There’s a little town called Rothsay in western Minnesota where I often stop on my cross-country travels. It’s on Interstate 94, not far from the North Dakota line. A truck stop just off the freeway serves up a mean country breakfast, but best of all, a giant statue of a prairie chicken sits right across the road from the diner. The statue is thirteen feet high, eighteen feet long, and weighs 9,000 pounds!
I visited Rothsay for the first time in the 1970s. I was working full time, but had enrolled in a night class in ornithology at the University of Minnesota. The class culminated in a spring field trip to Rothsay to watch prairie chickens on their booming grounds. “Booming” is the name given to the hollow, plaintive sound made by male prairie chickens during their spring courtship dance. We peered through a spotting scope as the males scooted around, wings spread and heads low, their inflated orange neck sacs visible in the morning sun.
Today only a few remnants of native prairie remain in western Minnesota to host the dance of the prairie chickens, but their booms and cackles still reverberate through the dawn near Rothsay. In fact, a blind five miles west of town can be reserved by contacting the Department of Natural Resources in Fergus Falls.
Farther east, in central Wisconsin, the Buena Vista Grasslands serves as a model of prairie chicken restoration, thanks in large part to wildlife biologists Frederic and Frances Hamerstrom. A Boston debutante, Frances gave up a life of privilege to become the only woman to earn a graduate degree under Aldo Leopold at the University of Wisconsin, and Frederic became the only person to earn a doctorate under Leopold. Frederic, who died in 1990, and Frances, who died in 1998, were inducted into the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame in 1996 for their work in saving the prairie chicken from extirpation in Wisconsin.
The Buena Vista Grasslands, managed by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, is a good place to observe the annual prairie chicken mating ritual. April is the best time, and reservations for observation blinds can be made through the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.
Hunting prairie chickens had long been a dream of mine, but I’d never made the trip from my home in western Montana to South Dakota or Nebraska where the closest huntable populations reside. Then one day, at a meeting of conservation specialists in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Lady Luck smiled. On a tour of a wildlife refuge I sat down next to Jon Farrar, a longtime senior editor of Nebraskaland magazine. It didn’t take us long to find out we were kindred souls. We swapped a few hunting stories and made plans to get together for a bird hunt someday.
“Someday” came a little over a year later in mid-September, when I pulled up next to Jon’s pickup at a cafe in Valentine, Nebraska, on the northern edge of the Sandhills. I didn’t know it at the time, but Jon is an expert on the flora, fauna, and natural history of this unique part of north-central Nebraska. A copy of his out-of-print book, Field Guide to Wildflowers of Nebraska and the Great Plains, if you are lucky enough to find one, will set you back a pretty penny. He’s also an avid waterfowler and author of a book on the history of an old-time Sandhills duck hunting club.
Hunting south of town for a few days on the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge, we found a few sharptails but no prairie chickens. Sharp-tailed grouse and prairie chickens (technically pinnated grouse) are distinct species, although both are sometimes referred to as “chickens.” Sharptails are whiter underneath than prairie chickens, and as their name suggests, they have a tail that tapers to a point. Prairie chickens have a rounded tail and dark-brown barring on their sides and belly. Old-timers often called them squaretails.
On the third day we moved farther east to a private ranch near Bassett, where we parked Jon’s pickup camper in a cut hayfield. We were up early the next morning, sipping hot coffee to ward off the chill and basking in the glow of a fiery sunrise. After a quick bowl of cereal we loaded our hunting vests with plenty of shells, water, and snacks, and headed toward a chain of low hills with my two-year-old Brittany, Chief, and Jon’s eleven-year-old German shorthair, Beaver. Where the hills dropped off into a large meadow, a good-sized flock of prairie chickens flushed, too far for a shot. A half-hour later, in knee-high grass not far from a line of cottonwoods, Beaver pointed. As Jon moved in, two prairie chickens flushed; he missed the first and downed the second. A minute later more birds rose from the grass and Jon quickly had his three-bird limit.
When we reached the north end of the meadow where the grass was heaviest, Beaver and Chief both stretched out on point. When I walked in, a bird flushed low and quartering left. I swung through, pulled the trigger with a hope and a prayer, and Chief soon retrieved his—and my—first prairie chicken. Since Jon had his birds, he decided to head back to the truck. I circled around toward the hills we had hunted earlier in the morning. Along the way, I saw a small bunch of sharptails fly across a ridge a few hundred yards away and put in near a windmill.
