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MIKE EDGERLY: With the news, here's Stephen John. Stephen.

STEPHEN JOHN: Thank you, Mike. President Bush is continuing his push to open offshore waters to oil drilling. He says Congress is letting down the American people by refusing to allow votes on the matter. Bush has already lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling, but it has no effect until Congress acts.

The president has signed a major housing bill into law. The measure is aimed at stabilizing financial markets and helping many struggling homeowners refinance. The goal is to relieve a broader credit crunch linked to rising defaults and falling home values.

A crackdown on Al-Qaeda-inspired militants in the Iraqi province of Diyala involves nearly 50,000 Iraqi police and soldiers. Iraqi officials say 35 wanted insurgents have been apprehended so far, and a number of weapons have been seized. US troops are providing intelligence and other support, but are letting Iraqi forces lead the operation.

Former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, is finally in the custody of the UN War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. After 13 years on the run, he's awaiting a trial in the Netherlands on charges of waging genocide against non-Serbs during the 1990s Balkan Wars. Last night, hours before our hours before Karadzic left Belgrade, thousands of people rallied in a main square in the Serb capital, demanding a halt to the extradition.

Investigators are trying to determine what caused an explosion at a Northern Wisconsin paper mill. The blast at the packaging corporation of America plant in Tomahawk yesterday killed three people and injured another. The explosion happened as they were performing maintenance on top of a tank that stores pulp.

The National Transportation Safety Board has released documents that indicate corroded gusset plates broke apart as the 35W Bridge collapsed. Minnesota Public Radio's Sea Stachura reports.

SEA STACHURA: Gusset plates are the steel rectangles that hold the beams of a bridge together. U10 was the undersized gusset plate the NTSB brought to the public's attention in January. But MnDOT had documented years earlier that the gusset plates surrounding U10 were corroded to nearly half their original thickness.

Documents released by the NTSB indicate gusset plate L11 fractured along the line of corrosion. L11 is diagonally below U10. Investigators recovered L11 east in five pieces. Another gusset plate, L9, also bent.

Video documentation shows those gusset plates also bent at a 47-degree angle during the collapse of the bridge. Investigators do not draw any conclusions from the findings in the documents. Sea Stachura. Minnesota Public Radio News, Rochester.

SEA STACHURA: Officials hope to reopen today a Southeastern Minnesota highway where a freight train derailed 27 cars of an IC&E train derailed near Reno yesterday morning, causing an ethanol spill on Highway 26. There were no injuries in the spill, did not result in any evacuations.

Partly to mostly sunny, slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the Southwest this afternoon. This is Minnesota Public Radio News.

MIKE EDGERLY: Thank you, Stephen. It's 12:04.

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MIKE EDGERLY: Welcome back to Midday. This is Midday coming to you on Minnesota Public Radio News. Gary Eichten has the day off. I'm Mike Edgerly.

In this hour, we note the passing of the man who led the reintroduction of peregrine falcons to Minnesota. Ornithologist Harrison Bud Tordoff died last week at the age of 85. We'll hear a Voices of Minnesota conversation with Tordoff from a few years ago when he described how the Midwest peregrine falcon population was brought back from the brink of extinction.

Then, later this hour, we'll stay outdoors and rebroadcast a Voices of Minnesota conversation with photographer Jim Brandenburg. He takes us to his hometown of Luverne in Southwestern Minnesota, where he's working to save remnants of Midwestern prairie. First, the conversation with Bud Tordoff. He talked in 2002 with Minnesota Public Radio reporter, Mary Lozier.

MARY LOZIER: Harrison Tordoff, known to his friends as Bud, has devoted much of his professional life to bringing the peregrine falcon back to the Midwest. The reintroduction has taken nearly 30 years and involved hundreds of people, but Tordoff has been a central figure.

Tordoff, who is 79, grew up in the small town of Mechanicville in Upstate New York. He was a fighter pilot during World War II. He got his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1952, and came to Minnesota in 1970.

Peregrine falcons are about the size of crows, with dark heads and wings and fierce hooked beaks. They prey on smaller birds like pigeons and ducks by swooping down on them from above. They make spectacular dives from the open sky at speeds of more than 200 miles an hour, faster than any other living thing on the planet.

The birds were never very numerous. Studies in 1930s and '40s estimated there were only about 1,500 breeding pairs in the United States and Mexico. But beginning in the late 1940s, the insecticide DDT nearly eradicated them. Now reintroduced to skyscrapers, towers and bridges, populations of peregrine falcons have reached and exceeded their pre-DDT levels.

The reintroduction is a compelling success story of science, public policy and personal dedication. I talked with Tordoff recently at his office. And when did you first get interested in Peregrine Falcons?

HARRISON TORDOFF: As an ornithologist, I was interested in them. As soon as I learned about them, I went to see a pair nesting on a cliff near Ithaca, New York, in 1940, and was terrifically impressed by them, beautiful spot they were in, and the way they behaved, and so on.

But I got seriously interested in them only after it became obvious that it might be possible to reestablish the Eastern population that had been wiped out by DDT. And when the people at Cornell demonstrated that you could breed them in captivity in sufficient quantity, that they might be released back to the wild. I wrote a letter to Tom Cate at Cornell in 1974 and suggested maybe the Midwest would be a good place to do it because we had a lot of good habitat that the peregrines had once occupied.

MARY LOZIER: When did the peregrine falcons first start disappearing? And what do you remember about that?

HARRISON TORDOFF: They started declining in the 1950s, right after World War II. In fact, as soon as DDT started to be used. Nobody really was aware of the extent of the decline until the late '50s. And then traditional nesting sites all over the East were being abandoned. And they were gone essentially by about 1962 or '63.

