Yeah, that's a great shot there.
I think that's the best one I found.
Look at how degraded that grass is there. Yeah.
You can see, the seed heads are falling over.
Natural plants, when they're placed in dioramas,
will respond to the heat and exposure to light just as fur and hair do.
And the grasses in the bison diorama showed real signs
of deterioration and brittleness and dryness.
So much so, that they would crumble if you came in contact with them.
The problem is, the prairie ecosystem has been so reduced, that those native grasses
--buffalograss, and in this case, grama grass--
is so restricted in the areas where it grows, that it's difficult to find.
We were lucky enough to have a colleague
working out in Colorado that we were able to coordinate with.
And he had an association with a prairie preserve
who knew what we were attempting to do,
wanting to recreate that ecosystem here in the diorama,
and approved us collecting a sufficient amount of buffalo grass and grama grass.
I was able to direct how they would need to be collected, how they would have to be crated,
because they're so delicate and fragile, they had to be collected and hung upside-down in the crate
and wired in place so that they wouldn't be damaged during shipping.
I would still keep small.
But that's about as big if we were going to go big?
I think so.
I called on a team of volunteers
and we kind of set up an assembly line of looking at the grasses,
finding the natural separation of them
in these clumps that they arrived in
and then adhering them in a screen that was then going to be placed in the diorama,
almost like flower arranging.
Maybe, I'm thinking that you might be able to sneak back between the animals.
I'll just place them here.
I don't know if I can fit between them.
Now that the grasses are replenished, if you look at it, the bison are grazing.
This whole herd is grazing towards grass.
We decided to kind of do less grass where they would have grazed already.
And then more grass before them.
And that didn't exist before, so that was kind of a nice detail in the restoration project
that we could bring back to life in this kind of narrative in the story.