Fending off an extinction

A full moon guides photographer Casey Wilson across a stretch of tallgrass prairie on the eastern edge of the Kansas Flint Hills to a tiny blind atop a hill.

Here he waits. And listens.

Just before dawn, an eerie love song interrupts the silence of the dark and cold spring morning.

Prairie chickens began to land amid the booming ground that surrounds the blind. They swoop down into the tall grass to stomp their feet and dance - part of an annual mating ritual that probably has happened since the beginning of time.

A male prairie chicken can pronounce love as convincingly as anyone. Turkeys strut. Mockingbirds sing. Deer fight through rut. However, the prairie chicken might do it the best.

On this morning, the tawny earth still frosty, they lean forward, puffing up their throats and bodies, their inflated air sacs making a whooping sound as they stomp their feet and fan their tails.

Then, when the male thinks he has found an interested female, he performs a "nuptial bow" - asking for her commitment with his wings spread and bill lowered to the ground.

"They put all this effort out, first thing in the morning, just to spread their DNA," said Wilson, who has been documenting the birds for about three years.

He likens it to singles going to a bar to check out the prospects.

The blind on the hill has been a growing business for Angela Anderson, who has been guiding birding enthusiasts to the lek - or booming ground - on the western edge of Lyon County for the past two years.

Yet while on a clear day these chickens can be heard two miles away, Anderson admits she worries that someday the sound may grow silent.

"Humans have invaded their habitat," Anderson said. "And it's becoming more and more of a concern."

Declines nationwide

The greater prairie chicken of eastern Kansas has been declining with the encroachment of man.

Roads have broken up vast rangeland, as well as oil wells, wind farms and cell phone towers. Cedars and other trees and shrubs have invaded their territory.

Suburban development also is a factor as a growing number of residents buy small parcels of land to build a home. Jim Pitman, Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks' small game coordinator, said department estimates show the greater prairie chicken has declined by more than 40 percent in the past 30 years.

"Go east of the Flint Hills, and it's even greater than that," Pitman said. "East has become forest, nonnative grass, Wal-Mart - that sort of thing."

Another part of the problem is a change in ranchers' management practices in the past 20 to 30 years, Pitman said. Many burn their pastures annually, which allows cattle to gain about a tenth to a quarter of a pound a day more than if the pasture wasn't burned.

Ranchers also have implemented intensive grazing methods - meaning more cattle on the acreage for a shorter period. He said both these practices keep the big bluestem grasses shorter during the birds' nesting season.

Prairie chickens nest in these tall grasses in open prairie, he said. It takes the hen about two weeks to lay 12 eggs. In all, the hens sit on the eggs 40 days.

"Imagine you are a chicken on May 1st," he said. "Imagine trying to sit in the same spot for 40 days and not get eaten by a predator."

The success rate, he said, is low. On average, less than 10 percent of the nests hatch eggs in the Flint Hills, Pitman said. Of those hatchlings, just 10 percent of the chicks survive.

Before intensive grazing and burning, Pitman said studies done in the 1960s and 1970s showed nesting success at 40 or 50 percent.

Roger Wells, national habitat director for Quail Unlimited who stations from Americus, Kan., said when he first started working as a biologist in Kansas in 1973, there were prairie chickens in the far reaches of eastern Kansas, including from Linn County down to Crawford and Cherokee counties.

"Now there are none in those counties anymore," he said.

If the past is any indication, he said, there is concern for what could happen, he said.

The heath hen, a subspecies of the prairie chicken, went extinct in 1932.

In Texas, the Attwaters, another subspecies, is on the endangered list.

Meanwhile, the lesser prairie chicken also has suffered from increases in human population and drought, Pitman said.

The bird, found in five states including parts of western Kansas and the Cimarron National Grassland in Morton County, has dipped by 50 percent in the past 40 years, according to a 2009 report by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moving the lesser chicken's threatened ranking from 8 to 2 - one step away from an endangered listing, Pitman said.

Both types of prairie chicken are hunted in Kansas. However, Pitman said, hunting is not a cause for more declines.

"It's a minimal source of mortality for the birds," said Pitman, who was part of a multi-year study that radio tagged 400 lesser prairie chickens around the Garden City area.

"Less than 2 percent of all mortality was due to hunting," he said. "The reason they are declining is poor nest success and survival, not hunting."

Conservation efforts helping

Conservation efforts have helped sustain populations, Pitman said.

In the Smoky Hills, greater prairie chicken numbers have stabilized. And in western Kansas, while lesser prairie chickens hit an all-time low in 1995, populations have since been on the rise thanks to acreage enrollment in the U.S. Agriculture Department's Conservation Reserve Program.

Meanwhile, in the Flint Hills, a group formed earlier this decade, the Tallgrass Legacy Alliance, and is working with ranchers to improve prairie chicken habitat, thanks, in part, to a $500,000 federal grant, said Wells.

Studies also are being done on patch burning - or burning just a portion of the rangeland each year. Wells said results so far show that cattle still gain about as well.

In addition, Pitman said an ongoing state study is exploring the greater prairie chicken and wind farms. If they are anything like their counterpart - the lesser chicken - they are suspicious of large structures like wind towers and power poles.

But while progress is happening, other worries abound.

Nationally, more than 2 million acres is expected to come out of the CRP program in the next two years, Pitman said. In Kansas alone, it's about 800,000 acres.

Pitman wonders what affect it will have on the chickens' survival.

"This is a huge concern, not only for chickens, but for pheasant and quail out there too," he said. "If we lose a third of our CRP, we could see big declines of our upland birds."

Nevertheless, more people are becoming aware of the prairie chickens' plight, Wells said, noting the popularity of bird-watching.

His daughter is Anderson, who guides residents in the wee hours of the morning to the patch of prairie near his home, where each year, out of instinct, the prairie chickens return to the lek for the annual rite of spring.

"How they know to come back to that exact spot, I don't know," Wells said. "It is a mystery."

On the net

https://www.jtbirdsong.com/angela/

https://www.caseywilson.com

https://www.tallgrasslegacy.org/