Study looks for clues to lesser prairie chicken survival

The size and color of Easter peeps with a few chocolate smudges for camo, the eight fuzzball chicks spent their first post-egg night clustered beneath a hen for warmth and security. Their hours-old life of simplicity turned to chaos last Sunday's dawn when the hen flushed and gave an alarm call that scattered the brood like a rack of well-smacked pool balls. Rather than the jaws of a coyote, it was the quick hands of Reid Plumb and two helpers that snatched up the chicks. Minutes later two of the little lesser prairie chickens carried tracking transmitters one-fourth the size and weight of a dime as they ran to the comforting calls of the hen. In about 10 days the birds could be capable of short flight, and within a few weeks flying to the far horizons of Kansas' best lesser prairie chicken country. And for years the birds could be part of study spread across five states because horizons are shrinking for lessers in other lands. There are probably more lessers on some Kansas ranches than in Colorado. Gove County, alone, may have more birds than Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma combined. Not many years ago, the latter two states compared well with Kansas. "We have to see why things are going so good here," Plumb said of his ongoing research in Gove and Logan Counties. "We need those answers so we can compare them to places with decreasing populations." Lessers have never had a wide range, a vertical oval containing minor parts of Kansas, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Yet they sometimes lived in amazing densities. Early 1900s accounts report flocks of hundreds or thousands feeding on cropfields. Resilient, the birds survived the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and another hideous drought in 1950s. From there came about three decades of posterity...more