MARY LOZIER: Did you see really, in your own experience, did you see that decline all around you, where you were?

HARRISON TORDOFF: No. In fact, peregrines are so scarce that nobody in any one locality can have any idea what the population size is. But people talking about what was going on at different nesting sites were able to figure out that there was a decline.

MARY LOZIER: So you decided that it was possible to reintroduce them into the Midwest.

HARRISON TORDOFF: Yeah, I didn't decide that. And I think it was demonstrated at Cornell that this was possible. And I simply tried to get them to have their early releases here in the Midwest instead of in the East. They didn't buy my argument. We started here in the Midwest seriously only when we found our own source of birds to release.

MARY LOZIER: And why didn't they buy your argument?

HARRISON TORDOFF: The East was a perfectly good place to operate, and they had money and funding from in the East. And that's where their facilities were. I think they just simply did what was simplest.

MARY LOZIER: And so where did you-- what did you do then?

HARRISON TORDOFF: We got our birds from about 35 different private breeders, people who had small, essentially backyard peregrine breeding facilities. They were all falconers, people that had peregrines before the birds disappeared.

And when funding became available through the nongame wildlife Chickadee Checkoff, the DNR here in 1982, we had a base source of funding. And using that and the availability of birds from private breeders, we went ahead independently of the Cornell operation.

MARY LOZIER: How did you approach it? What did you do first?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Well, once we realized funds were available, we simply contracted to get birds sent to us. The first birds came from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. And they were having trouble funding their breeding facility up there. And we told them we'd pay for the breeding facility costs if they would give us half of the birds they produced. And starting in 1982, we started getting birds from them. And gradually we added other private breeders as we knew about them and they became available.

MARY LOZIER: As I understand it, you tried cliffs first, didn't you?

HARRISON TORDOFF: No, the very first releases were from towers down along Weaver Dunes, down South of Kellogg, Minnesota. And the idea was that the Towers were within eyesight, in fact, of cliffs that had been used historically by the peregrines. And we released, I think, over four or five years, we released about 40 birds down there.

And in fact, it worked. We got breeding on cliffs along the river. But the early nests all failed because of great horned owl predation. And it was then that we began to start using cliffs along the North Shore and started releasing them from buildings in cities.

MARY LOZIER: How did it work to release them in cliffs along the North Shore? Did that work?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Yeah, that worked fine. We didn't have any owl predation along the North Shore at all there. Not very many great horned owls up there.

MARY LOZIER: But it seemed like your greatest success was on the buildings, wasn't it?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Well, all across the Midwest, there are tall buildings that have been mostly built since World War II, most of them since 1950. And it's turned out, was a big vacant habitat niche available for the peregrines. And they moved into buildings, into cities pretty much all over the Midwest. Now, about 2/3 of the pairs are on buildings, smokestacks or bridges. And about a third are on cliffs.

MARY LOZIER: And how many pairs are there in Minnesota Midwest do you know?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Last year, we knew of 133 pairs. And we figured there probably about another 10% or maybe up to 20% that we don't know about. Birds that are-- pairs that have found places to nest, but we haven't discovered.

MARY LOZIER: How much further do you think it can grow?

HARRISON TORDOFF: It's a good question. We think the population probably will level out at something under 150, but we might be wrong a little bit there. We can't really tell.

The reason we're uncertain about the ultimate size is that the cliffs along the Mississippi River and its tributaries have only started to be occupied, reoccupied just a couple of years ago.

And there's a lot of room for expansion there still. And the population on cliffs in Ontario is still expanding. And they're hard to count because that's wild mountain, hilly country. So there's some uncertainty. I think the city population, the urban populations are pretty well stabilized by now.

MARY LOZIER: Did you ever have any doubts that it would work when you first started doing it?

HARRISON TORDOFF: No, not really. We worried awfully about losing birds early on. When starting the first year, for example, we started with only five individual birds. And when one of them got killed by a great horned owl, it seemed like a real disaster.

But in fact, over the years that we were doing, we released, I think, 40 birds, and only lost, I think a grand total of two to great horned owls over the course of the time.

But they had demonstrated in the East, the Cornell people had shown that the procedures would work. We borrowed all our procedures from them. We didn't have to do a lot of inventing. They had the techniques worked out pretty well.

MARY LOZIER: So really it was just a matter of having somebody decide to do it, I think?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Yeah, it was a matter of deciding to do it, raising the money and then doing it. It's expensive. It cost about $2,500 per bird released to release peregrines in the wild, to raise them in captivity and release them. And you're talking about 1,000 birds. You can do the math. That adds up to a lot of money.

MARY LOZIER: Were there people saying that it wasn't worth the money?

HARRISON TORDOFF: I don't recall people saying that it wasn't worth the money. But I do recall a lot of people expressing skepticism that would ever work, particularly in the early days before Cornell started demonstrating that it would work. A lot of people thought there was no way that you could possibly raise enough in captivity and release them successfully to the wild to replace a population that had disappeared over half a continent. But they were wrong. It was not only possible, but we did it.

MARY LOZIER: I want to talk a little bit about what it was like when you started seeing that the DDT-- or when people started realizing that DDT was just decimating these birds.

HARRISON TORDOFF: I went back to University of Michigan in 1960. And that was probably the period when DDT effects were about at their maximum. And I would take classes out at Ann Arbor, take them out to the Arboretum. East of town, we would walk out there, 20 or 30 students and me. And we would see birds and trees with their wings quivering. We would find them on the grass with their wings quivering. All of this from DDT poisoning. And once they get to that stage, they always die.

We would have dozens, sometimes hundreds of small birds picked up on campus and brought into the museum at the University of Michigan that were dying or dead from DDT. So it was obvious that a whole range of species were being really seriously affected.

