Birds
Showtime
Though they are now rare east of the Mississippi, greater prairie chickens still strut their stuff on the plains of Illinois, wooing mates and sleepy birders.
By David Standish

My old Chevy compact is the only moving thing on this deserted country road, my sleepy brain zoned somewhere between last night and tomorrow morning. The empty unplanted late-March farm fields are blacker than the night itself, and God seems to be having a go at re-creating The Flood, the rain a relentless smeary curtain hardly dented by my headlights.

It’s 3:45 a.m., and I’m running late for a date. But soon I come to a small, plain farmhouse distinguished only by the sign plunked in the front yard announcing it as the office of the Illinois Prairie Ridge State Natural Area. I’m 20 miles southeast of Effingham, in the heart of the state, just east of I-57. Several other cars and SUVs sit in the parking area beyond the house, all belonging to people who had made it here on time. I hurry to the side door and am quickly let in out of the downpour, greeted by a crowd of 10 or so stalwarts who seem entirely too cheery, given the unconscionable hour.

We are here to take advantage of a rare, if sleep-depriving, opportunity: to spy on the sex lives of greater prairie chickens. Their mating behavior is complex, flamboyant, theatrical, and just plain fun to watch. These birds, once so abundant here in Illinois that they numbered in the millions, have been virtually wiped out through most of their original range, which extended to wherever the oceans of prairie grass luxuriated, from Ohio to the Rockies and from southern Canada to Texas. The tiny population of 200 or so here at Prairie Ridge represents one of the few remaining flocks east of the Mississippi. Chances to see them up close are limited to about 14 days a year, from late March to mid-April. So downpour or not, here we are, all of us also taking part in the annual Illinois Ornithological Society get-together being held this weekend in nearby Effingham.

We zip and snap our raingear, check our flashlights, and head outside following Scott Simpson, Prairie Ridge’s longtime manager. Our destination: a soggy pasture where three blinds await, looking like superannuated group outhouses. As we sit in the imperceptibly attenuating gloom, the rain starts coming down even harder, crashing against the tin roofs, sounding more like buckets of lead balls banging down than mere water falling. What prairie chicken in its right mind would come out in this?

Gradually first true light accomplishes itself despite the deluge. And there are birds out there. No chickens yet, but bopping about in the grass close to the blind are a few meadowlarks, speckled and splashed with the yellow promise of spring, and a couple of horned larks, dapper and understatedly elegant. Along a fence line in the distance, a pair of short-eared owls have perched together, until a northern harrier zooms at them, providing some pro forma annoyance.

These are all signs of how good the habitat at Prairie Ridge is. While the chief goal is to keep a healthy prairie chicken population going here, the area’s scattered acres are managed to encourage other endangered or threatened grassland species as well. There are only six true grassland birds in Illinois—prairie chickens, short-eared owls, barn owls, northern harriers, Henslow’s sparrows, and upland sandpipers—and Prairie Ridge is the sole location in the state where all six can be found nesting. No other site has even five.

By about 6 a.m. the rain has finally diminished, and, lo, there are prairie chickens. The more accomplished birders—that is, everyone but me—spot them first, but eventually a few move closer to the blinds, and even I can see them. Altogether, seven show up and, no surprise, they are all males. The females must have better sense than to come out in such rotten weather. But the boys have to clock in to do a little ritual showing off, puffing out their breasts, heads bobbing up and down, acting about as tough as a fluffy little chicken can.

Prairie chickens are among just one percent of birds that engage in a prolonged territorial mating quadrille. (Others include peacocks, cocks-of-the-rock, and birds of paradise.) To accomplish it, they need a large established “booming ground,” or lek. This is a Swedish word meaning play, or game, though for the birds it’s serious business, however diverting, since success or failure on the lek determines who gets to mate and pass along his genes, and who ends up frustrated on the sidelines.

Frank M. Chapman, the longtime ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History who in 1899 founded Bird-Lore, the direct precursor of this magazine, described one prairie chicken’s voice as “the mellow resonant tone of a kettledrum” and many booming together as a “truly startling call,” such that the “very earth echoed with a continuous roar.”

I know it is not scientific, or even fashionable, to anthropomorphize these things, but the male chickens remind me of nothing so much as teenage boys busting on each other on a schoolyard. The theatrics proceed with a rhythmic drum produced by stomping chicken feet. Then they fan their earlike feathers above their heads and inflate their orange throat sacs in a performance that might bring to mind showgirls in Vegas, all the while making deep hooting moans (for a video of this, click here). “But all this activity is only a prelude to the grand finale of actual combat,” marveled Chapman, recalling the competing males’ climactic clash of wings. “Uttering a low, whining tone they fight as viciously as game cocks; and the number of feathers left on the ground testifies to effective use of bill and claws.”

It’s really something to see.

