Yesterday some of us were sharing via birding email lists our dismay at the rapid pace grassland and wetlands are being converted to cropland. This is not news, but the change witnessed currently, driven by crop prices and government policies, is rapid and huge. This is particularly evident in western Minnesota, and eastern North Dakota and South Dakota.

Land critical to grassland and wetland bird species is being drained and plowed. It is disappearing. If there was a change in policy, land value, crop prices, or attitude toward land conservation, in any one of those, it would take a long time to move the land in the other direction, to convert cropland to prairie or wetland.

This morning, we have good news. It comes from an article in today's Minneapolis StarTribune.

The Nature Conservancy has given 95 acres of land in Burnsville (Minneapolis suburb) to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The land will become part of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The gift is valued at $515,000.

It creates a credit of that amount that will be used by the USFWS to purchase easements for prairie and wetlands in eastern South Dakota. As I understand it, it was willingness to devote the funds to South Dakota easements for prairie and wetlands that allowed the project to move ahead.

This is good news for the birds that rely on those land types for survival, good news for those of us who value and enjoy those birds, and good news for the Minnesota Valley refuge, which just grew by 95 special acres.

Everybody involved in that transaction deserves a very big thank you.

This kind of work is common to The Nature Conservancy. It, along with the gamebird organizations, is fighting the good fight in the most efficient and effective way – protect the land by buying it. The organizations then either maintain it themselves or cut a creative deal with a government agency for land protection. My conservation dollars are directed to these folks.

Below, a Common Yellowthroat sings courtship songs from atop the previous year's Bergamot flower heads in a piece of prairie west of Minneapolis.