And Rachel Carson showed that the birds at the top of the food chains particularly, are going to be affected because they accumulate a little bit more with every dose and stored in their bodies. So it was no surprise that various birds of prey, particularly eagles and ospreys, peregrine falcons and birds at the end of long food chains, would be affected by this.

MARY LOZIER: And what do you remember about the debate to put an end to DDT or the use of it?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Well, there was a huge vested interest in agriculture and other people who liked cheap, effective chemicals. But DDT is pretty safe in regard to humans at least. At least we have a high tolerance to it.

So there was lots of opposition to any effort to curtail the use of it. But the effects had become so obvious by about the middle 1960s, that biologists and ecologists across the country saw that this stuff was really very bad news, not just killing a few of our favorite birds, but poisoning the whole ecosystem. It was in mother's milk. Anything you sampled in the way of living organisms in the 1960s would have traces of DDT.

So the battle to combat it really focused at the University of Wisconsin. Joe Hickey there fought hard to get DDT banned because he could see what the effects were. And there were court battles and hearings and so on.

And finally in 1968, the state of Wisconsin banned DDT first before anybody else. 1970, Canada followed. And it wasn't until 1972 that the United States followed.

And it was done by an administrative act by. Ruckelshaus. I can't think of his first name. I think he was the EPA commissioner or something of that sort. And rather than try to win this battle in Congress, he simply issued an edict that we couldn't use it any longer. That made it stick. And it was really a courageous act on his part.

MARY LOZIER: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota interview with retired University of Minnesota professor, Harrison Tordoff. I'm Mary Lozier.

Tordoff is one of the key figures in the reintroduction of the peregrine falcon to the Midwest. The story of peregrine falcons is an all too rare success. Researchers report sharp population declines for many other animal and plant species. In the final part of our conversation, Tordoff answers some questions about biodiversity.

Sometimes I hear scientists talking about a biodiversity crisis, that the problem of our age is that we're losing all these species. But you don't seem as gloomy as some of the people I talk to.

HARRISON TORDOFF: Well, it's hard to know what the proper balance is. I drove down the Mississippi River last week, going down to look at some peregrines fledging off cliffs down along the river. And on the drive down, I was impressed with how much of the landscape was in solid cornfields, with tiny little strips between the cornfields and the road of mostly grass grasses and weeds. No brushy hedgerows anymore. Our farmers simply don't want that. The cornfields come right up to adjacent soybean fields.

There are no place in a habitat like that for any of the small birds that we were used to seeing. When I was a kid, catbirds, brown thrashers, rose-breasted grosbeak, yellow warblers, all the things that live in a farmland habitat, provided there's a little bit of woodland habitat.

So yeah, populations have really declined. But none of those species are going to go extinct, not in my lifetime. They're resilient enough so that there are some places where they can find a niche. But were there were once thousands, there are now tens. Huge changes in population sizes and population abundance.

So I think that we have to understand that we obviously can't turn all the agricultural lands back in their natural habitat. But we probably could alter farming practices in ways that provided a lot more habitat for the birds that can adapt to that sort of habitat.

I don't think that's going to happen because farmers are apparently pretty much driven by the bottom line. But it's possible to have hedgerows. It's possible to have habitat around the farmsteads and so on. Much, much better than we do now.

MARY LOZIER: Getting back to the falcons, I know that you have monitored a lot of these birds for years and years. Can you tell me some of the birds that you've watched the progress of for years and years?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Yeah, we banned the birds when we turned them loose. And we banned all the babies they produce as nearly as we can. And we keep records. So we've got an excellent database. And I know the histories of lots of birds in the Midwest really intimately.

For example, there's a female in Saint Paul who is 16 years old this year. She's named Meg. She was released off the Multifoods Tower in 1986, I guess that would be, or '85. Well, whatever. she's 16 this year, I can guarantee that.

And she's laid four eggs every year for almost as long as I can remember. And has had, I think, a total of five mates over the years. This year, she only laid three eggs. And I thought, well, what's going on here? And I kept checking, and the eggs never hatched.

Well, I think Meg has come to the end of her reproductive life. She's about at the age when peregrines in captivity quit reproducing. But she cranked out three eggs again this year.

The question now that's going to be interesting is to see whether or not a female like that, holding a prime downtown territory on an excellent building, whether she can hold that territory as a non-reproductive adult. We'll just have to find out.

A bird that was released a year after her in Rochester was nested on the Multifoods Tower in Downtown Minneapolis. This bird was released off the Mayo Clinic. And he was named Will, after Will Mayo, one of the famous founders of the Mayo Clinic.

He hung around Rochester for the first year after his release. Then he moved to the big city and took up territory ultimately, in the Multifoods Tower. And he is, I think this year, 15 years old. And he's again had a whole host of females. I think there have been four mated with him over the course of the years. In fact, each one of which killed her predecessor because that's really a prime spot. And they apparently really cherished the opportunity to nest on the Multifood building.

Well, Old Will, four days ago, flew into a wire over near the convention center and practically tore his wing off and had to be killed. So that's the end of his history. He produced three young that fledged this year. So he wasn't at the end of his reproductive life, but he died nonetheless. So, yeah, we know the individuals at a lot of sites and fun to watch them and see what they do.

MARY LOZIER: How far have some of them gone? I know you've tracked them geographically also.

HARRISON TORDOFF: The male peregrines like to settle as close to home as they can. And they have to find a territory, a vacant territory, or fight their way in or wait until there's a vacancy or whatever.

Females tend to disperse a little farther. They're not looking just for a vacant territory. They've got to find a territory that's got a male on it because they want to breed, of course. So on average, the females go about twice as far as the males.

