You can hear the show even if you don’t see it.
It starts under the still-dark sky, as the prairie chickens gather on fields called leks on early spring mornings. If It isn’t too windy, their thunderous voices can be heard from acres away.
To see the real spectacle — a turf war and mating ritual so dramatic, it once inspired native people of the Great Plains to choreograph it in dance — they say you just have to be there.
Laura McCaskill called being there as the sun rose on last April’s Kansas Lek Treks Prairie-Chicken Festival near Hays “transformative,” and not just because of the sensory experience.
“I think it dawned on me that we must save this habitat,” McCaskill, the Greater Ozarks Audubon Society vice president said.
That’s why McCaskill invited Audubon of Kansas Executive Director Jackie Augustine, organizer of the annual event, to the southwest Missouri society’s meeting Jan. 18 at the Springfield Conservation Nature Center.
Augustine, former associate professor of biology at The Ohio State University, has been studying prairie chickens since she was a Ph.D. candidate at Kansas State University in 2007. She started the festival three years ago, after she took the job as director of the Kansas society.
“It’s a really good fit for me because I got sick of watching prairie chicken leks disappear, and I wanted to do more to save the species and other grassland species throughout the state,” Augustine said.
When Augustine makes her presentation in Springfield, she’ll share photographs and videos of the birds, along with big-picture ideas about why protecting prairie chickens and preserving their increasingly scarce grassland habitats is important.
Augustine also said she hopes her presentation will be “part of that solution of showing what wonderful birds they are.”
Want to go?
What: Greater Ozarks Audubon Society meeting featuring Jackie Augustine, executive director of Audubon of Kansas
Where: Springfield Conservation Nature Center, 4601 S. Nature Center Way
When: Thursday, Jan 18, 5:30-8 p.m.
The dance of the prairie chicken
At first glance, except for bright combs of gold or orange feathers above their eyes, both greater and lesser prairie chickens look like rather ordinary brown and white fowl. What gives them charisma and puts them on bird-watchers’ bucket lists of birds to see before they die, Augustine said, is their unusual mating ritual.
Augustine first witnessed it as a college student in her home state of Wisconsin, one of a handful of Midwestern and Western states with small populations of prairie chickens.
Seeing it happen isn’t easy to do, since birders must get to the prairie chickens’ leks—the short-grass fields where they mate every year—well before dawn to watch them from blinds. In fact, the first time Augustine joined a trek to see the birds, the sky was so pitch-black that she stepped up to her knee into a hole filled with water, “so I saw the chickens with a wet leg,” she joked.
From blinds on mating fields near Hays in central Kansas, birders at the Lek Treks festival often hear the birds cackling and booming before they begin to see them.
“You look out, and you can barely make out dark shapes making their way across the prairie,” Augustine said. “And they’re so close to you — 40 to 100 feet.”
As the sky brightens, the rest of the show begins. Whether birders are watching lesser prairie chickens or greater ones — sometimes called boomers — the basic plot doesn’t change.
Neither do the characters. As the males gather to show off and fight for turf — and female partners — suddenly they’re no longer the same nondescript birds that blend into grasslands so well, a hiker could practically step on them, according to Augustine.
Distinct sounds of nature in action
Bending over, tails straight up, the males crouch into a U-shape as they spread their feathers. Neck feathers called pinnae pop up, too, as they drum their feet rapidly — “multiple times a second,” Augustine said.
Then, they stop, and—wait for it—the noise begins. Booming sounds come from the mouths of greater prairie chickens, Augustine said, while lessers make “pop-pop-pop” sounds.
Here’s how McCaskill described the sound: “It’s like a Tibetan chant.”
And no matter which species it comes from, the noise reaches beyond the territory of the leks.
“They both can be heard from up to a mile away on a calm morning,” Augustine said.
It’s not just the clamor of their calls that astounds onlookers, though; it’s what happens to the birds when they’re making them.
Brightly colored vocal sacs — orange for greaters, reddish-magenta for lessers — gust up like balloons from the sides of their throats.
