Greater prairie chickens cannot persist in Illinois without help, researchers report

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.

Continued

Outdoors: Not good news for upland birds

Two hot, dry summers in a row don’t do much good for wildlife of any species. Upland birds like pheasants, quail and prairie chickens are at the whim of Mother Nature and two years of dismal conditions don’t make for promising prospects.

The peak of wheat harvest, even delayed a week or two, can play an important factor in overall pheasant numbers. The earliest wheat harvest on record may have thrown pheasants strike three in some parts of their historical range destroying nests and young broods.

Another dagger for pheasants as a result of drought may have come in the form of emergency haying and grazing of Conservation Reserve Program acreage. All counties were opened to this practice and 50 percent of a field’s acreage could be hayed or all or a portion of it could be grazed at various rates.

This practice is detrimental in the short term, but many of these older stands of CRP can actually benefit from disturbance and provide better habitat conditions in the future, provided there are cooperative weather patterns.

Continued: http://cjonline.com/sports/2012-09-22/outdoors-not-good-news-upland-birds