Projects and Research

Tracking Prairie-Chickens  

an Intern wearing headphones holds a tracking wheel as she drives and listens for radio signals.
Image Details
Biology intern, Eva Sload, listens for radio signals from the tracking truck as she turns the antenna wheel.

Bringing back an endangered species requires continual research and constant data collection. A big part of this is population monitoring, and for the Attwater’s Prairie-Chicken, we monitor this through radio telemetry. Our biologists try to radio-collar every hen received from a captive-breeding facility so that our biology interns can track the birds throughout the year. This helps the biologists monitor the prairie-chicken’s movements, find nests in the spring, and know when a prairie-chicken has died. It is especially important to radio-collar hens so that, when she successfully rears a brood, our biologists can find and radio-collar her wild-born chicks when they are old enough.

Check out how our biologists protect Attwater’s Prairie-Chicken nests from predators in this quick video by Claire Hassler (USFWS). Click here for an audio-described version of this video.