Hole in the Mountain Prairie
tallgrass prairie in southwestern Minnesota, United States
Hole in the Mountain Prairie is a preserved remnant of the tallgrass prairie in southwestern Minnesota. It is owned and administered by The Nature Conservancy.
Geography
Hole in the Mountain Prairie is located on Buffalo Ridge near the town of Lake Benton in Lincoln County, southwestern Minnesota. It spans a valley of about a half-mile in width, with a total area of 1,364 acres (5.5 km2).
Flora
The preserve is home to about 60 species of grasses and emergent vegetation, and about 200 species of wildflowers. Trees are a minor feature, with only about 10 species present.
Fauna
Whitetail deer, foxes, and numerous rodents are present, but The Nature Conservancy touts the butterflies of Hole in the Mountain as the most unusual and significant of its creatures. In 2017 an attempt was made by the Minnesota Zoo to reintroduce the nearly-extinct Dakota Skipper butterfly to Hole in the Mountain, from which it had disappeared in the previous decade.
Geology
The preserve is located in a valley of Buffalo Ridge, which is in turn a portion of the Coteau des Prairies, a highland which originates in South Dakota and runs about 200 miles (320 km) south and southeast through part of Minnesota and into northwestern Iowa.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hole in the Mountain Prairie” is tallgrass prairie in southwestern Minnesota, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hole, Mountain and Prairie, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 17, 2022. The linked authority identifier is Q5880015. Authority coordinates are 44.232, -96.296. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hole in the Mountain Prairie” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.