Crops & Breeds › Grouse & Ptarmigan

🛟 Greater Prairie-Chicken

Grouse & Ptarmigan · breed reference

THE BOOMING GROUND: at dawn in April the cocks inflate orange air sacs on the neck, raise their pinnae like horns, stamp their feet and produce a three-note moan that carries for a mile — the sound the tallgrass prairie is remembered by. Reduced to fragments across the Midwest as prairie became row crop. TWO SUBSPECIES GET A SENTENCE RATHER THAN A ROW, for opposite reasons. ATTWATER'S, the coastal Texas bird, is federally endangered and survives only through a zoo recovery programme — it has no entry here and should never be given one. And the HEATH HEN, the eastern bird of the Atlantic seaboard, is EXTINCT: the last individual, a male known as Booming Ben, died on Martha's Vineyard in 1932 after a decade alone. An entry implies a bird you might record, and neither of these is one.