Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing

7. Gary Clark, “Memories of a Prairie Chicken Dance”

101 Chapter 7 Gary Clark Memories of a Prairie Chicken Dance Gary Clark is a dean at North Harris College and author of “Wonders of Nature,” a weekly column in the Houston Chronicle. His writing has been published in a variety of state and national magazines including AAA Journeys, Birds & Blooms, Birder’s World, Living Bird, Rivers, Texas Highways, Texas Parks & Wildlife, Texas Wildlife, and Women in the Outdoors. Gary’s first book, Texas Wildlife Portfolio (Farcountry Press, 2004) is available through major booksellers. Gary has been active in the birding and environmental community for over 25 years. He founded the Piney Woods Wildlife Society in 1982 and founded the Texas Coast Rare Bird Alert in1983. He served as president of the Houston Audubon Society from 1989 to 1991 and purchased the North American Rare Bird Alert (NARBA) for Houston Audubon in 1990. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory. During his collegiate career, Gary has been a professor of marketing, a faculty senate president, a Teacher Excellence Award recipient, and the Associate Dean of Natural Sciences. He has won five college writing awards. He currently serves as Dean of Business, Social, and Behavioral Sciences. In the dawn light of a March morning in the early 1980s, I stood alone near a lek at the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge near Eagle Lake, Texas. Only a slight chill was in the air suffused with the fragrance of emerging springtime flowers like chickweed, prairie iris, and meadow pink. Fresh shoots of grasses like bushy bluestem, windmill grass, and eastern gama grass were dappled with dew, redolent of the 102 scent of a morning bath. Meadowlarks began to fill the air with their piccolo-sounding tunes. It felt to me as though the prairie was waking up. I was awake to witness an event, an ancient ritual, played out century upon century, dawn upon dawn, on Texas coastal prairies—the mating dance of the male Attwater’s Prairie Chickens. I had watched the dance often in the years before, but I had also seen it become less and less common on fewer and fewer coastal prairies. In years past, I could have counted 1,400 birds—not many to be sure—in 13 coastal counties. A hundred or so might catch my eye on undeveloped prairies between Galveston and Houston, and I could count nearly 100 birds during any given spring on the Attwater refuge. They would fly up in front of me as I walked the trails through the prairie, and the males would stand proudly on pimple mounds near the trails surveying their territory.Even then,the chickens’total numbers were barely able to sustain a breeding population with sufficient genetic variability to be viable,and the prairies available to them were succumbing to urban development. Quite simply, dwindling coastal prairies meant dwindling prairie chickens.A century and a half ago, the prairies stretched inland 80 miles and covered at least seven million acres of the Texas coast from Louisiana to South Texas, sustaining over a million Attwater’s Prairie Chickens, grouse-like birds that are a sub-species of the Greater Prairie Chickens that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands on the Great Plains but are now drastically reduced in numbers. So plentiful were the Attwater’s Prairie Chickens that early Texas settlers shot them for food with as little thought as we today pick abundant edible dewberries off roadside vines. By the late twentieth century,descendants of the Texas settlers had razed all but 200,000 fragmented acres of coastal prairies, leaving at the close of the century fewer than 50 prairie chickens on limited lands like the Attwater refuge. Gary Clark 103 As I stood on the refuge in the barely lit dawn, I wondered if I were standing on a vanishing stage waiting for a waning dance. Soon, the dance began. Five or six male chickens strutted onto a nearby lek, a flat grassy patch on the prairie. They squared off, two at a time, like gladiators in an ancient Roman arena. The chickens, though, were not in the arena to maim or kill each other. They were there to intimidate each other with a dance,and to prove their prowess to a group of by-standing females. Still, the dance looked like a fight. They stomped their feet rapidly on the ground...