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Meet the Attwater's
Prairie-Chicken

Check a bird book and you’ll find the endangered Attwater’s prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus cupido attwateri) listed as a slightly smaller, darker form of the greater prairie-chicken that lives farther north in tallgrass prairies.
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Attwater's prairie-chickens, photo by Mike Morrow.

Both are subspecies of the extinct heath hen. Typically, about half the adults die each year from predation or other natural causes. The average life span ranges from two to a maximum of eight years in the wild.

Courtship Rituals

If you visited a lek, it is hard to imagine why the inconspicuous, grass flat attracts a frenzy of activity each year. A lek, or booming ground, is an area typically used year after year for courtship activity. They may be naturally occurring short grass flats or artifically maintained areas such as roads, airport runways, oil well pads, and drainage ditches.

For males, a lek is their stage. Here, they perform each morning and evening from February through mid-May. Holding their tails erect and wings drooped, they inflate their air sacs, then drop their heads to deflate the sacs with a low sounding "whur-ru-rrr" while stomping their feet extremely fast. Jumps and charges at other males are interspersed throughout this booming activity. It’s energetic work to attract a mate.

Nesting

Once the female chooses and breeds with a male, she leaves the lek to nest in a shallow depression on the open prairie, usually within a mile of the booming ground. If her nest is destroyed early in the season, the hen returns to mate again.

The hen lays a dozen eggs and if she’s lucky, they’ll hatch about 26 days later. Only some 30 percent of all nests escape predators that include opossums, skunks, raccoons, coyotes, snakes, and domestic dogs and cats. Less than half the chicks make it to adulthood. Heavy rains and early chick-rearing seasons can mean even lower nesting success.

Chicks stay with the hen for at least six weeks, dining mostly on nutritious insects. As the chicks grow older, they join the adults in pecking the leaves, flowers, and seeds of prairie plants in addition to insects.

Attwater's Prairie-Chicken
A Story of Loss and Hope