There are just 140 Attwater's prairie chickens left in Texas. State and federal agencies, landowners and conservationists are working to save them.
Feuerbacher, working land program director for The Nature Conservancy in Texas, is standing in a field about 20 miles outside the South Texas town of Goliad, watching as little brown-and-white chickens with big orange air sacs strut around, stomping their talons into the dirt and looking for a partner. From early to mid morning, the male birds will inflate their air sacs and create a “wooing” booming sound that can travel 2 to 3 miles across the coastal prairie land.
At the start of the 1900s, about 1 million Attwater's prairie chickens roamed roughly 6 million acres of Texas coastal prairies. Today, because of the shrinking of its natural habitat, invasive species and brush predators, there are just 140 of the birds left in Texas, living on about 1 percent of the original prairie.
The species was named after naturalist Henry Philemon Attwater, who advocated for the conservation of the species until he died in the 1930s. While in Texas, Attwater briefly lived in San Antonio, where he studied the nesting habits of 50 species of birds in Bexar County and collected data on the deaths of thousands of warblers during a cold snap in 1892. He eventually sold his natural history collection to the Witte Museum.
As a result of over-hunting and habitat destruction, the prairie chicken declined from 1 million birds at the turn of the century to about 8,000 in 1937. By the time the Federal Register declared the bird endangered in 1967, the species had fallen to just over 1,000 birds. Landowners learned to remove invasive species that threaten the grouse, such as imported red fire ants, and to use prescribed burns to remove brush and trees from their property. Since then, the project has expanded to about 500,000 to 600,000 acres of private land owned by as many as 30 landowners.
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