Just before sunrise in the spring, you could hear something amazing in a certain area of central Illinois. For over a mile, a low, hollow booming sound that resembled someone blowing across a bottle’s mouth rolled across the grass. It originated from the elaborate ritual of male greater prairie chickens stamping their feet and puffing orange throat sacs while gathered on their ancestral breeding grounds, known as leks. The Great Plains used to be home to millions of these birds. In Illinois, there are currently fewer than 200 left in the wild. Now, the booming grounds are largely quiet.
It wasn’t an abrupt silence. It followed the plow’s path, creeping in over decades.
The greater prairie chicken was never a delicate animal. It fed on seeds, insects, and greenery as it flourished for centuries in the tall, mixed-grass prairies that covered the interior of the United States. In areas like McLeod County, Minnesota, early settlers discovered birds everywhere; even on a slow day, hunters could consistently bring them home for supper. The warning signs of trouble were present by the turn of the 20th century, but it’s possible that most people were just ignoring them. There were too many crops to cultivate and too much farmland to claim.
The real unraveling occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, when advances in machinery made it possible for agriculture to grow at a rate that was unthinkable in the 1800s. Large areas of native tallgrass prairie, which provided these birds with their only habitat for nesting, feeding, and survival, were nearly completely destroyed over night. The nesting cover vanished. The expansive grounds contracted. To make matters worse, Asian-introduced ringneck pheasants started depositing their eggs in prairie chicken nests. The female prairie chicken would raise the pheasant chicks rather than her own because she was naturally devoted to whatever eggs were in front of her. In many areas of Minnesota, the birds had virtually disappeared by the 1940s.
Looking back, it’s remarkable how predictable this was and how completely disregarded it was. Since then, studies have shown that prairie chicken populations do not simply decline once cropland makes up more than 50% of a landscape and native grassland falls below a critical threshold. They fall apart. Once you cross this kind of tipping point, it’s very hard to go back. With each generation, the remaining birds weaken the population even more as they become isolated in small pockets with no genetic corridors connecting them.
Once numbering in the millions, the species is now only about 360,000 in North America, primarily in Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. The greater prairie chicken has been declared extinct in Canada; it is no longer found in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Ontario. In 1932, one subspecies—the heath hen—went extinct. Another is the critically endangered Attwater’s prairie chicken found in coastal Texas, which is mostly kept alive by captive breeding programs managed by zoos and, somewhat surprisingly, NASA.
Sitting with these figures gives you the impression that we’re not actually discussing a bird story. We are discussing a land story. The greater prairie chicken was able to adapt as well. It was a perfect fit for the existing prairie. All we had to do was swap out that prairie for something else, and we assumed the accounting would balance out. It didn’t.
Though saving a species is important, it’s not the only question worth considering. The idea that land’s value is solely determined by yield per acre is what the decline of the prairie chicken represents about the larger logic of industrial agriculture. With surveys in 2025 showing the highest numbers of booming males since 2007, Wisconsin provides a small, complex reason for cautious optimism: managed conservation areas have permitted some population recovery.
In Missouri, groups like The Nature Conservancy are restoring tallgrass prairie by removing invasive vegetation, planting conservation easements on nearby land, and utilizing locally harvested seeds. These initiatives are worthwhile. In comparison to the extent of what has been lost, they are also modest.
The decisions being made about the land around them will likely have a greater impact on whether they continue to hear it in a generation than the bird itself.