Video

Prime turf on a prairie chicken lek is near the center. “The males with the most central and largest territories on the mating ground do about 75 percent of the mating,” Simpson told a dinner gathering of the Illinois Ornithological Society I attended. “So there’s this continual battle by all of the males to get to that point. There’s a lot of physical contact between the birds.”

Simpson projected a slide of a male falling back on its rump, suggesting Charlie Brown right after Lucy plucks away the football. “This male here tried to kick his opponent and missed. He’s one of the dominant males; he’s got five hens in his territory. He was right in the middle of the booming ground, so he was doing quite well.” The next slide shows a male executing a courtly bow—or as courtly as a plump prairie chicken can manage. “This is called the nuptial bow,” Simpson explained, “where he will hold his wings out, bend down, and touch the breast to the ground. They only do this in the presence of the female, and it usually precedes copulation—which is a real quickie thing. When they bow down, you gotta be right on ’em to see it.” When no females are present—as was the case during the Friday morning downpour—the males go into a sort of aggressive holding pattern. “They do what is called ‘confronted crouching,’ ” Simpson said, “where they will set and stare at each other. They don’t spend a lot of energy when there are no girls there to impress.”

This lekking takes up a lot of time and requires a fair amount of congenial space—which is one reason among many that the greater prairie chicken population has plunged toward extinction from an almost unimaginable abundance. The prairie, flourishing undisturbed since the most recent ice age, covered more than half the present state when the first settlers arrived in Illinois, and it supported a prairie chicken population in the millions; indeed, the birds were its signature species. At their peak, between 1850 and 1860, it’s estimated that there were between 10 million and 14 million greater prairie chickens in Illinois alone.

Although prairie chickens were hunted for food, it was loss of habitat as prairies were converted to agricultural lands that inexorably did them in. By 1900 the original 21 million acres of prairie in Illinois had been reduced to 1 million, and the drop in prairie chicken numbers was comparable. By 1933 the estimated population had plummeted to 25,000 birds, and in that year the hunting season was permanently closed. But it didn’t really help. By 1962 only 2,000 were left in Illinois, and four years later, in 1966, the numbers had dwindled to 400.

This fall occurred despite protection that began in the 1940s, when two prairie chicken refuges were established by the Illinois Department of Conservation in Lee and Iroquois counties; in both places the prairie chickens were gone by 1960. A year earlier the Prairie Chicken Foundation was created with the specific mission of saving them in Illinois. In 1962 the group set aside a sanctuary of 77 acres in Jasper County. Since then many additional parcels of land between Jasper and Marion counties have been added to the refuge, which now comprises 3,940 acres and is managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Not far from the farmhouse headquarters, Illinois Audubon owns an additional 160 acres, known as the Robert Ridgway Grasslands Nature Preserve, a rich grassland habitat and restored prairie wetland with a self-guided interpretive trail meandering through it and a handy viewing platform overlooking the wetland.

While Prairie Ridge has been a success, it has had its share of setbacks. Chief among them was a prairie chicken population drop in the 1990s due to one effect of the small, sedentary population: inbreeding. The result was a loss of genetic variation, which may have important consequences for the long-term viability of a population, possibly decreasing resistance to disease and parasites, and the ability of populations to respond to environmental changes. Another result of this genetic loss was lowered egg viability. From a hatching success of 91 to 100 percent in the 1960s, the rate in 1990 fell to 38 percent, and despite best efforts, the number of birds bottomed out in 1994, at 46. The solution was to bring in new recruits. Between 1992 and 1998 a total of 271 greater prairie chickens from populations in Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska were relocated to Jasper County, while an additional 235 were released in Marion County, for a grand total of 506. Hatching success rebounded to as much as 94 percent. But the population continued to struggle as a series of cold, wet springs made the survival of newly hatched broods an even more treacherous business than usual. Fortunately, in the past few years the weather has been kinder. In 2007 the closely monitored population count was 51 males in Jasper County (up from 37 in 2006) and 59 males in Marion County (up from 48 in 2006).

On my last morning of spying on prairie chickens I go to see another booming ground within the Prairie Ridge acreage in Marion County, 20 miles or so due south of Effingham. Even minutes after sunrise the morning is bright and crisp, with only a few wisps of cloud in blue crystal sky. Here it’s not possible to get very close to the booming ground, which is on a rise beyond bare unplowed fields, easily a quarter-mile from the road. The prairie chickens have sensibly picked a spot about as far from people as they can find. But snazzy scopes abound, and we get a good look at more than a dozen chickens, including two or three females who deign to put in an appearance now that the weather is more civilized. And the boys are whooping it up and duking it out for all they are worth, a sight at once comic and tender, and a little sad, since the antics of these few remaining birds are all that is left of a sight on the prairies that was once as common as sunrise itself.

Besides Audubon, David Standish has written for, among others, Outside, Travel & Leisure, Smithsonian, and Esquire. He teaches graduate writing at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

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Prairie Dance
Prairie chicken mating rituals are caught on film by Kipp Woods of the Missouri Department of Conservation.