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Greater Prairie-Chicken | Tympanuchus cupido
Groot prairiehoen | Gallo de las Praderas Grande
Greater Prairie-Chicken is the heaviest of the three prairie grouse and the emblem of the American tallgrass prairie, more than ninety per cent of which has vanished under the plough in little more than a century. In display the male inflates two bright yellow neck patches into orange air sacs and stamps his feet hard enough to seem to shake the ground. Of the millions that once existed, only a fraction survives in scattered prairie remnants from Texas to the Dakotas.
Voice
The signature sound is 'booming': a deep, resonant three-note oo-loo-woo, produced as air is forced through the syrinx and the inflated orange neck sacs, carrying several kilometres. Between booms come shrill cackling and whining notes, especially when two males challenge each other on the display ground. Females give a soft kuk and, when gathering chicks, a low brrb; in alarm comes a sharp kwerr. Booming can be heard before sunrise and swells as more males arrive on the display ground.
Recording: Sue Riffe — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Bledsoe Ranch (PRIVATE), Wray, Yuma County, Colorado, United States · xeno-canto
Identification
A heavy, chunky grouse with a small head, a full chest and a relatively short, rounded tail. The plumage is coarsely barred brown and white over almost the entire body. The male has long, erectile neck feathers ('pinnae') that stand up like ear tufts in display, and beneath the chin two bare, bright orange patches of skin that are inflated as air sacs; above the eye he shows a yellow eyebrow comb. The female lacks the pinnae and orange skin and is more finely marked; juveniles closely resemble the female. In flight the species is laboured, with short bursts of rapid wingbeats between glides.
Confusion species
Lesser Prairie-Chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) is a smaller, paler species of the driest, southernmost prairies, with reddish-purple rather than orange neck sacs; the two ranges lie hundreds of kilometres apart and do not overlap. Sharp-tailed Grouse (Tympanuchus phasianellus) is slimmer, with a pointed rather than rounded tail and purple rather than orange neck sacs; in the northern Great Plains Greater Prairie-Chicken occasionally hybridizes with this species. Escaped or released pheasants are sometimes mistaken for prairie-chickens at a distance, but have a far longer tail and lack the neck feathers.
Habitat
Tallgrass and mixed-grass prairie, originally continuous for hundreds of kilometres, now often reduced to fragments among cropland. Dense, tall grass cover is essential for nesting and escaping predators, while shorter grazed or mown grassland serves as display ground and foraging habitat. Adjoining cropland with grain, soybeans or sorghum is used as a supplementary food source in winter. It avoids both closed forest and unbroken cropland without any remaining grassland.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
Resident in heavily fragmented populations across the Great Plains, from the Sandhills of Nebraska and the Flint Hills of Kansas through parts of Oklahoma, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin, to an isolated subspecies, Attwater's Prairie-Chicken, on the coastal prairie of Texas. It does not migrate, and rarely moves more than a few tens of kilometres from its display ground. The range was once nearly continuous from Texas to southern Ontario and southern Canada; since prairie was converted to cropland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the species has vanished from Canada and most of the eastern part of its range. Only in the Sandhills of Nebraska, where the soil is too sandy for the plough, has a large continuous stretch of habitat survived.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Look before sunrise in March or April for a display ground in the Sandhills of Nebraska or the Flint Hills of Kansas, where several organizations offer purpose-built viewing blinds; booming begins in the dark and the birds usually stay visible well after sunrise. Stay in the blind until the birds leave of their own accord — standing up too early flushes the whole group at once.
Conservation
The species is listed as Near Threatened (NT) on the Red List: in fifty years the population has fallen by more than half, to a few hundred thousand birds worldwide. Loss and fragmentation of prairie to cropland, competition with released pheasants, and wind turbines built on remaining prairie are seen as the main causes. The subspecies of the Texas coastal prairie, with less than one per cent of its original habitat and a population that depends largely on captive-bred, released birds, is one of the most endangered birds in North America.
Scientific name
Tympanuchus cupido | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as a member of the genus of the capercaillies, under the name Tetrao Cupido; author and year stand in parentheses because the species has since been moved to Tympanuchus. cupido is Latin for 'desire', after the Roman god of love, Cupid — the long, erectile neck feathers the male spreads in display reminded early describers of a pair of small wings. The type locality is Virginia, recorded from the description of the eighteenth-century English naturalist Mark Catesby.