HOMEFRONT: Chicken dance an amazing sight

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By Alma Gaul | Monday, April 21, 2008 | No comments posted

Just before daybreak last Sunday, I found myself huddled in a wood trailer atop a grassy knoll in northwest Missouri, squinting through a small window and waiting.

Also in the trailer were a dozen other bundled-up nature lovers who had driven from across Iowa to this remote, windswept spot to witness a wonder of the animal kingdom: the spectacular courtship dance of the male greater prairie chicken.

As we peered out the windows facing the dancing ground called a lek, the chickens appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and began their show.

It was amazing.

The males are plain brown-and-white birds until they begin strutting to attract the females. Then they puff out their throat sacs into blazing balls of orange and fluff out their feathers — tufts on top of their heads, the fan of their tail and the finger-like projections of their wings.

With feathers and sacs in high display, they stamp their feet really, really fast and, heads down, run in a circle around a female. When a male breaches another male’s small bit of territory, they run straight up to each other, staring face to face until they either fly up against each other or run away in a circle.

And all the while they’re doing this they’re producing a sound like nothing I have ever heard before.

It’s called “booming,” but it sounded nothing like booming to me. It was more like “wooing” — a constant, up-and-down, ethereal melody that was something like the coo of a mourning dove. Punctuating the hum were cackles and, on this day, the rustle of a cold, wet wind.

The show lasted nearly two hours. Then, as imperceptibly as they came, the dozen or so birds vanished. The 12 of us watching closed up the windows and trudged back down a muddy, half-mile-long path to our van.

I felt privileged to have witnessed this spectacle. I also felt a sense of obligation.

In the late 1800s, more than 1 million greater prairie chickens roamed Iowa and Missouri.

With settlement came hunting, and tens of thousands of the birds were killed, either by being shot or trapped. They probably could have survived that high rate of mortality if habitat conditions had remained favorable to them. But during the late 1800s, Iowa continued to be settled, and the small stands of prairie grasses, pastures, weed fields and other “waste” land that provided nesting cover were planted with crops.

By the 1950s, the greater prairie chicken was gone from Iowa. A few remnant populations survived in Missouri.

Beginning in 1980, there have been several attempts to restore at least token populations in Iowa. Wild birds caught in states such as Kansas where relatively healthy populations still exist were brought to Iowa and released.

The first attempt did not succeed. The birds disappeared without reproducing. But a later attempt in the area where I saw them Sunday has been more successful.

Our blind was set up on the Dunn Ranch, a 3,320-acre preserve that is the last and largest expanse of unplowed deep soil prairie in Missouri, owned by The Nature Conservancy, an international conservation organization. There is an associated site on land managed by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in Ringgold County, about 15-20 miles to the north.

There are about 150 birds between the two sites. But their future is not assured, and that is where the sense of obligation comes in.

Because our landscape is so altered from the time of settlement, the only way prairie chickens will survive is if people manage the tallgrass prairies on which they depend. And that takes commitment and money — not only to manage the land with prescribed burns and the removal of invasive species but also to buy and conserve the land in the first place.

Prairie chickens are a little fussy. They need tallgrass prairie in which to nest, and they need elevated areas of short grass on which to do their dance.

In addition to limited habitat, several other factors work against them. The birds lay 10 to 14 eggs per nest, but there is about a 60 percent mortality rate, and they live only two to three years. Furthermore, the ring-necked pheasant, a species introduced from China, competes with the prairie chicken.

Private groups such as The Nature Conservancy, Pheasants Forever and Partners in Flight, and public agencies such as state departments of natural resources and conservation need our support.

We have prairie chickens today because people in those groups before us cared about protecting and conserving dwindling habitat and did something about it: took initiative, spoke up, gave money.

We can do no less.

Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.