He was the first prairie chicken I’d ever seen, and I called him “Lonesome.”
He had been the first to glide into the booming grounds on Taberville Prairie, 13 miles north of El Dorado Springs, Mo., that chill April morning. He’d been followed almost immediately by a dozen or more of his own, but he was some sort of outcast. They no sooner hit the ground than they drove Lonesome from their midst and to within 30 feet of the blind where Don Wooldridge and I waited.
But Lonesome was undaunted. He jumped up and down, cackled defiantly at his departing enemies, lowered his neck, thrust up his tail and neck feathers, beat a tattoo on the ground with his feet. Suddenly I saw the orange air cao on his throat bulge, and then came that strange, hollow sound unique to the prairie chicken.
“Gung-goo.” Lonesome seemed to be saying. And his erstwhile fellows responded in kind. The prairie vibrated with “booming” of the birds. And I knew I was witnessing one of the most remarkable rituals of nature – the mating ritual of the prairie chicken.
Time was when the Prairie Chicken abounded in the United States from Pennsylvania to Kansas, from Wisconsin to Texas. Time was when three men killed 410 birds in three hours on 80 acres of land east of Lamar, Mo., when the birds landed in trees in numbers so great the branches broke.
But the changing society of man changed the society of this child of nature. The day of my hunt, Kansas, with its 5 million acres of Flint Hills, could have only a token hunting season. Oklahoma was somewhat better off for prairie chickens, but again, only a token season was allowed.
In Missouri, the Department of Conservation had been hard pressed to keep the chicken from becoming extinct; there were only an estimated 7,000 birds in the whole state at that time.
Thus, one of the department’s primary biological projects became the study of the prairie chicken. It was essential to know all there was to know about them, so that management for now and the future can ensure that this primitive and interesting fowl can be a part of the outdoor scene for all time.
As Wooldridge remarked before Lonesome came onto the scene, “One of these days it’s going to be important that we have maintained wildlife such as the prairie chicken. We must save them for our kids and grandkids to see.”
It was for this reason, as well as for biological reasons, that the department bought the 1,680 acres of rolling native prairie north of Taberville, in St. Clair County, Missouri. It became a part of the nearby Schell-Osage Wildlife Management area, and was dedicated to the preservation of the prairie chicken. Here the public can, free of charge, observe one portion of the interesting life of the prairie chicken.
I’d met Wooldridge, then a staff photographer for the Department of Conservation, in Taberville shortly before midnight. We drove to Taberville Prairie, where he pitched a tent and threw down sleeping bags.
“The birds come onto the booming grounds shortly after day-break,” he explained. “We could have viewed them during the late afternoon, but they are not quite as active then as during the early morning. We’ll have to get up about 4 and go the blind so we won’t disturb them as they come in…”
It wasn’t easy to sleep that night; but I remember it fondly still. The outdoors, so much a part of the heritage of the people of the United States, were then, and still are rapidly becoming alien to most as, more and more, it is pushed into an urban existence.
The wind snapping the tent ropes, whistling through the tall, dry bluestem, is a sound strange to a man accustomed to being walled in at night. Not that it wasn’t pleasant – quite the opposite – but unaccustomed, and stimulating to the senses. Only the distant mercury vapor lights of farmsteads indicated that it was the 20th Century, rather than the 19th. Otherwise, time could have moved back 100 years.
When the alarm clock pulled us reluctantly awake, we put on warm jackets to ward off the sharp wind, and headed for the blinds a quarter mile distant. While awaiting the arrival of the first birds, we fortified ourselves with coffee and rolls, and Wooldridge supplied background on prairie chickens.
Next issue I’ll tell you what became of ol’ Lonesome… and give you a little more information on the magnificent prairie chickens.
