Patty Loew:
The owner of John Muir's homestead would like to work with private landowners along with county, state and federal agencies to see native prairie chickens reintroduced in-areas near the farm. A four-year project to boost the diversity of Wisconsin's chicken population was completed last fall. The Wisconsin DNR introduced Minnesota birds to the Buena Vista wildlife area. That's where every spring you can see and hear a ritual as old as time in Portage County.

Jo Garrett:
At dawn, on an April morning, you can hear one of the state's more amazing sounds. And as the light breaks, you can see an annual April ritual. It's the greater prairie chicken, out on what's called its booming grounds. That X-files sound you hear, well, that's the birds booming.   

Jo Garrett:
Sharon Schwab is a prairie chicken aficionado.

Sharon Schwab:
They're so intent on their small little territories and protecting it from another male prairie chicken. The neck feathers go up, the orange air sacs fill up, foot stomping and the snapping of the tail feathers.  They whoop and they holler and they jump and they dance. Try and imagine what it must have been like when Wisconsin had tens of thousands of these birds. We just don't have very many anymore.   

Jo Garrett:
At one time, you could find them across Wisconsin, this small bird with the honking big handle.  Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus. The translation, drummer of love. The greater prairie chicken at its peak numbered more than 54,000.  Now there are fewer than 1500 birds. And most of them can be found here at Buena Vista grasslands. Jim Keir is a wildlife biologist for the Wisconsin department of natural resources.

Jim Keir:
Canada doesn't have them anymore, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas. They don't because they lost the habitat. We've made the commitment several decades ago that we were going to try not to let that happen. And the result is what you see here. So far it's been working.  This is a 12,000 acre project. It is identified and managed as a grasslands habitat. It is the only one of its type.   And so the decision was made to try to save the prairie chicken right here.   

Jo Garrett:
Right here is one of the rarer landscapes in Wisconsin.

Jim Keir:
Prairie chickens were found in the traditional prairies and oak savannahs in the southern 40% of the state. What happened when settlers came into Wisconsin is they started plowing those prairie soils up.

Jo Garrett:
But while most of the southern prairies were plowed under, our northern forests were clear-cut, which created grasslands.

Jim Keir:
And that created that nonnative, but suitable, habitat for the prairie chicken population, so they pioneered and expanded northward. At one point because of this expansion they were actually present in every county in Wisconsin.

Jo Garrett:
After the big clear-cut of the late 1800s, the northern forests grew back. Since much of the prairie had been lost to farming, grasslands were greatly diminished.

Jim Keir:
So the prairie chicken population started declining all over.

Jo Garrett:
The birds need these open grasslands. Buena Vista was established in the 1950s by a unique private and public partnership that managed to raise the funds to acquire this land. But now they must manage this land continuously to keep it as grassland. Consider the land where Keir is standing.

Jim Keir:
If you step back in time maybe six, seven years, this was a 45-foot tall aspen forest. And we used mowing. We use fire. We use farming. And we use cattle.

Jo Garrett:
Yes, you're looking at a land management technique. Cattle, like these, can help save prairie chickens. In particular, they need the kind of grass that results from a particular kind of grazing, rotational grazing.

Jim Keir:
Rotational grazing splits that single pasture up into a series of paddocks or a series of pastures and you move the cattle around.

Jo Garrett:
They've had good success at Buena Vista, but the success here is only part of the story.

Jim Keir:
Once you get north of here, the populations are very thinly distributed, they're definitely dependent on private land use because we have no public land and private land use changes are occurring and the chicken numbers are declining. It's because the habitat is being lost.

Jo Garrett:
The birds need more habitat. They need what's here. So the pressure is on to increase the amount of grassland in the state. Sharon Schwab is working toward that. Schwab is not just a prairie chicken aficionado. She's also the coordinator of the Central Wisconsin Grassland Area Project, which has among its goals encouraging private landowners such as farmers to engage in practices like rotational grazing to promote grasslands.

Sharon Schwab:
For example, there may be federal dollars or county dollars that may be available to them to get some of the equipment, like some of the fencing and things like that. So there are things that can help farmers, for example, change the way they farm that might be a little more wildlife friendly.

Jo Garrett:
And a wildlife-friendly landscape will benefit more than just the prairie chicken, this showy star of the grasslands. There's a whole community of flora and fauna that calls this distinct habitat home.

Sharon Schwab:
What I like most about grasslands is they're just open. There's something about them that I think is very freeing. You can see all around you, and perhaps that's what the prairie chickens like as well. There's a clear vista. It's one of those things that if you've never experienced, it's worth seeing.

Patty Loew:
If you're interested in more information on the prairie chicken, go to our website at wpt.org/inwisconsin. You can also get details on how to reserve a blind to experience this call of the wild.