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Glenn Pollock, a man who’s not out standing in any field.
In the realm of understanding the prairie, few know as much as he does. As for Pollock, standing in a field just doesn’t happen often because he’s always in motion. He leads lecture hikes through prairies, organizes prescribed burns, shakes seeds from seed heads to repopulate the prairie wildflowers, uproots invasive brome grass, helps track songbirds from northern Canada to South America, and catalogs plants in 125 prairie cemeteries from Nebraska to Ohio. No, Pollock doesn’t stand still in a field.
Born 81 years ago, he grew up on a farm near Denison, Iowa. “We had chicken, pigs, cattle, and corn,” Pollock said. “I played in a river as a kid, trapped muskrats, mink, fox, skunk, and all sorts of things, and fished.”
After a stint in the army and running a television repair shop for a short time, he wound up living in Omaha near Immanuel Hospital and working as a biomedical engineering technician. Despite his turn to electronics as an adult, he never lost his love for the prairie.
Upon retiring, he volunteered for a while at Fontenelle Forest and began associating with organizations including the Audubon Society of Omaha, Sierra Club, and the Iowa Prairie Network, which he helped found in 1990. To put it mildly, his fingers are in the prairie in one way or another. “I’ve been doing this for 50 to 60 years, and I can’t keep track of all the stuff I’ve done,” Pollock said.
For 25 years, he tended a 9-acre native prairie owned by the Audubon Society on the north side of Omaha and convinced the society’s Omaha chapter to buy an adjacent 10 acres of brome grass. He then cleared and restored that, partially with seeds of prairie plants he’d raised in his yard. “You can get only one-quarter of the plants of a native prairie to grow in a restored one,” he said. “It’s tough.”
One plant Pollock has mentioned when accompanied by visitors there is a downy gentian, a rare blue-violet perennial. “It’s found here only on the native portion of this land,” he explained.
“He’s nurtured that prairie all these years. We’re so fortunate that he’s there to take care of it,” said Anne Maguire, president of the society’s board. “Last year, the board decided to call it the Glenn Pollock Prairie while he’s still here. It was important to us that he know how much we appreciate him.”
In 2001, Pollock helped acquire 42 acres of remnant prairie on the south edge of Council Bluffs. Now named Vincent Prairie, the land has parking, a picnic shelter, and a foot trail that rambles across the Loess Hills and overlooks the Missouri River floodplain and Omaha. Part of the trail is paved for people with disabilities.
A few years ago, Pollock pitched in with teen volunteers to remove trees there. He also helped to arrange for goats to visit and nibble away plants not found in real prairies.
In 2022, Jerry Toll, who’s been banding birds since 2007 at Hitchcock Nature Center north of Council Bluffs, asked Pollock to help build a radio receiving station there as part of a program designed to note the routes flown by migrating songbirds and shore birds. Begun by Birds Canada in 2014, MOTUS, which means “movement” in Latin, now has 2,074 tracking stations in 34 countries which follow more than 5,000 birds representing at least 400 species. “We’re the United Nations of bird nerds,” Pollock joked.
The birds monitored by MOTUS can’t be harnessed with anything weighing more than one-third of a gram. Each transmitter costs $225 and has a range of 6 to 9 miles. When a bird’s signal is detected, that station relays its information so its route can be displayed on MOTUS.org. A Franklin’s gull picked up by Hitchcock was found to have flown 2,516 miles to Colombia.
Since Pollock devised the six antennas on a tower on the north end of Hitchcock, he’s been involved with others at Niobrara State Park, Offutt Air Force Base and Henry Doorly Zoo, as well as near Onawa and Waubonsie State Park in Iowa. “I’ve gone from human telemetry to bird telemetry,” Pollock said with a laugh.
Hitchcock’s operations supervisor, Chad Graeve, said Pollock has been a mentor to him and others. “He’s an inspiration because he cares at his core about the natural world and he wants to help engage visitors with this place and the natural world beyond,” Graeve said.
Last year, the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation presented Pollock with its Lawrence and Eula Hagie Heritage Award to honor the work he has done on behalf of the state’s natural resources. In short, it’s for a person who is outstanding in his field, although Glenn Pollock is always in motion.
This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
