Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/68594
oak savannah on the island's Great Plain was set aside as a reservation for the bird. There the heath hen held its own and for a time even prospered. By 1916 the population was estimated at a robust 2,000. But on May 12, 1916, a wildfire swept the Great Plain at the very peak of the nesting season, killing virtually all the adult females and sending the population into a free-fall from which it never recovered. After 1928, only a single heath hen remained. A cock, he'd appear every spring on the James Green farm near West Tisbury, faithfully performing his ritual courtship display for the ladies that never came. The poignancy of that is almost unbearable. On March 11, 1932, the last heath hen on earth was seen for the final time. The Vineyard Gazette eulogized, "There is a void in the April dawn, there is an expectancy unanswered, there is a tryst not kept." The southern subspecies, Attwater's prairie chicken (T. cupido attwateri), once occupied six to seven million acres of grasslands along the Gulf Coast, from southwestern Louisiana to the Nueces River in Texas. It, too, was hunted relentlessly – there are accounts of bags so enormous that most of the birds were left to rot – but the real culprit was the transformation of its habitat into rice fields, cattle pastures and cities. Extirpated from Louisiana in the 1930s, the remnant population in Texas slowly and inexorably declined until, in 1976, it was designated a Federal Endangered Species. Today, only about 100 Attwater's prairie chickens exist in the wild, most of them at the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge near Eagle Lake. An intensive captive breeding program involving Texas A&M, the Houston Zoo, the Nature Conservancy and several other partners has been implemented in a last-ditch effort to bring the birds back, but despite this heroic effort its survival seems far from assured. Now considered a separate species rather than a subspecies, the lesser prairie chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) is slightly smaller and paler in overall coloration than the greater. The cocks are also distinguished by their dusty rose neck sacs, which are T burnt orange in the T. cupido tribe. The lesser's range extends from southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado through the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma to eastern New Mexico, where it inhabits short- and mixed-grass prairies sprinkled with sand-sage and shinnery oak. Only Kansas supports enough birds to allow hunting, but with its future as a huntable species decidedly murky, a number of sportsmen have moved "Bagging a lesser prairie chicken" to the top of their Bucket Lists. Conversion of grassland to cropland, overgrazing (limited grazing actually benefits the bird) and oil, gas and wind energy development are among the conspirators depressing the species' population. Curiously, one of the most significant causes of mortality in lesser prairie chickens is collisions with fences. With recent research showing that bobwhite quail in the same general part of the world are infested with parasitic eyeworms that almost certainly impair their vision . . . Well, it makes you wonder. he most widespread and abundant chicken of them all was, and still is, the greater prairie chicken, T. cupido pinnatus. The grouse of the tallgrass prairies, its range historically extended from Ohio to Oklahoma and from Minnesota to Arkansas, although it expanded its range significantly (if temporarily) north and west, as far as the eastern Great Plains and the Prairie Provinces of Canada, in response to logging and, in particular, to pioneer agriculture. Indeed, as abundant as the birds were on the unbroken prairies – circa 1810, a young John James Audubon reported them so numerous in Kentucky that "they were held in no higher estimation as food than the most common flesh" – by all accounts their numbers exploded when their habitat first came under cultivation in the mid- to late-19th century. With a smorgasbord of high-quality food in the form of corn, buckwheat and other grains, and still plenty of grass for nesting, the greater prairie chicken had it good – and market hunters cashed in spectacularly. A skilled marksman with a well-trained S POR T IN G CL A SSI C S 110