Prairie chickens fewer but still dancing

Most mornings — if the wind isn’t flinging sand and hurling tumbleweeds — I am outside close to sunrise to take a few quiet sips of the sweetness of dawn on the High Plains.

That little cup of pure, soul-satisfying nature is even better this time of year because it is also the season when our shyest and most reclusive neighbors, the lesser prairie chickens, set aside their inhibitions and return to the leks — their historic breeding grounds — for a few weeks of loud and reckless courtship.

It’s a sound that is impossible to describe, but the Bible of birding, “The Sibley Guide to Birds,” tries. It says, “Males display a bubbling, hooting wamp wamp wodum wodum and a wild clucking in descending series; also a sharp pike note in presence of females.”

I’m fortunate to have heard this sound almost every spring of my life, but in clearly diminishing scope and volume, making those love notes a little more bittersweet each year.

Eastern New Mexico’s pioneers talked about the sky being blackened by countless thousands of these birds in the early 1900s. They were even a source of food in lean times for some of the early settlers.

My father started taking curious friends out in the pre-dawn dark to watch the springtime courting ritual sometime in the 1940s. He often talked about riding horseback from north of Milnesand all the way to Elida in the midst of “booming” leks the entire way.

In my youth, on a still morning I heard them consistently in all directions, north and south and east and west. This spring, they are in only one.

These birds — unseen and unknown even to most of the people in this immediate area — have some needs that don’t always line up with those of humans: Unfragmented prairie land devoid of vertical structures.

You see, they remember the Llano Estacado before humans arrived, when it was a vast, treeless expanse, a sea of grass covering the largest level plain of its kind in the United States.

They evolved here, those little prairie dancers, on an unbroken range that once covered the eastern fourth of New Mexico, all of West Texas, the western half of Oklahoma, sizable chunks of Oklahoma and Colorado.

Today, they remain in all five of those states, but in pockets that feel more pressure each day. The shinnery oak habitat they love in south Roosevelt County is some of the last, best space for them in our state.

I can’t help feeling like Dr. Seuss’ Lorax, the “shortish and oldish and brownish and mossy” creature who hops onto stumps to “speak for the trees” since the trees have no voices.

As we consider the needs of our energy hungry human species, I hope we can find it in our hearts to also factor in the needs of these feathery critters — the prairie chickens who are dancing for mates, dancing for their futures, dancing for their very existence.

Betty Williamson is clinging to the prairie. You may reach her at: [email protected]