SAVING THE LESSER PRAIRIE CHICKEN

Rare dancing grouse of the Southwest, lesser prairie chickens are known for the males' elaborate calls and showy displays of reddish-orange air sacs while they perform mating dances on “booming grounds” in the spring. These birds need large, unfragmented parcels of intact native grasslands to maintain self-sustaining populations. They once roamed the sagebrush and shinnery oak of the southern Great Plains by the millions, but today they occupy just a fraction of their historic range.

BACKGROUND

In 2012 the lesser prairie chicken population bottomed out at 35,000 individuals — until it reached a new low of only about 17,616 birds the very next year, a massive decline of about 50 percent. The birds' numbers rebounded in 2014 and 2015 after the end of a drought in their range, but biologists are worried about another population decline, even with adequate rainfall.

The main threats facing lesser prairie chickens are habitat loss and degradation from livestock grazing, agriculture, oil and gas extraction, herbicides, mining and roads, and wind-energy production. The birds' habitat is also lost to fences, power lines, and other tall structures that beckon predators to perch — prairie chickens won't set foot within a mile of them.

Lesser prairie chickens have danced a long, hard road in their journey toward gaining — and keeping — the federal protections they need to survive.

OUR CAMPAIGN

The Center has been working for these fascinating birds for decades. In 1995 we and allies petitioned to protect them under the Endangered Species Act; nearly three years later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the birds deserved protection — but instead of granting it, the agency merely added the animals to the “candidate list.” Finally, thanks to the Center's 2011 landmark agreement on 757 species, the Service officially protected lesser prairie chickens as threatened in 2014 — only to snatch that protection away two years later in response to a lawsuit from a Texas oil trade group. And that was after the agency itself admitted in court that the loss of even a small amount of suitable habitat could send the species into a "death spiral."

After the Service did a new review of lesser prairie chickens' status, in 2022 it again granted them Endangered Species Act protection — this time as two "distinct population segments,"  with the southern population listed as endangered and the northern population listed as threatened.

But under the second Trump administration, in 2025 the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas reversed the listings. The ruling has nothind to do with science or the law and everything to do with kowtowing to the oil and gas industry. We won't be silent witnesses while the Trump administration and fossil fuel companies try to carve up what's left of these dancing birds' habitat and doom them to extinction.

We won’t be silent witnesses while the Trump administration and fossil fuel companies try to carve up what’s left of these dancing birds’ habitat and doom them to extinction.

Check out our press releases to learn more about the Center’s work to save lesser prairie chickens.