Festival pays tribute to plucky Attwater’s prairie chickens
The Booming-NBlooming Festival at the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge near Sealy reminds me of an April morning in 1983.
I sat quietly on the dew-laden ground behind a wooden blind on the Attwater refuge a full two hours before dawn. The blind faced a lek, which was a meadow hillock surrounded by tall grass where male Attwater’s prairie chickens would enact a spectacular mating dance as females observed from grassy edges dotted with blooming wildflowers.
At daybreak, the males strutted onto the lek and began stomping their feet,
raising their tail feathers like flags, arching their heads downward and erecting blackish-orange neck feathers like little horns.
Bright golden air sacs on the sides of their necks billowed out as the birds uttered a low-pitched drone like the beating of kettledrums. A resonate “WOOO-LOOOO” sound boomed across the prairie.
Males then began charging each other like miniature bulls while stomping and jumping in the air as though ready to lock their feathered horns in a duel to the death. It was all a bluff. They were posturing, trying to persuade hens of their male prowess.
Persnickety hens would choose only two or three dominant males for mates.
Plains Indians modeled their own ritual dances on the booming display of male prairie chickens, a dance that will be re-enacted at the Booming-N-Blooming Festival April 8-9 by tribal members of the Blackfoot Confederacy.
More than a million Attwater’s prairie chickens roamed through roughly 6 million acres of coastal prairie from the Vermillion River in Louisiana to the Nueces River in South Texas during the early 19th century. Only 1,070 birds roamed on a remaining 5 percent of native coastal prairie in 1967. They were then designated an endangered species.
Populations had revived to 1,600 birds with about 320 on the refuge in 1983. But by 1998, their numbers had dropped to fewer than 60 birds on merely 1 percent of native coastal prairie.
Herculean efforts spearheaded at the Attwater refuge began restoring populations to a sustainable level through captive breeding and release programs along with intensive prairie management on both refuge and private land.
Last spring, 138 prairie chickens were gallantly making a comeback, with 12 at a restricted location near Goliad and 126 at the Attwater refuge.
Learn more how people are working to keep the birds off the precipice of extinction — and watch the dramatic dance of prairie chickens — at the festival.