And some of the birds, some of the long distance movements, we have a bird nesting in Omaha, Nebraska, for example, for the last several years, who was released in Rochester, New York.

There's a bird nesting in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that came from Newfoundland. And a bird in Chicago, that came from Minneapolis and so on. So some individuals go a long ways.

But others, Meg, for example, starting in the Multifoods Tower and now in Saint Paul for 16 years, I doubt if she's ever been farther than 10 miles from home in her whole life, despite the fact that she could go wherever she wanted. And she doesn't do it. She stays home.

MARY LOZIER: Now, do peregrines migrate? I don't know that.

HARRISON TORDOFF: That's a good question. The original population in this area, nesting on cliffs, apparently mostly migrated, but probably not very far. They apparently didn't go to South America. Birds that nest in the Arctic now do migrate to South America. They go way down as far south as Southern Brazil and Argentina.

The birds that we released came from a variety of genetic stocks. Some came from the Arctic, some came from the Pacific Coast populations and so on. And the different populations they came from differed in their migratory behavior. And it turns out that the genes they have, their disposition to migrate depends a lot on their heritage, whether or not they come from migratory ancestors.

So we've got a mix of birds in the Midwest. And the birds nesting on cliffs pretty much have to migrate. They've got to go somewhere where it's a little bit warmer or maybe at least move into cities where they can find food in the winter.

The birds in cities in the Midwest shouldn't migrate because there are pigeons and starlings and mallards and stuff like that available for food year-round. And if they migrate, almost always they find their territories taken over by a new bird when they come back.

And we've had several instances of really serious territorial fights, sometimes ending in death of one of the other combatants. That have been triggered by females leaving a territory, going somewhere in winter, probably down southern states or maybe farther. Coming back in March or April, and finding your territory taken over by a new bird. Both of those birds, for example, would then think that they own that territory. And the fights for regaining the territory are really, really severe.

MARY LOZIER: I think I heard about one over a loading dock in Bloomington, wasn't it? Or Golden Valley. I remember I watched you band some birds on a tower. And they were saying that female had come back, and they had fought for two hours.

HARRISON TORDOFF: That was the colonnade out at the intersection of Highway 394 and 100. The female that you're referring to had migrated every year and came back usually in late March or early April, and most years had no problem chasing out her successor.

But the last year that this happened, the bird that moved in had moved in in December. She had been there all winter long and had two eggs in the nest and was about to lay the third when the old female arrived. And a terrific fight started. And they fought for a couple of hours. And I got to watch about the last half of it.

The net result was that the old female lost the fight that day. She was all bloody and battered and so on, and blind in one eye. One eye was put out. She flew off, and the female that had been there all winter went back up to her nest, but she was in pretty bad shape. She never laid that third egg. Apparently, it probably got broken and somehow expelled from her oviduct in the course of the fight. So I thought, well, that's it.

Next morning, I was up watching the nest site. And the female that I thought had won the fight the day before was sitting on the nest box. And around the corner comes this female that she had fought with the day before.

Without any hesitation, the female that I thought had won took off. She wasn't about to do that again. And the female that had still blood all over her, still blind in one eye, she came and sat there for two hours and was not challenged by the old female. So I think she won the psychological battle even if she lost the physical battle.

Two days later, she was picked up, too weak to fly, and brought into the Raptor Center. And they had to put her down because of the severity of the damage. So when they fight for territory, they can be serious business.

The reason it's serious is that they make their living by killing birds up to their own size. That's how they get their food. So when they start fighting using those weapons, it's not surprising that they can hurt each other.

MARY LOZIER: How do they fight? Can you describe?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Typically, they battle in the air at first. And then they grapple with their feet, grab hold of each other, and end up on the ground or on the roof of a building, which is what the case was at the colonnade. Then they hold each other with their feet, changing grips, but holding on with their feet and bite. They do the really serious business with their bills. They have a really powerful bite. And they grab and bite wherever they can.

And the female that was killed at the colonnade, as I said, had one eye puncture. Her palate was punctured by bites. And she had blood all over her chest, a lot of puncture wounds from their feet. But the puncture wounds from the feet mostly don't kill them. I think it's the biting that does it.

MARY LOZIER: Have falcons come back everywhere where they were in the old days? Have they completely recovered?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Essentially, yes. Populations haven't stabilized yet everywhere. But there are no big peregrine habitats that were once occupied that are now vacant, as far as I can see.

And in fact, as is obvious in Eastern North America, the population now is roughly three times the size of the original population because of the use of man-made sites.

And to some extent, this is true even in the West. There are birds in all the West Coast cities, in addition to peregrine nesting on all the cliffs all through the Rocky Mountains. So they haven't abandoned their old cliff nest sites. They just simply have moved into new habitats.

MARY LOZIER: So in your mind, is there any doubt about their future as a species?

HARRISON TORDOFF: Not unless we do something really stupid and poison the habitat in some new way. I really hope we don't do that. They're really pretty tough and adaptable birds.

Who would have guessed, for example, that we would have nesting on smokestacks all over the Midwest, nesting on three or four bridges in the Twin Cities, nesting on buildings? Given half a chance, they're adaptable, and they'll look after themselves.

MARY LOZIER: Retired University of Minnesota ornithologist, Harrison Tordoff, over a span of nearly 30 years, he helped lead the successful reintroduction of peregrine falcons to the Midwest. I'm Mary Lozier, Minnesota Public Radio.

MIKE EDGERLY: That conversation with Bud Tordoff was recorded in 2002. Tordoff played a central role in reintroducing the peregrine falcon to the Midwest. He was an ornithologist and served as the head of the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum of Natural History from 1970 to 1983. In 1991, Tordoff retired from the university, but he continued his work for the peregrine falcon until his death last week at the age of 85. A memorial service is being planned.

