Over-hunting and the destruction of Texas’ coastal prairie have pushed a 99.98 % decline in Attwater’s prairie chickens
This text initially appeared within the winter 2023 subject of Mission Upland Journal.
The packed, silty soil and low grass cowl made for a leisurely stroll, though the pointers stored working too far in entrance of the road. The primary grouse ran earlier than a low flush, no more than ten to twenty ft off the bottom. It didn’t appear to rush in its escape, alternately flapping its wings and gliding. Facet-by-side smoothbores barked, the grey smoke of opened chambers obscuring a second hen that flushed in entrance of an impatient level.
On the flip of the Twentieth century, the grassland range of Texas was residence to 3 totally different grouse species—the better prairie-chicken, lesser prairie-chicken, and Attwater’s prairie-chicken. The Attwater’s prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus cupido attwateri) was named in 1893 by ornithologist Charles E. Bendire for the “well-marked race of T. americanus” to honor Texas naturalist H. P. Attwater as “a slight recognition for his hassle in acquiring these specimens.” Its distribution paralleled the coast from Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin to Texas’ Corpus Christi Bay, encompassing some six million acres of tall-grass coastal prairie that supported as many as one million Attwater’s prairie-chickens.
The sportsmen on that morning hunt considered it in no particular phrases. They raised dozens of birds they known as grouse, prairie hens, or prairie chickens, and it was one thing they’d executed for many years. But it surely was nearing the top. The yr was 1919, and the hen they had been pursuing was already extinct in Louisiana. There have been nonetheless shootable numbers in elements of their former Lone Star State vary, however they had been getting more durable to search out. Texas closed its searching season on Attwater’s prairie-chickens in 1937. By then, solely 8,700 prairie chickens remained within the wild, and there was each indication that the hen’s epic decline would parallel Louisiana’s.
Early Birds
Prairie chickens by no means reached the staggering numbers of the passenger pigeon, however they had been referenced in way more historic narratives. Captain William Sterling described the Matagorda Bay shoreline within the 1840s with native Karankawa Indians nonetheless residing in crude huts and prairie chickens so ample they roosted with barnyard fowl.
Within the early 1850s, Capt. John W. Warren was the proprietor of the Warren Resort on the stagecoach observe by the Hockley Prairie. Warren, a former gamekeeper in his native England, equipped searching canine for his company to shoot prairie chickens and quail. They killed sufficient to produce the resort dinner desk every night time throughout winter months.
When Arthur Stilwell based the city of Port Arthur on the still-wild shores of Sabine Lake, Joseph Bash owned one of many solely two dozen buildings on the town. Bash described flocks of prairie chickens that “handed by in droves” in part of Texas the place he stored his daughters indoors throughout heat months due to streets stuffed with alligators and snakes and mosquito plagues so thick that the solar seemed to be in eclipse.
Subject to Desk
Earlier than the Civil Battle, prairie chickens had been known as partridges, the time period extra generally used later for quail, they usually offered in sport markets for 40 to 50 cents a pair. They had been widespread on the tables of early settlers, boarding homes, inns, and market stalls, their taste “extremely esteemed.” Menus and sport market entries mirror a by-gone period, their listings together with the now-extinct passenger pigeons and Eskimo curlews and such birds as whooping cranes, swans, robins, meadowlarks, shorebirds, and wading birds.
Skilled hunters equipped Texas markets. One was W. A. Hughs, dubbed by his prospects as “Texas’ Biggest Hunter.” Hughs, who settled in Eagle Lake in 1875, hunted the Lissie Prairie, which was teeming with prairie chickens. Throughout winter months, he made the 100-mile journey to Galveston markets in a wagon loaded with wild sport. One other marketman was Mr. G. M. Oliver from Beaumont, “recognized at each farmhouse for his professional taking pictures and jovial disposition.” He tallied a outstanding 326 prairie chickens in just a few days’ outing in 1896.
Days of journey by horse and wagon had been made out of date by the enlargement of American railroads, and the worry of spoilage ended with the arrival of refrigeration. Prairie chickens and different sport might now be quickly distributed nationwide, and it was huge enterprise. For instance, a chilly storage plant in New York within the late 1800s listed 4,200 prairie chickens in its stock, though their numbers paled in comparison with its provide of 30,000 plovers and 15,600 snipes.