“You wouldn’t even know it’s the same bird,” McCaskill said.
‘It was a lot like a frat party’
As the males face off at the boundaries of the lek, the females arrive, seemingly indifferent to the drama.
“She will walk through the center of the lek and peck at the grass and look like she’s not even looking at the males, whereas all the males will be looking at her like crazy,” Augustine said, adding that if a male walks into the center, other males will attack him.
McCaskill said her partner, John Cardoza, who accompanied her to the festival, joked that “it was a lot like a frat party.”
With reproduction of the species the main purpose of this prairie chicken gathering, though, females eventually choose mates—and, despite their initial coolness, Augustine has discovered by banding males in her research that females are most likely to choose partners who fought for them and put on the best displays.
“I always joke around that I studied what makes males sexy,” she said.
The female signals she’s ready to mate by crouching, ducking her head and spreading her wings. After she does that a few times, mating happens in seconds, Augustine said.
McCaskill said it happens so fast, she and Cardoza missed that part of the ritual as they watched from their blind.
Dominant males get put back into their places pretty quickly, too, though.
“Usually after the mating, the male gets beat up,” Augustine added. “But we can tell it’s a successful mating because the female will shake their wings vigorously.”
Then she’s off to other, taller grasses to lay her eggs and hatch her young, all on her own.
Hunter turns birder in search of adventure
Growing up in McPherson, Kansas, Greg Swick had seen prairie chickens before on hunting trips with his father. He had seen their mating ritual, too, before attending the festival two years with his son, Nathan Swick, who as an American Birding Association podcaster was a keynote speaker at the event.
Still, the retired Ozark science teacher and co-founder of GLADE (Green Leadership Academy for Diverse Ecosystems) had a “sense of wonder” while he was there.
“All the circumstances — the Kansas dark sky at 3:30 a.m., walking onto the short-grass prairie where you know the lek dances are going to occur — it’s the whole experience of adventure and excitement and appreciation of the universe.”
Chickens face a dwindling habitat
Because of its grasslands, Kansas is home to two-thirds of the 30,000 or so lesser prairie chickens left in the world, Augustine said. More tolerant of human disturbance, greater prairie chickens are also more common, numbering about 300,000 left worldwide, yet the undisturbed grasslands they and other species also need to survive have dwindled over the years.
Since 1970, one study found, the loss of such habitats and the birds that called them home has been great, Augustine said.
Over the past half-century, she said, “We’ve lost 53 percent of our grassland birds.”
State attorneys general lawsuits have stalled repeated efforts to protect grasslands habitats by listing the lesser prairie chicken as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. This happened most recently in 2021, after the species in Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and northern Texas was listed for a second time, Augustine said.
Mainly, property owners fear government regulations, she said, since the presence of a threatened species could mean that portions of land would have to be left undisturbed to protect habitats.
Federal protection doesn’t prohibit property owners from developing land for oil, wind or solar power facilities, “but it makes it a lot harder,” Augustine said.
“Prairie chickens are really sensitive to human disturbance,” she said. “They won’t nest within a half-mile of a road or a mile of a house, so they really need intact grassland for their existence.”
Prairie chickens stir controversy in Sunflower State
Lesser prairie chickens, slightly smaller than greaters, are even more sensitive, Augustine added, so much so that they won’t cross a high-power transmission line. After a lawsuit vacated the species’ first listing under the Endangered Species Act in 2015, she said, “I personally saw a prairie chicken lek of about 20 birds disappear during the development for an oil well in the area.”
Prairie chicken protection can be so controversial in Kansas, though, that after the lessers were listed for a second time two years ago, a few landowners refused to allow Audubon of Kansas onto their leks for the festival, even though the organization offers to pay landowners for access.
“There’s a lot of negative press about prairie chickens in Kansas,” Augustine said.
Yet collaborating with landowners is crucial to the prairie chickens’ survival, she said.
