Eisele: Prairie chickens put on a show worth watching
WISCONSIN RAPIDS -- The real Big Dance has nothing to do with basketball, but has everything to do with an annual spring ritual.
It is taking place right now, as it has for the past century, at dawn on Wisconsin's grasslands.
The performers are greater prairie chickens, one of four species of grouse native to the state, as they dance at dawn for their mating ritual. Males fly from nearby grasslands, where they roost overnight, onto open pasture and low grasses where they display their finest moves and attire in hopes of attracting a hen.
Those of us lucky observers have to get to the stage for the performance early so as not to scare off the performers. Our 20-minute walk in the dark to the blind starts shortly after 5 a.m. and is lit only by flashlights as we follow a two-wheel trail in short grassland to a plywood blind.
Although our hopes are for a bright sunrise so we'll see a peak performance, the day before was typical Wisconsin spring: winds up to 40 miles per hour and driving rain.
Would the dance troupe still appear this morning?
Indeed it did, as it has for decades, with the first evidence of performers on stage at 5:55 a.m. being the booming sound of the male dancers. We gently slid open the window coverings. In the predawn half-light we could barely see one, then two male prairie chickens establishing their territories in front of us.
The male prairie chicken, with his combination of plain brown, black and white colorations, puts on his finest dress outfit by raising his tail feathers and long neck feathers (called pinnae), showing brilliant orange "eyebrows," and then inflating bright orange air sacs along the side of its neck. The result is an eerie humming-like sound that demands attention.
Soon more birds are on the booming grounds and each bird establishes its own territory, called a lek. The males display in hopes that a hen will come sauntering through the area and choose to mate with them.
Hens are elusive and we saw only one on the outskirts of the booming ground, causing males in that vicinity to boom intensely -- to no avail. The hen continued on to inspect other potential suitors.
Males actively defend their territory, often crouching beak-to-beak with the occupant of the adjoining territory in mock battle posture. Often there is loud cackling, and sometimes the result is a flapping and brief flare-up in the air, but there never appears to be any damage to the combatants.
This morning was covered by gray sky, occasional mist and light fog obscuring distance vision. But, we heard Canada geese and mallard ducks fly over.
Sandhill cranes call with their unique and mystical bugling as they announce the morning.
A Northern harrier sails low over the booming grounds, causing all activity to come to a brief halt, and one of the boomers takes flight. The hawk causes no overt damage but the birds were obviously attuned to danger from the sky. They evidently were content that the peering eyes from inside the blind were harmless.
As observers, we are participating in a census of prairie chickens on Wisconsin's grasslands. We count the birds every 30 minutes, noting if any hens are on the breeding grounds, which helps to provide an index of the population.
It reminds me of the first time that I ever watched prairie chickens, in the spring of 1969. Participating as a graduate student in an ornithology class at the University of Wisconsin, I drove to Plainfield and stayed with noted Department of Natural Resources researchers Fred and Francis Hamerstrom.
Students stayed in the upper floor of their Civil War-era farmhouse and rose early to spend time observing the chickens and then returned to the Hamerstrom house for a formal "debriefing" by Fred. He quizzed us about what we saw and questioned any discrepancies in our numbers of birds on the booming ground.
The Hamerstroms earned an international reputation as renowned grouse researchers. They prescribed that scattered pieces of low grasslands throughout agricultural areas in central Wisconsin were necessary to keep the prairie chicken booming into the next century.
On our recent trip, we didn't have to go through a formal debriefing, as with the late Hamerstroms, but recorded our observations on a form. We recorded 15 drummers on the booming grounds and felt fortunate to enjoy sights and sounds that have been a part of Wisconsin grasslands for decades.
Will the spirit of Wisconsin's grasslands still be booming in 3008?
Tim Eisele (teisele@chorus.net) is a full-time freelance outdoor writer and photographer. He is a founding member and past president of the Wisconsin Outdoor Communicators Association and active member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.
Tim Eisele
A male prairie chicken booms in the early morning in Central Wisconsin.