Next, we hear about a prairie restoration project underway in Southwestern Minnesota. One of the remnants is near Luverne, the Southwestern Minnesota hometown of photographer Jim Brandenburg. Brandenburg is famous for pictures of wolves and other images published through the years on the pages of National Geographic magazine.

He's working with the federal government to reclaim land as part of what's called the Northern Tallgrass Prairie Project. The remnant near Luverne is called Touch the Sky.

Brandenburg talked in 2002 with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson about the project. The remnant near Luverne was about 600 acres then. Since that conversation, the size of Touch the Sky remnant has grown to about 800 acres.

DAN OLSON: Jim Brandenburg has traveled the world for National Geographic. He makes his home near Ely in Northeastern Minnesota. He returns often to visit the blue mounds in Southwestern Minnesota.

Brandenburg's partner in his prairie preservation project there is the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Using public and private funds, they've bought about 600 acres of mainly rocky pasture land near Luverne. They've begun the years-long process of returning it to prairie.

Bumping along in a car on a washboard gravel road near the Luverne area farm where he grew up, Jim Brandenburg points out the car-sized boulders, which he guesses caused white settlers to name the area blue mounds because of the color they saw on the horizon.

JIM BRANDERBURG: I was born on a little farm that was littered with these Sioux quartzite boulders. I remember my father, in frustration, would come in from plowing and saying he broke a plow or had a hard time plowing it up.

I always think of the Sioux quartzite in a different way. It's protected a lot of prairie here, subsequent to that. But yes, Luverne is my hometown, and I left when I was about 20 years old.

I think the early pioneers came rolling across these prairies in their covered wagons. And from the distance, they look blue. The perspective from 10, 15 miles away, where you can start picking them up, has a blue mound effect. And I always assumed that's the case. We have the Sioux quartzite that has kind of a purple look. From a distance, that looks blue also when the lichens are on it especially.

DAN OLSON: But of course, the rock isn't blue. In fact, it's kind of there's a reddish cast to it.

JIM BRANDERBURG: It's a pink. It's like it's a pink stone. It's been used for a lot of buildings in this region. Pipestone has a lot of buildings, Jasper. The railroad beds were crushed. Quartzite.

We have this huge cliff, of course, which having grown up in Luverne, the cliff at the Blue Mounds Park is the most prominent feature on the land. And all the stories about the Native Americans driving herds of bison over the edge, coupled with just the growing up in a flat country, that sheer cliff really stays with you. And it's always a joy to come back. You never get tired of walking across that cliff.

DAN OLSON: Why have you wanted to do a prairie restoration project?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Well, Dan, I've always been interested in prairie. I feel like a salmon coming home to the spawning ground. Having been traveling for the National Geographic and living in Ely for several years now and working with the boreal forest and wolves, I've always, always been interested in prairie. I think it's one of the greatest landforms that North American cotton gave us.

DAN OLSON: So the prairie restoration project for a landowner amounts to what? What do you have to do?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Well, the first thing, it's about getting willing landowners to give up a precious pasture. Then it's finding the funding, getting the local people. You can't do this alone. So this was just simply an idea that I had.

The Laverne townspeople approached me three years ago to bring a Brandenburg gallery to Luverne, and I thought it was a boosterism thing. And I smiled and said, well, it'll never work. I live a long way away. And so I try to talk them out of it gently. They persisted and persisted and persisted and persisted.

One day, they call, and something came to me. I said, OK, folks, I'll do it. If we make it a prairie gallery and we have a mission statement of preserving prairie and prairie heritage, then I will be involved. And they said, OK. And in just two short years later, we have acquired this prairie. And I think that's a tribute to the town, not to me.

Actually, about seven or eight years ago, I was interested in buying it for myself. Couldn't justify it, couldn't afford it. And one thing led to another. And we've got the Fish and Wildlife Service interested. And it was a real group effort. The Brandenburg Gallery, of course, is totally non-profit. All the profits go back to these kinds of endeavors.

DAN OLSON: So who will manage this land and how big will it be?

JIM BRANDERBURG: The Fish and Wildlife Service will manage this. It will be called Touch the Sky Prairie. It's part of the Northern Tallgrass Prairie National Wildlife Refuge System.

The government has set aside a commitment to try to bring back the tallgrass prairie in Minnesota and Iowa. This is the first piece in both states that has been purchased for that particular purpose. So we're very proud of that.

DAN OLSON: What's been the reaction of some of the adjacent landowners? What some consider prairie, others consider a weed patch. How do the neighbors feel?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Well, I just learned today there's a little anxiety, very little. The Fish and Wildlife people were standing next to me when I was concerned. I think there were two or three farmers in the county that are a little concerned that we're taking land out of grazing production. And they smiled, and they said they've never heard of such support, that it's virtually nonexistent in terms of their history of trying to preserve natural lands.

And I think that if we treat everybody with respect and bring some tourism to town and tell a good story about Rock County and the good people that live here, preserving the heritage of our forefathers and what they saw, I think has a lot of value.

DAN OLSON: How does one restore prairie? Physically, what has to be done?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Strange as it may seem, Dan, burning a prairie is the healthiest thing you can do to it. That's saying you have some native plants to start with. If you don't have any native plants, say, it's a piece of cornfield that you want to plow up and restore, you need to plant the seeds and let them grow. And it takes several years. You need to be quite patient to bring back a prairie.

But if there's native species present and if it's never been plowed, there's a very good chance it's very healthy and a very complex system of nematodes and organisms underneath the soil. And then there are a lot of dormant things that happen. Some of these prairie plants can last for centuries.

