Attwater's Prairie-Chickens Survive Hurricane Rita

Tim Barksdale

The Attwater's prairie-chicken is an endangered subspecies, and its last remaining lek, or display grounds, is on the coast of Texas. So conservationists were rightly worried when Hurricane Rita began heading for the prairie-chicken's last holdout.

Brandon Crawford, preserve manager of The Nature Conservancy's Texas City Prairie Preserve, was attending a grouse conference in Nebraska when he heard about Rita. He immediately left the conference to return to the preserve, home to 20 of the last 40 wild Attwater's prairie-chickens in the world. Unfortunately, he was unable to get that far before a mandatory evacuation of the area.

Meanwhile, biologists at the Attwater's Prairie-Chicken National Wildlife Refuge prepared for an evacuation of prairiechickens. Twenty prairie-chickens were already living in the wild there, with 17 birds from the captive breeding program in pens, awaiting release. The biologists took the captive birds to a safer site in College Station. "I thought I had a pretty rough trip ahead from Nebraska, but it was even worse for the chickens," Brandon said. Because of the high density of human evacuees on the roads, the 150- mile trip for the birds took about the same amount of time as his 1,100-mile trip from Nebraska.

When Brandon finally made it to the Texas City preserve, he was expecting the worst. He was equipped with onegallon Ziplock "body bags" in case he found prairie-chickens killed by the hurricane. "It was such a pretty evening on the preserve as the sun was setting in the west and in one spot where there aren't any smokestacks, doves were flying," he said. "I was really dreading having to walk for miles fighting mosquitoes to pick up chicken parts."

Then Brandon heard a signal from a radio transmitter indicating a prairiechicken was alive. One after another, he heard signals from other birds too. "I don't really want to say it too loud or it might jinx something," Brandon said. "But all 11 radioed birds were giving off live signals. I am still in shock since seven of those birds were released a little over a month ago and the death toll is highest in the first month after release."

Brandon said he feels confident that the wild birds without radio collars fared just as well. He speculates that they all just hunkered down and clung to the grass when the hurricane swept through.

The good news struck a special chord with staff in the Lab of Ornithology's multimedia Macaulay Library. Videographer Tim Barksdale and audio curator Greg Budney traveled to the Texas City preserve in 2002. They captured close-up footage and sound recordings of Attwater's prairie-chickens on the last and, thankfully, still-existing lek.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu