[Illustration: Camas blooms in the prairie community along the Red Eagle road. An important staple, camas bulbs were gathered as food by Indians.] Conspicuous also are many insects—including grasshoppers; flies; ants, wasps and bees; butterflies and moths; bugs; and beetles—which fulfill important roles as herbivores, carnivores, and scavengers while also acting as pollinators for flowering plants and providing an abundant food source for other animals. Below the ground are the tunnels. Burrowing is an important means of survival on the open prairie, and life underground is extensive. Some of the animals are rarely seen—the northern pocket gopher, for example, with a diet of underground insects, grubs, worms, and roots, spends most of its life tunneling just below the surface. Others, like the badger, leave their burrows during the day to dig for rodents. Most conspicuous of the burrowing animals in the park’s grasslands is the Columbian ground squirrel. Its alert upright stance has earned it the nickname “picket pin.” When danger approaches from the air or on land, its shrill alarm whistle passes the warning to others of its kind. Where prairie and forest meet, a never-ending struggle for dominion is waged. The isolated patches of prairie that dot the North Fork Valley near Polebridge hold the great forest of the park’s northwest region at bay. This broad valley, floored with coarse glacial outwash and terraced downward to the deep channel of the North Fork River, presents a graphic battleground between grass and tree. Lining the upper terraces, from which they glower down on the dry, well drained grass flats like a line of warriors, are the Douglas-fir, western larch, and ponderosa pine. Seedling trees continually invade the prairie. But most perish early, their shallow roots no match for the extensive root systems of the fast-growing, moisture-greedy grasses. If encouraged by a series of wet summers, however, the young lodgepoles quickly gain stature. They had made significant inroads at Big Prairie when the disastrously dry summer of 1967 killed most of these 15-year-old pioneer trees. These North Fork grasslands and the immediately surrounding lodgepole pine forests are an important spring range. Deer, wapiti, and grizzly—and, in the wetter areas, moose—graze or browse here. And here, low on the western slopes of the Livingston Range, are the park’s only stands of ponderosa pine, a tree that prefers warm, dry habitats. As a result, at low elevations it often merges with the prairie community.