The Sport Afield
As new railroad traces had been laid throughout the coastal prairie, sportsmen entertained themselves by firing at flying birds from practice home windows. Houston excursionists headed to Clear Lake on the GC & SF Railway within the 1870s shot dozens of prairie chickens, snipes, geese, rabbits, and deer from their automobiles. In cities alongside the route, the follow was not shunned besides on Sundays, when residents complained of the numbers of “Sabbath-breaking gunners.”
Learn: Searching Geese Over Cattle: The Skilled Waterfowling Steers of Texas
Rich gents sportsmen had been normally members of searching golf equipment, and the “amiable spirit of rivalry” ran excessive between them. Capturing competitions utilizing thrown glass ball targets had been standard, as had been prize hunts, wherein groups competed for the very best variety of birds killed on the wing. The rating was stored for level values assigned to totally different hen species, the scorecard together with prairie chickens and different ample prairie birds corresponding to woodcock, snipes, bobwhite quail, hawks, and owls. Sixty prize hunt members harvested 4,000 birds in an 1884 competitors, and the successful group in one other contest that yr netted a thousand.
Not each sportsman had cash, however the quantity of their harvest was equally spectacular. Recreation warden Thomas Waddell wrote of searching camps close to Eagle Lake the place sport hunters would return from the sector with as many as a thousand prairie chickens. Close to Bay Metropolis, in Matagorda County, hunters killed 71 Attwater’s in lower than two hours.
Looking back, the amount of the market hunter’s kill, which initially equipped a nation’s want and later its urge for food, is maybe simpler to justify than the sportsman’s. The latter, nonetheless, was most likely due much less to vanity than ignorance. Few thought that America’s wildlife bounty was something aside from countless. It was about to vary.
The Finest Intentions
Early conservationists not often acknowledged the function of habitat destruction on declining wildlife populations, as a substitute focusing their efforts virtually completely on searching rules. Throughout the years they battled for wildlife safety, some species had been on a downward spiral so dramatic that the sportsman’s gun would by no means have had an impression. A kind of was the prairie rooster.
Moderately than the federal authorities, particular person states had the only real authority to control wildlife till the Twentieth century. Texas’s first upland sport regulation was handed in 1860 and guarded bobwhite quail on Galveston Island for 2 years. It was one other 20 years earlier than hunter-conservation teams had been based in Texas—however their associations had been accountable for 1 / 4 century or extra of passionate, tireless efforts to craft and move wildlife legal guidelines.
Hunter-conservationists contributed to the enactment of the primary state-wide sport regulation in 1881. Amongst its proposals was a restriction on the months that prairie chickens might be hunted, nevertheless it was stricken from the invoice. It wouldn’t have mattered. The 1881 regulation was solely ignored by the general public and “violated day after day and yr after yr” with no recognized situations “whereby events have been prosecuted.”
The Texas legislature, eventually, handed an modification to shut the searching season on prairie chickens for 3 years in 1897. Supporters had been satisfied that by prohibiting their killing, the birds would rebound sufficiently to “present limitless sport.”
Recreation regulation advocates enlisted Henry Philemon Attwater of their campaign in 1899. Attwater’s was a formidable pedigree. He was acknowledged as a “scientist and authority on Texas birds and animals” in his function as “normal industrial agent” of the Southern Pacific Railway, a director of the Nationwide Affiliation of Audubon Societies, and served on the American Ornithologists’ Union’s sport regulation committee. In 1890, Attwater described the traits of Texas’s three grouse species and picked up specimens for the Smithsonian.
One in every of Attwater’s conservation marketing campaign methods was to enlist help from farmers. “Helpful insect-eating birds had been turning into scarce,” he opined, however the good these birds do in stopping crop harm was “incalculable.” His new agricultural ally was cautious in its endorsement of sport legal guidelines. Nonetheless, their backing was not attributable to a “sudden enhance within the habits of feathered animals” however “an awakening to the essential indisputable fact that the birds have some worth in destroying bugs.”
Attwater and others prevailed with a Mannequin Recreation Regulation in 1903 and a Everlasting Recreation Regulation in 1907. A part of his success got here from educating the general public on conservation points by a state-wide lecture sequence. In his deal with at Faculty Station in 1905, Attwater spoke of the “wholesale slaughter of what stays of our sport birds,” and warned that if it was not regulated, extra “will quickly be exterminated.” He precisely predicted that considered one of these could be the prairie rooster that bore his title.