“Some 95 percent of lesser prairie chicken habitat is on private land,” Augustine said. “We don’t have any Yellowstones in Kansas.”
Working with landowners to show them how ecotourism like the Lek Treks festival could benefit them economically as it protects the birds is one of Augustine’s goals.
Last year, she said, 130 birders from 25 states attended the festival: McCaskill and Cardoza, for example, drove about six hours from Springfield to get there, she said, and met birders from as far away as California and New York.
Prairie chickens are “not just a bust,” Augustine said. “They can also be an economic boon. And they’re really cool birds, just for their own right.”
Grassland preservation is ecosystem preservation
Preserving grasslands habitats is not just about protecting prairie chickens, though, Augustine said.
Swick agreed.
“It’s about a whole suite of organisms that are naturally adapted to warm-season grasses and native grasslands that are now having a tremendous downturn in their numbers,” he said.
Augustine points to birds like Henslow’s sparrow. Swick points to animals like the black-footed ferret, which preys on prairie dogs, a nuisance to Western farmers because cattle step into the holes they dig.
It’s also about how prairie chickens are signs of a healthy ecosystem, Augustine said.
“We’re really talking about the health of our grasslands and our community,” she said. “Prairie chickens are just a sign of a healthy habitat, and if we don’t have healthy habitats, we’re not going to have healthy grasslands, healthy cattle to eat.
Lonesome Chucks lives up to his name
Here in Missouri, that information comes too late for Lonesome Chuck.
When Swick first started birding more than 30 years ago, greater prairie chickens in Missouri weren’t so lonesome: Then, Lonesome Chuck’s ancestors were among about 22 birds making their home just outside Lockwood, at the Wade and June Shelton Memorial Conservation Area.
As the years went by, there were fewer and fewer birds. Ten years ago, Swick said, he counted three at the Dade County lek. Finally, there was only one.
Banded by the Missouri Department of Conservation, that lone prairie chicken came to be known as Lonesome Chuck.
“You’d go out there and see him and not only would he dance but he’d fight with you,” Swick said, adding that photographers’ legs were fair game for Lonesome Chuck’s attacks, since there were no other male prairie chickens around.
Still, Swick felt sorry for him, watching the bird play his part regardless.
“It was poignant, I guess,” Swick said. “He was so endearing in his dance, trying to find a mate.”
Much to Swick’s surprise, one year he returned to the lek to discover that Lonesome Chuck had gotten lucky: He had found a female, and together they had produced a litter of five chicks.
Predators killed most of them, but Chuck’s son — Lonesome Chuck II — returned to the lek the following spring, Swick said.
Dade County chickens are all gone
Today, Lonesome Chuck and his progeny live on only as legends among birders. There are no prairie chickens left at the conservation area, said Swick, a past president of the Greater Ozarks Audubon Society.
As it is in Kansas, as large expanses of warm-season grasses disappear, so are many grassland species.
“You can just say all species that are living in grasslands in Missouri are in trouble,” Swick said.
More funding for the federal Conservation Reserve Program could help the cause of prairie creatures, Augustine said. Beginning In the late 1980s, that program paid farmers to take some row crops out of production to make way for native grasses.
It “really is responsible for increasing the lesser prairie chicken populations into the 2000s,” she said.
Their populations have leveled off since 2010, she said, and the pay rate for farmers voluntarily taking part in the program has decreased.
“If we could get more funding for CRP, it would do a world of good,” Augustine said, urging citizens concerned about grasslands habitats to express their views to U.S. senators as federal Farm Bill appropriations are made this year.
Augustine said she isn’t sure how many times people have to tell stories about losing their prairie chickens for change to happen. Meanwhile, though, she’ll continue to spread the word about them — and hope that treks to leks to watch the prairie chickens’ spring mating ritual will still be happening 20 years from now.
“I really hope that people appreciate their grassland birds,” she said. ‘I always said that I wanted to lead lesser prairie chicken tours when I retire, but I’m not so confident that’s going to happen now.”