DAN OLSON: So on either side of this road now, we have land that I gather has not been broken because you just couldn't break it. You couldn't do anything but graze on it. Is that right?

JIM BRANDERBURG: That's right. This was pasture land, and fairly good pasture land. Of course, there's a lot of protein in this prairie grass. And there's a lot of introduced species that eventually came onto the scene because it hasn't been burned.

These introduced species from Europe are very tenacious. And they are very powerfully driven towards pioneering certain gopher mounds and broken spots. And there's, I think, around 1,200 acres to the adjacent original 400 acres that we have here.

And we've talked to some of the local folks. And they're all intrigued with the possibility of someday maybe being part of this project and species like some of the rare insects that we don't even know what kind of a role they have in nature.

And there's one in particular plant that I'm sure your listeners know of is echinacea, which is a purple prairie clover. I'm sorry, purple coneflower, which is taken now as an herb to remedy colds and other maladies that we might get. And who knows what these prairies might have to help restore some health to our culture, along just with the green space that it brings.

DAN OLSON: Photographer Jim Brandenburg, talking about his role in a prairie restoration project near Luverne, his Southwestern Minnesota hometown. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Brandenburg got his start in photography at the Worthington Daily Globe Newspaper. He says his interest in the prairie and his experimentation with photography began in his early teens. One of his neighbors was the author, Frederick Manfred.

Tell the story of growing up in this area and some of the first pictures you took.

JIM BRANDERBURG: Well, Dan, we're heading to that spot as we speak. We'll be able to see that in just a few minutes.

I was about 14 years old, and I had a $3 camera and roll of black and white film in it. And I went up to the top of the Blue Mounds, and I learned how to squeak like a mouse to attract fox.

And I went up there and hid behind a big hunk of Sioux quartzite and started squeaking. And lo and behold, the fox started trotting over to me. And I peeked out over the rock and took its picture. And I'm not sure who was the most surprised, me or the fox. But it remains as one of a very cherished early photograph of mine that I love very much.

DAN OLSON: What did you do with that? Were you on the yearbook staff? Were you already at that point a freelance photographer working for a local newspaper or something like that?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Well, to the chagrin of my teachers and parents, I suppose, I was not a particularly good student back then. I didn't like the classroom. I was a daydreamer. I was always looking out the window.

And back in the '50s and '60s, there was no really such thing as a wildlife photographer. We had less Blacklock, bless his soul, one of the few people in the country at the time that was making a living. He was a legendary Minnesotan that made a living and supported his family with cameras.

But I had so many people smile at me and pat me on the head and say, oh, Jimmy, you really, there's no hope for you to be a wildlife photographer. You'll never be able to make a living with it.

I grew up in Luverne, of course, which was a sports town, basketball and football. And thus, I was a little smaller. I was one of the smallest kids in the class, and I felt a little bit left out at times. So it's particularly fun to come back to town now and be able to show off a little bit.

DAN OLSON: What was one of your first assignments, where you thought, I'm probably a full-time photographer, I can probably make a living at this?

JIM BRANDERBURG: I was in college at Worthington Community College. One day, Jerry Shury, a friend of mine who was going to school there, introduced me to Jim Vance, publisher, along with his brother, Bob, and father, Vernon, of this legendary newspaper. I didn't necessarily know it at the time, and it was a good little newspaper. But I didn't know how widely respected the Vance family was and their incredible little newspaper.

And I was so lucky to have met Jim Vance at that time. It literally changed my life overnight. He saw something in me. I don't know, as I was rather shy, but I knew a lot about photography. And I had a certain passion that he must have picked up on. He was good at spotting that. Paul Groucho was another person that worked there that some of you people probably know.

And so I started at the Globe shooting football games at night and gradually starting to do features, and ended up doing a lot of prairie features. When I ended up with the Globe, it was actually easier to work for the National Geographic than it was to work for the Globe because Jim Vance had such high standards. He expected so much from us. It was one of those great life opportunities and lessons that is immeasurable and its importance to me in my career. So I suppose I was-- within a couple of months of meeting Jim Vance, I sensed that there could be a future there in photography.

DAN OLSON: How did you break into this very high photographic society of the National Geographic group?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Well, again, I'll take it back to the Globe. The Globe has not a national reputation. At that time, had an international reputation. I called up the director of photography at the National Geographic. And at the time, I didn't know I was making that kind of an impression. But of all the things that I said, he picked up on the fact that I worked at the Globe because he knew about the Globe. It had won lots of awards. And so that was my foot in the door.

And in a year or two later, I was out there with a portfolio. And he remembered me and the phone conversation. And my first assignment was a prairie story. No one else wanted to do a prairie story. And today, I still see very few people shooting prairie pictures.

DAN OLSON: Let's talk for a moment about photographic technology and that $3 camera and the roll of black and white film. What do you mark as the major turning points in photographic technology? The motor-driven camera, the digitization of images?

JIM BRANDERBURG: I would say roll film, when you could crank off several exposures quickly, was a major turning point in photography. Fast lenses with fast film that are able to capture things without a flash pretty well set that whole era of photography.

And now, interesting you'd ask that, Dan. I did my last book with a digital camera. And generally, I was very suspicious of technology. There's something about celluloid and film that's magical. And you open up a box of film. Even the smell that comes out of it is very evocative to me of something really special.

To shoot things with a digital camera is very bizarre to me. I got into it by accident. Nikon gave me a very special, new, highly sophisticated, high quality digital camera. And I fell in love with it. I was able to do things, like with a paintbrush.

Because I must be fairly frugal yet from my farm beginnings, shooting film, I was known at the National Geographic as probably shooting less film than anybody else. Well, the more photographs you make, the better they tend to get. And with digital, it's all free. You can shoot thousands and thousands of images.

