Marsh meditations

Amid the arid prairie landscape of Nebraska lies an unexpected ecosystem: 1,000 acres of saline wetlands that are a haven for the salt-loving species that have evolved to thrive here.

It’s pure, unadulterated nature – but not in that big ‘look-at-me’ way of a dramatic canyon or mirror-glass lake. Instead it’s a place of water gently seeping up through limestone and sandstone bedrock, of tiny crystalline salt flakes and low-growing succulents. Its muted beauty goes largely unnoticed, unloved, even.

And yet there is much here to love, as local artist Madeline Cass discovered, including nesting bald eagles, a coyote or red foxes and the tiny endangered salt creek tiger beetle, whose only known habitat is here.

Immersing herself in this forlorn landscape, Cass reignites her connection to the land, soaking it up to replenish her soul.

She combines her own photos, observations and poems with botanical and zoological specimens, early 1900s glass plate negatives and journal excerpts by pioneering local ecologist Frank Shoemaker. Together her project, ‘How lonely to be a marsh’ is a gateway for us all to experience this rare environment. Under threat from encroaching urbanization, it is one of the most endangered ecosystems of the Great Plains.

“If we are to save critical habitat, it must be placed in a new context, one in which our awareness of it and relationship to it is based on the personal and poetic rather than the recreational and profitable,” she says.