On a frosty predawn in the middle of March, Rebekah Foote drives along a dirt road to the apex of a softly rolling hill within Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas. Bouncing headlights settle as Foote puts the truck in park, rolls down the window, and quiets the engine. Then, in the dark silence of an ocean of grass flooded on every horizon by the Milky Way sky, she waits and listens for a sound that has been synonymous with spring in the prairie for thousands of years. At first, only the murmuring wind breaks the morning quiet, but then it comes. A love song, the haunting boom—part whisper, part wail—of a greater prairie-chicken pining for his mate.

“It’s the most magical sound,” says Foote, a graduate student at Texas A&M, who has spent the last year researching the species within the national park unit. It’s the sound of wind blowing over an empty glass bottle. A breathy, baritone flute harmonizing with the tenor wind, the booming of the greater prairie-chicken can carry a mile, beckoning all females to come hither.

At one time, this song could be heard throughout the tallgrass prairie of North America, emanating from millions of beaks across the continent’s middle ground, from Texas to central Canada. Today, the greater prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) exists only in small pockets on a fraction of its historic range. Of 15 states it once inhabited, it is extinct or endangered in all but four. Which is why Foote has been studying its population here, in one of its last strongholds—the Flint Hills of central Kansas.

There are stories of pioneers waking in early spring to the booming sound of prairie-chickens echoing across the wide-open spaces of this strange new land, inducing a sort of madness amidst the lonely isolation of the plains. But for humans more accustomed to the landscape, more at home in the wilderness of the prairie, the mating rituals of the greater prairie-chicken inspired art. Native Americans even patterned dances after the animal’s iconic choreography.

In fact, the bird’s mating rituals aren’t all that different from those carried out by the rest of us who stand on two legs. It all begins with the male taking center stage, literally. Males establish a platform called a lek on an elevated piece of earth, with little grass cover, and jostle for dominance over its middle ground. The gaudy orange sacs on the sides of their necks inflate like flaming balloons, feathers on the side of their heads rise up like horns, their tails flare out, they dip their heads, stomp their feet, and compress their air sacs to produce the booming noise that draws the females.

In short, they show off.

“There’s a lot of cackling and jostling and fighting, and then the females come over to check them out,” Foote explains. “It kind of reminds me of a bar. The guys are there strutting their stuff, and the females will sidle up to the one they like.” But that’s where the resemblance to humans ends. When the female chooses her man, the mating commences right there on the lek. “It’s real quick,” Foote says. “They’re not shy.”

The contest for female attention can get rough, because it’s a winner-take-all situation, genetically speaking. The alpha male establishes dominance and is engaged in 80 percent of the breeding. Although the consequences may seem harsh, the scene itself is captivating. As dawn gives way to a morning shrouded in clouds, one or two birds pop up and down like popcorn on the near horizon, fighting for position.

“Not only are they tough little nuts, they’re beautiful,” Foote says.

And as emblems of the prairie, they couldn’t be more perfect. The ecosystem itself evolved as a complex dance between life and death, violence and calm, fire and regrowth. Every moment of the prairie-chicken’s life cycle is connected to the dominant forces that sculpted the ecology of the tallgrass prairie—fire and thunderous herds of bison by the million.

“Throughout the Great Plains, fire has been a key ecological force,” says Brian Obermeyer, Flint Hills project director with The Nature Conservancy, which owns all but 34 acres of the land at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. “There wouldn’t be prairie here without fire.”

Because the region gets a moderately high amount of rain compared with the rest of the Great Plains—30 to 35 inches per year—it would quickly be covered with trees if something didn’t scour the landscape on a periodic basis, Obermeyer says. Studies have shown that the transition from prairie to cedar forest could occur in only 35 years, given the right conditions.

Likewise, the presence of grazers like deer, elk, and especially bison, which followed the lush grass nurtured by prairie fire, sculpted an ecosystem with a diverse range of grass heights and densities. Bison were the keystone, or most influential, species on the landscape where the greater prairie-chicken evolved.