And with that, I start to experiment. And when I talk about digital, I'm not talking about manipulation. I'm talking about using the digital camera like I did a film camera, except we don't have film. It's straight from the digital data onto the print. And I make all my own prints for our galleries. And I find that my work has improved dramatically.

DAN OLSON: Let's take on that issue of your philosophy of choosing not to manipulate the digitized image. Is there still a big divide on that point among photographic artists who feel, well, yes, of course, I have the right, the freedom, the artistic freedom to place the trees a certain way? Or I don't even know what you can do with digital manipulation. You apparently don't go that direction.

JIM BRANDERBURG: I've played with it. I can't imagine anyone not experimenting. There's a distinction. There are the photographic artists which really have the license to do anything they want as they see something.

Then you have the journalists, the photojournalists, who have to be very, very careful. There's no gray area in photojournalism. You need to keep it exactly as your camera saw it. That doesn't mean the cameras can't fib. We could do 10 shows on-- the cameras do lie. You can manipulate a picture with a 50-year-old camera in black and white film to make it look like something that didn't really exist, without doing any computer manipulation. But computers make it much easier.

I use the computer much like I did in the darkroom. I would darken and lighten and crop and do some very minor manipulation. But I don't like to move things around. I've done it in the past. And it's not fun. Then you should just probably be a painter. And that's where my background was in painting. But I conceive myself or perceive myself right now as more of an artist than a journalist. And I probably have more license to do that.

Most of my work now is hanging on the wall of my galleries. I don't really do assignment work anymore. And I do my books, which probably would be perceived as documentary. So I have to be pretty careful that I show the scene as it is.

DAN OLSON: Jim Brandenburg's photographs, including prairie scenes, hang in his gallery in Luverne. Money from sales of the pictures goes to support the Northern Tallgrass Prairie Heritage preservation area. When complete, the area will be 77,000 acres of remnants stretching across 85 counties in Southwestern Minnesota and Northwestern Iowa.

We stopped the car at Blue Mound State Park. There's some white blossoms in front of us with a monarch just settling in there. And I'm guessing honeybees. Do you think honeybees floating around in there?

JIM BRANDERBURG: I think those are honeybees. They're working on an aster. We normally think them as more blue purple, but these are white asters. And that's not the name. That's just the color variation.

And they're growing amongst the big bluestem, which is the king of the prairie grasses. That stuff will grow to be 8 feet. It's also called turkey foot in its prime. It's just ready to lose its seeds. In fact, the prairie restoration people now are actually harvesting the seed.

And this is what made up the tallgrass prairie. As you looked across the prairie, this is what you virtually saw. It was big bluestem. And then there's little bluestem. I saw some of that coming up here. There are as many as 350 species of plants that grow on prairies like this.

And this was like a golf course. When I was a boy, this was private land. In fact, this is the Manfred residence. Frederick Manfred, the author that we all know lived here, built this house and has now become a state park.

My first introduction to burning prairies was Fred out here burning his prairie. And I thought, Why is he burning that? And he told me that it will bring back the prairie. I'll never forget that day. It stuck in my head like it was yesterday.

DAN OLSON: So as a kid, you were a little bit of a daydreamer. You liked the out-of-doors. You were a tramper. You tramped around in the open and became sort of a self-taught naturalist?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Totally self-taught. I really wanted to become a biologist. I applied at South Dakota State, which is land grant school, and taught a lot of wildlife management in South Dakota, in Brookings. And they didn't like my grades, so I was rejected.

So I went over to Worthington Community College and did fairly well there. I really became inspired when I got to college, and it was too late though.

Then I went to the University of Minnesota. I was there one day, the main campus. I didn't like all the traffic, couldn't find a parking space. So I finally went to Duluth, UMD, in art. I thought, well, I can do art. They didn't have photographic courses up there, so I thought I could get close to that.

And it was actually a good move. It seemed to be. I guess everything you've done in your life, it brings you to the point you are, must have all been good decisions. So here we are.

DAN OLSON: You end off at a point in your life to study in Japan. I think I have that right. What did you do there?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Well, I have a lot of affinity with the Japanese. When I did my first assignment in Japan, I was doing a story on bamboo and some of the craftsmen that made bamboo flutes and basketry.

I thought I'd never come back home. There's something about the country. I don't know if it was a past life or a mannerism that I loved. I would write back and call back on the phone, and some of my colleagues thought I was never coming back. And I've since made several visits and had one-man-shows tour Japan, and it's like a second country to me.

DAN OLSON: Up on Ellesmere island, a truly forbidding place it would seem in some moments. Did you have moments where you thought, shoot, I should have stayed with family portraits or something? This is too much. This is too crazy.

JIM BRANDERBURG: Normally, I've been scared, I've been frightened, and I've been very sick in lots of foreign locations, dreading, so homesick that I could hardly work. Ellesmere Island was unique. I was so thrilled to be living with his pack of white wolves. It was an absolute experience, truly an experience of a lifetime.

In fact, that's what's brought me back to this place. And that when I did the white wolf assignment, at the time, I was telling myself, I will never do something that is richer, more exciting, or deep in my career. I know I will never. I know as a fact, there'll never be another assignment I can do to top this.

So it was a very interesting contradiction of feeling extremely fortunate and knowing that I would probably not do it so much after that. I could sense it then. And I haven't really done much assignment work since then.

