Greater prairie chicken mating ritual is booming success
On April 21, just before dawn, on the rolling prairie of Switzer Ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills, we sat on folding chairs inside an old school-bus-turned bird photography blind.
It was a bracing 38 degrees as ranch bird guide John Murphy, Kathy Adams Clark and I led a group of people to photograph an ancient spring prairie dance.
Twilight revealed green grasses dripping dewdrops. Western meadowlarks sang melodious flutelike songs, punctuated with gurgling sounds.
But our eyes focused on a grassy knoll called a lek, where male greater prairie chickens would gather to perform an elaborate and boisterous courtship dance. Meanwhile, a grasshopper sparrow sang a highpitched “chitchit-tweeeezzzz buzzy” song, as if to hush us for the coming show.
Finally, a group of brownish birds, moving like balls of grass, made their way through the dimly lit prairie. Male prairie chickens! They strutted onto the lek where higher ground with short grass made them conspicuous to females watching from the surrounding tall grass. A spectacular ritual ensued in which the males strove to lure females for mating.
Before Anglo settlements, well more than a million greater prairie chickens held spring mating rituals at countless leks across a sea of grass on the Midwestern Great Plains, where bison herds also spread from horizon to horizon. Current estimated populations of
the chickens vary between 250,000 to 690,000, and the Switzer Ranch manages an expansive prairie where the birds can still thrive.
The subspecies Attwater’s prairie chickens that once numbered a million along vast Texas Gulf Coast prairies have dwindled to just 138 on two limited prairie preserves.
We saw 24 male greater prairie chickens mere yards away. They lowered their heads and uttered low-pitched drones — something like “wooWHOOO-dooo-oooh” — which were amplified by the ballooning orange sacs at the sides of their throats, which act as bellows. The droning sounds, called booming, bound a mile across the prairie.
The birds boomed and stamped their feet with the resonance of tango dancers. When a hen wandered onto the lek, the males began furiously charging at each other while erecting long ear feathers, called pinnae, in the shape of horns.
They leapt into the air, wings flapping fiercely, and voices uttering cackles, whoops and whines. One male bowed in front of a hen. She turned and allowed him to pounce on her back, grab her neck feathers and mate with her, all in the blink of an eye.
Only prairie chickens know why a hen selects one male over another. But she will wander among the leks to mate with multiple males during this flashy spring morning prairie dance.
Greater prairie chickens
Birds survive in isolated populations on piecemeal Midwestern prairies. Largest populations in Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota.
Require expansive prairies, like Nebraska’s Switzer Ranch, with sparse trees, short and tall grasses, hillocks for booming and dense grasses to conceal ground nests and protect chicks.
Nonmigratory, with males using same booming grounds and females using same nesting grounds annually.
Primary diet of seeds, leaves, buds, fruits, insects.
Other birds on Switzer Ranch include sharp-tailed grouse, wild turkey, blackcapped chickadee, yellow-headed blackbird. Ranch info at calamusoutfitters.com. For info on our 2018 tours to the ranch, go to kathyadamsclark.com.