Lesser Prairie-Chicken

Status: Estimated to have decreased by 97 percent since 1900.

Habitat/Range: Inhabits mixed grass-dwarf shrub communities in sandy soils like the sand sagebrush-bluestem in Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma and shinnery oak in New Mexico and Texas.

Threats: Habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation due to the conversion of grass and rangeland to cropland and pastures, overgrazing and brush control.

Restoration Potential: All efforts to establish new populations have failed. But moderate grazing and selective use of herbicides in overgrazed shrublands can maintain or improve habitat.

Places We Are Protecting:

• Smokey Valley Ranch/ Chalk Bluffs, Kansas

Learn More:
View a species management abstract for this bird.

Illustrations by David Allen Sibley from The National Audubon Society: The Sibley Guide to Birds published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. Copyright © 2000 by Chanticleer Press and David Allen Sibley. No illustrations may be copied, reproduced, or reused without the express written permission of the copyright holders.