Date: February 27, 2017
Source: University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
An iconic bird whose booming
mating calls once reverberated across "the Prairie State" can survive
in Illinois with the help of periodic human interventions, researchers report.
The greater prairie chicken once
dominated the American Midwest, but today the bird is in trouble in many parts
of its historic range. It is no longer found in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky,
Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas or Wyoming, states where it once flourished.
And in Illinois, an estimated 186 birds remain in two adjoining counties in the
southern part of the state.
"They used to be all over
the state," said Illinois Natural History Survey conservation biologist
Mark Davis, who participated in a genetic analysis of the Illinois birds.
"This was the tallgrass prairie state. You couldn't throw a rock into a
field without hitting a prairie chicken."
The reason for the decline is
simple, Davis said.
"We changed our land-use
practices from having a lot of prairie, then to wheat, hay and alfalfa, and now
to vast expanses of corn and soybeans," he said. "Prairie chickens
used to have 20 million acres of prairie in Illinois. Now, they have around
2,000. At the same time, population size went from 10 to 14 million in the
1860s to the 100 to 200 or so we have today. There just isn't enough
habitat."
Environmental officials have made
two efforts to rescue Illinois' dwindling prairie chicken populations, which
are suffering from a lack of habitat and declining genetic diversity. Between
1992 and 1998, teams imported more than 200 prairie chickens from other states.