For the primary time, the 1907 Everlasting Recreation Regulation offered funds to rent sport wardens and a restrict on the variety of sport birds that might be killed per day: 25, with a possession restrict of 75. By the point the regulation handed, it was too late for the passenger pigeon. It was virtually too late for prairie rooster. When the primary moratorium on prairie rooster searching lapsed in 1901, a season that ran from August till the top of January was reinstated. The next yr it was shortened to November 1 to February 1. The day by day bag restrict of 25 was diminished by 1917 to 5, and the authorized searching season was minimize to simply 30 days. Twenty years later, the season was closed for good.
In Their Personal Phrases
Over the a long time, historians and writers collected tales from outdated males whose names, a era in the past, had been legends to Texas outdoorsmen and girls. Usually, they spoke in regards to the final of the Attwater’s prairie-chickens. To them, it outlined extra than simply the second after they noticed the final of a as soon as prolific species, however their realization that the coastal prairie was additionally vanishing. Their voices are gone now, however their tales resonate.
Earlier than he was the searching supervisor of the East Bay Lodge for Brown & Root in Chambers County, Ralph Leggett landed at airstrips to deposit brown luggage filled with marketing campaign donations for Lyndon Johnson. Spaceland Airport was a kind of surreptitious places, its paved runways laid throughout the prairie the place, 100 years earlier, prairie chickens had been harvested from GC & SF Railway automotive home windows close to Clear Lake. It was 1967, Leggett remembered, when he noticed his final flock. There was “a ton of ’em,” he stated, and “after I landed there, there’d be chickens simply getting out of your means.”
Richmond Mayor Hilmar G. Moore additionally noticed his final prairie chickens within the Sixties. He was working cattle on the household’s Orchard Lake ranch in Fort Bend County, west of Houston. Mayor Moore stood within the chilly that day and counted them. It was throughout an ice storm, he recalled, and “I noticed 18 of them within the hay area.” He by no means noticed one other.
“Prairie chickens, prairie hens, grouse,” Barrow Ranch searching information Elmer Jackson advised Shannon Tompkins, then an outside author for the Houston Chronicle. “We known as ’em all these names. You might discover ’em totally on the little ridges and humps on the prairie. They had been high-quality sport and good eatin’. On a spring morning, you can hear them drummin’ and hummin’ everywhere in the prairie.” He didn’t care to assume again to when he noticed his final one. “There have been a whole lot of them again then,” was all he stated. “Again then” was 1917.
Henry Palmer ‘Peg’ Melton of Houston was 12 years outdated when, leaping on a practice, he fell and misplaced a leg. He by no means thought of he was disabled. Almost each Sunday throughout the season, he shot prairie chickens at Pierce Junction and on the prairie west of Houston.
Right now, the Houston Astrodome covers Pierce Junction, and the prairie west of Houston grew to become Sharpstown throughout the metropolis boundaries. When Melton fearful that he might need seen his final prairie rooster within the Thirties, he did one thing about it. He ready a publication and a radio deal with in 1935, cajoling sportsmen and lawmakers to acknowledge their responsibility to protect habitat and wildlife. Amongst those that heard his message had been sport warden Thomas Waddell and biologist Val Lehman. They had been already doing one thing about it.
The Final Stronghold
After the flip of the century, the biggest remaining prairie rooster concentrations had been in remnants of “the Large Prairie.” Overlaying over a thousand sq. miles, the Large Prairie was a part of a six-million-acre ecosystem bordered to the north by piney woods and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. It was merely known as the Large Prairie at first, then the Houston Prairie, and as farming communities got here, smaller elements of it took on native names such because the Lissie Prairie, the Katy Prairie, and the Large Hill Prairie southeast of Houston. The issue with the Large Prairie was that it was too near Houston.
When settlers first crossed the Large Prairie, they discovered high-standing grasses of bluestem, swap, yellow Indian, and jap gamagrass in a delicate topography of topographic highs generally known as knolls or mima mounds, and pure pothole ponds they typically known as “buffalo wallows.” The Jordan household was among the many pioneering households on the Katy Prairie. Chester Jordan stated, “When my Dad got here there, it was nothing however grass, crimson wolves, prairie chickens, and geese.” He remembered that, on the excessive grounds, there have been 1000’s of prairie chickens, quail, and “hundreds of thousands of jackrabbits on these knolls.” Jordan noticed his final prairie rooster on a kind of knolls within the Nineteen Seventies.