As I worked toward them into the wind, Chief tiptoed to a point. He crept ahead another twenty yards and pointed again. While I scrambled to catch up, the sharptails flushed, a little too far out for comfort but still in gun range. The bird I picked out of the flock dropped a leg when I shot, lost altitude, and landed seventy yards away. Chief marked the fall and soon came bounding back with the bird in his mouth.
We continued into the hills and hadn’t gone far when Chief whipped into a stylish point, neck outstretched and right foot raised, at the edge of a grassy bowl; this time a pair of prairie chickens took flight, buttonhooking downwind toward the distant cottonwoods. I picked the closer of the two, its barred feathers clearly visible in the brilliant sunlight, and filled my limit for the day.
On the walk back to the truck I thought about the long-ago days when clouds of prairie chickens filled the sky and market hunters, working from horse-drawn wagons, shot them by the thousands for shipment to eastern markets. A circular posted in Kansas in 1888 made this offer: “Get your gun and go hunting. We pay spot cash for all you can ship us, f.o.b., your station, packed with plenty of ice … Fourteen years in business enables us to pay more than any other dealer in Kansas City.”
Not all of those seeking prairie chickens in the old days did it for the money. Men like Teddy Roosevelt visited the grasslands at the end of the nineteenth century to pursue them for the sport they provided. While doing research for their book, The Market Hunter, Jim and David Kimball interviewed an old-timer named Orin Sabin, who left his Iowa home in 1899 at age fourteen to work on a farm in eastern South Dakota. It’s corn-and-pheasant country now, but when Sabin first saw it, tallgrass prairie stretched to the horizon.
Orin was eighty-one when he told the Kimballs this story:
Teddy Roosevelt came up … in 1899 to hunt. With him he had a taxidermist who later accompanied him to Africa, a secret service man named Cole and a doctor… . Three boys and I rode down to the station to see them … I had hauled my red bird dog up on the saddle and held him in front of me, and in one boot I had shoved my 10-gauge double-barreled shotgun with one hammer broke off. The men came around and asked if I knew the country around there. I told them I knew it for miles around because all I did was ride the prairie herdin’ cattle and huntin’. Well, Roosevelt wanted to hire me to drive the livery wagon while they hunted prairie chickens. He said he would give me a dollar a day. That sounded pretty good because I was making nine dollars a month. I rode two miles back to the ranch and asked the boss. It was OK with him, so I hunted with them, and the second day Roosevelt told me to bring my dog and gun along. I hunted prairie chickens with them for the next six days. When he paid me off he gave me a twenty-dollar bill, and I started to the bank to get it changed. But he called me back and said, “Just keep it. That’s yours.” … When the engine hooked on the train to pull the cars out, he called me to the door and handed me a double-barreled shotgun. I looked at it and said, “Both hammers are lost.” But he explained that it was a Baker Hammerless. Boy! And those were in the black powder days!
It’s hard to imagine the numbers of sharp-tailed grouse and prairie chickens that graced our grasslands just over a century ago. As the prairies began to fill with settlers, the birds at first flourished thanks to new food sources like wheat and corn. For a time, when cropland struck a perfect balance with native prairie, a market hunter might kill up to a hundred prairie chickens a day. But the heyday was short-lived, as the grasslands these birds need for courtship and nesting began to shrink.
Prairie chickens melted away in many states where they were once abundant. Some states, like Iowa, successfully reintroduced them, while others tried and failed. Remnant flocks still exist in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Illinois, and Missouri, thanks to the efforts of conservationists. The best huntable populations are found today in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas.
According to the North American Grouse Partnership, only about 10 percent of North America’s native grasslands remain. Conservation groups like Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever are working with the Partnership to restore prairie grouse habitat, but it’s an uphill battle. John Madson, in his book Where the Sky Began, called the prairie chicken’s springtime booming a lonely, wild sound made by a lonely, wild bird. “When it is gone,” he wrote, “it shall be gone forever. All our television will not bring it back to us, and none of our spacecraft can take us to where it vanished.”
Let’s hope that day never comes.