DAN OLSON: I saw some pictures you took of a place that I think is called The Forbidden Zone in Namibia. I'm not sure if I have this right, where diamonds are mined. Is that right? How did you get in there?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Well, the National Geographic has entree like nothing I've ever seen in my life. The whole world knows what the National Geographic is. It's done a good job over the last 110 years of being fair, sometimes to a fault. They don't tend to judge. They don't tend to criticize. So nearly every country in the world open their arms up and put out the magic carpet and the red carpet for us. And we had virtually limitless entree almost everywhere we went in the world, in China and Russia and the diamond mines in Africa.

They trusted me up to a point on that particular visit, and that they gave me a full body X-ray when I left the diamond mine, thinking I might have tucked a diamond away. [CHUCKLES]

DAN OLSON: Called The Forbidden Zone, I gathered, because, as that search points out, they're extremely concerned about loss of the natural resource for their economic purposes.

JIM BRANDERBURG: Right. That's one of my favorite places in the world I've ever visited. I've got two favorite places, Namibia, the Namib Desert, and Ellesmere Island, two ends of the earth, opposite ends of the earth.

What I find interesting, neither place has trees, like the place I grew up. So we get back to this, the cycle is completed in that we keep going back to those places that you're born from.

DAN OLSON: You took some pictures there of people, who I gather were tribal people. What's your approach to people when you want to take their picture? Do you just take it and kind of wave bye-bye? Or what's your approach?

JIM BRANDERBURG: I would always take my time to get to meet the people. And those were the Ovahimbas. And they were the most happy. Again, technology hadn't visited them.

And it's a cherished moment. We brought them food. They were in bad way, they were starving, and they needed sustenance. And we brought lots of food, and that helped open up some doors. It was a two-day Land Rover trek across the desert to reach them on the Skeleton Coast, one of the most magical places I've been.

But again, those exotic locations are fascinating too. But having seen most of them standing out here in the prairie today is as thrilling as the experiences I've ever had.

But looking back at those National Geographic experiences has allowed me to appreciate my local home better because I've done that. A lot of people grow up here and think, if I could only go off to Africa, if I could only go off to the high Arctic, then I would really be happy. I could make the best pictures of my life.

Well, having done that, I think our own backyard-- and that's the message I'd like to leave everybody with is, whether you live in Rochester or Winona or Morris or Duluth or Thief River Falls, any of those wonderful places, your own backyard is a very, very special place. And I would encourage everybody to take a second look.

DAN OLSON: Jim Brandenburg, you've taken the Prairie Restoration Project here, near Luverne and Blue Mound State Park, to a level that has included the naming of the place, a dedication, assembling of land. Where do you want it to go? How far do you want it to go? And then when you get it to a certain place, what do you want people to take away when they see it?

JIM BRANDERBURG: Dan, I'd like to take it to the young people. Preserving land is very self-gratifying and very exciting. And there's always a little ego involved, I suppose. But if we can pass that sense on to the young people in town, get them involved in having our own little prairie plots, growing their own rare species of plants and transplanting them up into the prairie, and watching it. Starting the first, second and third grade, watching that prairie plant grow all the way through their senior years. Can you imagine coming back with their families and the heritage that gets passed on? I wished I had had that.

My grandparents, great grandparents, plowed up some of this prairie, and there are no stories. There is nothing written. There are no photographs, except that my portrait studio, they're all standing very solemnly.

And I feel that's a real loss. And I feel resentment sometimes that stories weren't passed down. And that kind of heritage, I think that is crucial. When I travel abroad and visit families, they all have long, long family traditions. They can talk back hundreds of years of what their families did and felt and what they were like.

And somehow, we broke from the past when we came from Europe, us European stock. And I'd like to think that we've started a new book here, with our prairie culture and prairie heritage. I have a gut feeling we're going to have a lot of immigrants from our East Coast moving out here to get away from the stress that's been developing.

And I think it's going to be a whole new time. I think we're going to find a whole new view of living in a more rural sense. And I think we would like to have and prepare these places, some green spaces.

And this was a breadbasket of the world. And it's grown a lot of wonderful farm product. But leaving one half of 1% that originally remained, I think is blasphemous. And I would like to be one of those that stood up and said, you know, we're going to try to preserve and bring some of it back.

DAN OLSON: Jim Brandenburger, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time.

JIM BRANDERBURG: Dan, it's a real pleasure.

DAN OLSON: Photographer Jim Brandenburg leading a tour of his home area near Luverne in Southwestern Minnesota. You've been listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

MIKE EDGERLY: That conversation with Jim Brandenburg was first heard on Minnesota Public Radio News in 2002. Earlier this hour, we heard a 2002 conversation with ornithologist Harrison Bud Tordoff.

Tordoff died last week at the age of 85. He was responsible for reintroducing the peregrine falcon to Minnesota and much of the Midwest. A memorial service for Bud Tordoff is now being planned. You can hear the conversations, these conversations, and all the other Voices of Minnesota interviews online at MinnesotaPublicRadio.org.

That goes for this morning's 11 o'clock hour as well with StateBridge Engineer Dan Dorgan. You can check that out as well at MinnesotaPublicRadio.org. A reminder that, on Friday, at 11 o'clock, we will carry live the bridge victims' memorial service. That will be heard live here at 11 o'clock on Minnesota Public Radio News. It was August 1, 2007, when the 35W Bridge collapsed in Minneapolis into the Mississippi River.

Tomorrow at noon, we'll hear from New York Governor David Paterson. It's a live National Press Club speech. David Paterson, of course, one of two African-American governors in the US. Tomorrow, he'll talk about the economy, energy prices, the mortgage crisis, and other economic issues. Coming your way tomorrow on midday on Minnesota Public Radio News.

ANNOUNCER: Programming is supported by Minnesota State Colleges and University System. 81% of graduates work or continue their education in Minnesota. We educate Minnesota. We make it work. Online at mnscu.edu.