Good for All

Like most of the country, north Missouri lost its turkeys before Teddy Roosevelt rode up San Juan Hill. Generations passed before birds were translocated from the hollers of the Ozarks to the Green Hills region. It took years of lobbying by Kirksville’s Shag Grosnickle to convince the turkey team at the Missouri Department of Conservation to let go of a flock of its precious seed stock, not convinced the birds would survive in a landscape of cattle pastures and ag fields. Instead of simply surviving, the population literally exploded.

Within 20 years, Putnam County, bordering Iowa, and its neighboring counties became the epicenter of modern turkey hunting. Every turkey hunting personality and call maker from across the country became April residents, often hearing hundreds of gobbles a morning. The late 1980s and early 1990s was the golden era in a golden location. This was all taking place during a time of agricultural crisis, in which good timber land could regularly be purchased for $250 an acre. The recreational purchaser began filling the vacuum for the deer and the turkeys ubiquitous to the area.

And then, slowly but persistently, where wintertime flocks had numbered in the hundreds, more commonplace numbers scratched for dropped soybeans and corn. By the current decade, word of the turkey decline across the country began to find ground truth here as well.

Rudi Roeslein, a St. Louis businessman, hunter, conservationist and landowner, has become a force of nature who decided that a prolonged turkey decline is not an option.

“We have seen a dramatic decline in the number of ground-nesting birds across the range of the original tallgrass prairie,” Roeslein said. “Quail, bobolinks, dickcissels, meadowlarks and many other grassland favorites are likely at their lowest numbers for the history of the continent. Except at the Nature Conservancy’s Dunn ranch, greater prairie-chickens have likely been extirpated from the state.”

Roeslein has seen a version of the end of this story, saying, “I have spent a lot of time in China; I have walked through parklands and looked for the birds that are unseeable, because their calls are artificial, piped in through tiny speakers in the trees. I have decided that this is not the future I want for my grandchildren.”

To that end, Roeslein’s business, Roeslein Alternative Energy, is leading an audacious movement to build homes for ground-nesting birds in the Grand River basin of north Missouri.

As recipients of a federal Climate Smart Commodities grant, the company is putting a down payment on its goal of restoring 30 million acres of grassland on highly erodible land across the upper Midwest.

“We are going to make the renewable gas industry a hand-in-glove partner with landowners and producers in a program that will bring a new source of income initially to Grand River basin families and communities in Missouri and Iowa,” Roeslein said. “We will be planting a diverse mix of forbs and grasses on the least productive croplands of partner landowners. We’ll be harvesting a portion of the prairie biomass to serve as a feedstock for gas-producing digesters (that create renewable energy). Our goal is to simultaneously create critical habitat for ground-nesting birds, reduce our country’s reliance on foreign energy sources and create a reasonable return on investment.”

“The NWTF is excited to have been included as a partner with Rudi in his early efforts to secure a grant to develop a seed mixture that creates biomass for alternative energy and benefits wild turkeys and our overall ecosystem health,” said John Burk, NWTF district biologist for Missouri, Iowa and Illinois. “Rudi knows what it takes to run a successful business, but, in the process, he is ensuring that we leave the landscape better than it was.”

Roeslein’s Putnam County farm has served as the proving ground for the processes he is putting into action. Land management can be expensive, and there are a myriad of cost-share programs available to landowners to offset some of this expense. The NWTF has partnered with the Missouri Department of Conservation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service program since 2009 to provide one such option in the NWTF’s Missouri/Iowa Oaks focal landscape within the America’s Crossroads Big Six of Wildlife Conservation. Roeslein took advantage of this program to complete 24 acres of oak savanna restoration work on his farm in 2020.

Frank Oberle, often referred to as the “godfather” of Missouri prairie restoration, said of Roeslein’s farm, “Rudi took on a grubbed out, eroded, mostly unproductive farm that held so much potential because it had so far to go. He has spared no expense experimenting with native plant materials to come to the right prescription to heal the patient.”

The first 1,000 acres of a larger USDA project on Roeslein’s farms were dormant seeded on highly erodible land, most recently farmed to soybeans. This year will see an additional 6,000 acres seeded with nearly 30 species of local wildflowers and grasses.

“Although turkeys are big birds, when they start out as tiny chicks, they need quality brood cover adjacent to nesting areas,” Roeslein said. “This lack of grassland brood habitat is most likely one of the leading causes for our groundnesting birds’ decline. Our prescription is the best chance we have to use the miracle of deep-rooted prairie plants to sequester carbon, infiltrate nitrogen, stop erosion and provide birds, including the wild turkey, the cover and food they need at their most vulnerable time.”

An enduring adage that has survived the real world of wildlife management is, “If it pays, it stays.” As our nation grew from the East, the tallgrass prairie gave way to John Deere’s steel moldboard plow. Whole landscapes of big bluestem, butterfly milkweed, compass plant, New Jersey tea and a few hundred other species turned into monocultures of soybeans and corn.

“Settlers of the tallgrass saw the prairie for what it could produce in terms of crops and, ultimately, income for their families,” Oberle noted. “In large part, our nation became a world powerhouse because of the richness of prairie soils. But now in 2024, a great coalition of conservationists is determined to seek a compromise with the plow’s appetite.”

It likely is going to take an economic incentive, such as what Roeslein Alternative Energy offers, to compete with the market rate of $12 per bushel of beans. Altruistic set-asides of acres, though soul-satisfying, bears little chance of competing with agricultural markets. The advent of incentives under California and federal law are now giving the prairie its own dollar value that in turn could return our ground-nesting birds to the landscape and perhaps consign this period of wild turkey decline to the dustbin of history.

“When a wise businessman happens to be a stalwart conservationist, the results are profound, and that is exactly the case with Rudi and Roeslein Energy,” said Al Clark, NWTF national director of development. “Rudi is not only leaving the land in a better condition, but he is showing the world that a successful business can — and should — be conservation-minded.”