The arrival of Anglo-American homesteaders in the 1800s interrupted this system. The plows of these early farmers launched an agricultural industry that would eventually all but erase the prairie. In fact, the tallgrass prairie is now the most altered ecosystem on the continent, comprising only 4 percent of its historic acreage. And two-thirds of what remains is found in the Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma.

As its name suggests, the region is so rocky and hilly that it was generally unsuitable for farming, which led the Flint Hills to develop into a region of cattle ranches, a way of life that persisted for a century and a half.

Things changed dramatically in 1995, with the designation of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, a breakthrough made possible by the work of NPCA and the National Park Trust(established by NPCA in 1983). But this was no typical national park unit: Its founding legislation mandated that the Park Service could own no more than 180 acres of the preserve. The National Park Trust stepped in and purchased the nearly 11,000-acre Z Bar Ranch, which carried a 35-year grazing lease owned by a Texas businessman.

Though grazing is a disturbance as native to the prairie as fire, and one that’s important to the life-cycle of many animals including the greater prairie-chicken, the style of grazing practiced by most ranchers hasn’t taken ecology or wildlife into full consideration.
“The grazing lease for the preserve was a standard lease that was similar to other ranches in the region,” says Obermeyer. “It was based more on the economics of livestock production than the desire to optimize habitat needs for native species.”

When The Nature Conservancy bought the remaining portion of the preserve in 2005, it also bought out the grazing lease, which afforded the Conservancy and Park Service more flexibility. Today the same rancher runs his herd on the land, but the terms and type of grazing are now determined cooperatively, says Kristen Hase, the natural resources program manager at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. “We can decide what we want to burn, and when we want to burn; when we put cattle out there, and how many—and we didn’t have that option before,” Hase says.

“The tenant has been very supportive of the management changes and has taken a keen interest in how we’re improving wildlife habitat,” says Obermeyer.

Which is good news for the greater prairie-chicken.
Before human habitation, the prairie burned on average every three to four years. But today ranch managers often burn the land every year, because the grass that grows after a burn is more palatable to cattle, which leads them to gain more weight and, thus, generate more profit. reater prairie-chickens, however, need grass at various heights throughout their life cycles: short grass for the mating ground on the lek, medium grass for nesting, and tall grass for winter cover. And densities of the grass also factor into their successful reproductive cycles. The trick for the park is to emulate the natural rhythms of the prairie drama without the presence of bison and wildfire.

The hope is to reintroduce bison to the landscape one day, but for now, cattle are being managed as the “surrogate keystone species,” according to Obermeyer. Although cattle and bison are similar, their effect on the prairie is different. Cattle have more of an appetite for native forbs, whereas bison are almost exclusively grass eaters. As with any altered ecosystem, especially one as altered as the tallgrass prairie, trying to reconfigure the natural system is difficult.

The greater prairie-chicken may offer some insight into this puzzle. Because of the varied habitat needs of this species, wildlife biologists consider it an umbrella species. Each type of habitat required by the greater prairie-chicken also serves as important habitat for many other species, including grazers such as deer and prairie birds such as the western meadowlark, Henslow’s sparrow, upland sandpiper, and horned lark, so if workers here can keep the prairie-chicken happy, they’ll be meeting the needs of other species as well.

Foote hopes her research can help. Over the next two years, she will continue studying the population of greater prairie-chickens on the preserve and the effect of grazing and fire management on the habitat. Her work also could play a role in the larger story of the greater prairie-chicken in North America. In many states where the species once thrived, populations are so low in number and so isolated that they contain a shortage of genetic information. The result—inbreeding—leads to disease and reproductive problems. With a healthy population of birds in the Flint Hills, biologists can relocate Kansas greater prairie-chickens to regions that need an influx of genetic information, thereby helping to ensure a more stable future for this charismatic bird.

It’s a future that’s very important to Foote, whose affection for the stomping, booming, strutting Romeo inspires her work.

“These little birds,” she says, “they really grab hold of you.”