The Downside with Prairie Chickens
Prairie chickens are simply too fussy. Notoriously illiberal of land use adjustments, they’ve been unable to adapt to the numerous modifications of their native habitat. Farming and rice manufacturing, cattle grazing, and management of pure fires erased the grassland range they want for profitable nesting. Land leveling eliminated the delicate elevation change of the knolls that ground-nesting prairie chickens relied upon to outlive floods. Clouds of bugs that when sustained chicks after their hatch succumbed to man-made land adjustments and pesticides.
Subsequent got here the invasives—Chinese language tallow bushes, the thorny McCartney rose bush that infilled grasslands, and hearth ants that destroyed eggs and even grownup birds. Then got here urbanization and suburbanization. Texas might have banned searching of Attwater’s prairie-chickens, nevertheless it didn’t prohibit the destruction of the coastal tall-grass prairie.
Boots on the Floor
Texas sport warden Thomas Waddell was some of the influential Twentieth-century advocates for the Attwater’s prairie-chicken. Waddell, who considered his job much less as enforcement and extra about wildlife consciousness, devoted years of his life to the hen. Between 1925 and 1937, he coated tens of 1000’s of prairie acres, counting nests and the numbers of younger and grownup birds. On the lookout for elements that influenced good counts and poor ones, he discovered correlations with things like rainfall quantities and the burning of prairie grasses for agriculture throughout the spring nesting season.
In 1927, sport warden Waddell hosted Texas Governor Dan Moody and W. J. Tucker of the Fish, Oyster, and Recreation Fee on a prairie rooster hunt close to Eagle Lake. They’d a very good shoot, bagging 21. However Waddell was much less considering searching than the chance to enlighten his distinguished company on the way forward for the prairie rooster. He continued these efforts for the subsequent 50 years.
Val W. Lehman, a area biologist ending his diploma at A&M Faculty, introduced scientific strategies to the prairie rooster plight when he joined Waddell within the area in 1937. That yr, Lehman estimated that simply 8,700 prairie chickens remained within the state, their distribution restricted to only some Texas counties. One was the Lissie Prairie of Colorado County. Though the variety of birds was “pitifully small,” he wrote, it was nonetheless “better than every other place on this planet.” Lehmann was blunt: “Whether or not or not the Attwater Prairie Rooster’s thrive or takes its place alongside the passenger pigeon, heath hen, and the Carolina parakeet relies upon to a better extent upon the individuals of Colorado County.”
Colorado County individuals responded by forming a neighborhood Sportsmen’s Affiliation in 1938, enrolling landowners in experimental packages to enhance their lands for prairie chickens. Three years later, Lehman printed the seminal “Attwater’s Prairie Rooster,” the benchmark work used as a foundation, partially, for the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund’s buy of three,500 acres of Lissie Prairie habitat close to Eagle Lake within the Sixties.
A Steady Spiral
In 1967, the Attwater’s prairie-chicken was positioned on the Federal Endangered Species checklist. Their inhabitants had declined to lower than 2,000 birds. The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund’s prairie rooster oasis grew to become the Attwater’s Prairie Rooster NWR in 1972 and rapidly doubled its acreage.
Statewide numbers continued to plummet, from 456 wild birds in 1993 to 42 in 1996. Their numbers rose within the early 2000s to roughly 90, then crashed once more after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, when solely 13 males remained within the wild. It was a harmful level in historical past, mitigated, for now, by a rebound in 2021 to simply below 200 birds. Only one % of the Attwater’s prairie-chicken’s unique six-million-acre vary stays as we speak. The hen has fared worse than its habitat; it has skilled an unprecedented 99.98 % decline from its million-bird peak.
It has been 125 years since hunter-conservationists hypothesized that, by regulation, the Attwater’s prairie-chicken may rebound sufficiently to “present limitless sport.” As an alternative, it grew to become a race to stop their extinction.
The publish The Final Attwater’s Prairie Chickens appeared first on Mission Upland.
