P RE SCRIBED FIRE
GROUSE, GRASS AND GARGANTUAN FIRE MEGAFIRE MAY BE A NEW THREAT TO IMPERILED LESSER-PRAIRIE CHICKEN BY NICHOLAS PARKER AND DANIEL SULLINS Spring mornings in southwestern Kansas often begin cool, dark, and quiet. Among the surrounding silence, the prairie slowly awakens. Sometime after the owls stop asking âwho?â and before the liquid summer song of the meadowlark bubbles forth to greet the light, you hear lesser prairiechickens; they yodel, boom, gobble, gurgle, moan, whine, cluck, and cackle, filling the cool spring dark with life. The morning of March 6, 2017, in Clark County, dawned with the prairie muffled by a strong sustained south wind, bringing with it faint whiffs of smoke. The next morning the prairie was utterly dark and quiet, with charred and blackened ground for miles around.
million in damage to fences and structures alone. In addition to megafire impacts to rural communities in these areas, both megafires burned grasslands occupied by lesser prairie-chickens. The lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) is a dull, brownish, football sized grouse found in the southern Great Plains of North America. While quiet and unnoticed for most of the year, in the spring male lesser prairie-chickens are scintillating stars of the prairie. They gather on communal mating grounds known as leks to sing, dance, and display for females. Males stamp their feet, inflate bright red air sacks on their necks, fan out brilliantly yellow eyebrows, and gobble, cackle, and yodel to woo females. Female prairie-chickens remain quiet and cryptic, hesitantly darting around the leks, seemingly unimpressed by the strutting and dancing of puffed-up males. The age-old ritual repeats every spring, with lesser prairie-chickens returning to the same leks year after year, with some leks existing in the same spots for greater than 40 years.
The wind-driven Starbuck fire burned more than 250,000 hectares in Kansas and Oklahoma on March 6 and 7, breaking the record of largest wildfire in Kansas. The record had been set just the previous year, in 2016, by the 150,000-hectare Anderson Creek fire. Both wildfires were known as megafires for their massive size (> 40,000 hectares, or 100,000 acres) and lasting impacts to the Unfortunately, much rural communities like the North American A male lesser prairie-chicken displays on a lek in Clark County, Kansas. affected. Separated prairie, once abundant PHOTO BY ELLEN WHITTLE by a year and roughly lesser prairie-chicken 50 miles, both megafires burned the sparsely populated Red populations have dwindled. Historical accounts speculated Hills region of Kansas, an area of rolling grasslands dedicated that millions of lesser prairie-chickens may have been on to agriculture and cattle ranching. The Starbuck fire killed the prairie prior to 1900, and surveys that began in the between 5,000 and 9,000 cattle and caused an estimated $44 1960s estimated an overall population of around 175,000 40
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APRIL - JUNE 2022
