Lesser Prairie-Chicken On the Chop Block

The future looks shaky for the lesser prairie-chicken, whose federal protections under the Endangered Species Act are under siege. Last week the House Committee on Natural Resources voted to use the Congressional Review Act to reverse the lesser prairie-chicken's listing under the ESA — the first step toward stripping the species of federal protection. 

Meanwhile the attorneys general of three states – Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas – are suing the Biden Administration in order to remove the bird’s ESA status, which took effect only in January. Kansas AG Kris Kobach penned a truculent opinion piece in Fox News this week titled “This prairie chicken is Biden's latest weapon in his war on fossil fuels.”

But if Biden is waging war on oil, he has a strange way of showing it. His administration has been positively incontinent in issuing drilling permits, having granted 6,430 of them for oil and gas on public lands in its first two years, easily outpacing Trump’s rate.

The lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) is in the grouse family, a native of the Great Plains states and designated “vulnerable” by the IUCN, having lost about 97 percent of its population since the 1960s. Its range is a patchwork of dwindling habitats in the West, inexorably squeezed out by development – including oil and gas drilling.

The colorful bird’s defining characteristic is its impressive courtship behavior. Adult males claim a territory called a lek, usually an elevated spot relatively clear of vegetation, where it struts about with dramatic wing movements as it inflates the colorful skin pouches on the side of the neck and stamps its feet. The females apparently enjoy this sort of thing.

Conservation groups like the National Audubon Society are appalled by the plan to strip the prairie-chicken of its protections. “This proposal is motivated by politics and has no place in how we manage our nation’s wildlife,” says chief conservation officer Marshall Johnson. “Congress should not let politics interfere where science is clear. This bird will vanish from our grasslands without these necessary protections.”

Photo credit: Brittany Meagher/Audubon Photography Awards