Watch The Best-Known Grouse of the Western States

A documentary short on an iconic Midwestern species.

The Greater Prairie Chicken isn’t the state bird of Illinois, but maybe it should be. I mentioned this recently in a segment on WGN about the current bird-focused exhibition at the Newberry Library. As you’ll see in the following five-minute documentary, mostly made with materials from the Newberry’s collection, the Prairie Chicken’s “booming” calls were once one of the most notable and unmistakable aspects of the prairie. You’ll see in this video, which hasn’t been shared in this space previously, that the fortunes of the Prairie Chicken, or Pinnated Grouse, rose and fell with the settlement of the prairie in the 19th century. Back then, the western states like Illinois were known for grouse.

But in putting this story together, as I was sharing last week with students in my Adult Education course, there was something puzzling about the story of the Prairie Chicken in Illinois in the 1800s. All of the anecdotal indicators of the size of its population—once said to be 10 million birds—suggested that it was on a precipitous decline. Habitat loss was likely the primary driver, what with the expansion of the railroads west and the plowing of the prairie and the carving of it into farmsteads. Overhunting and the introduction of cats and dogs didn’t help either.

But suddenly in 1890, the respected periodical Forest and Stream published an aside suggesting that Prairie Chickens were doing well. None other than Robert Ridgway said as much in his Ornithology of Illinois. As noted in the above film, the mosaic of farm and grassland may have briefly helped the birds. Just think of all the loose grain for feeding, from growing corn and wheat. Wrote Forest and Stream, “It may be said with confidence that no writer is so competent to prepare a report on the birds of Illinois as Mr. Ridgway.”

However, an examination of Joel Greenberg’s A Natural History of the Chicago Region (2004) suggests that many of the plates for Ridgway’s Ornithology were lost in a fire years before 1890. This delayed publication of the book. Perhaps Ridgway’s words were left over from a much older account, from a time when Prairie Chickens were still thriving.

Then there was something I stumbled upon in a very informative 1890 book, Shooting on Upland Marshes and Streams, that is only held in one library in Illinois—Founders Memorial Library at Northern Illinois University. Illinois had placed a two-year moratorium on grouse hunting in the late 1880s, much to the outrage of many a hunter and farmer. The result likely was a mini-boom, no pun intended, in their populations.

Game laws were still in their infancy in the 1890s, and the march of development would be too much for the Prairie Chickens to overcome. By the mid-20th century, their numbers had dwindled dramatically, eventually to just a few hundred birds at the Prairie Ridge State Natural Area near Effingham, Illinois. That they are still with us in the state is maybe a miracle.

“Winging It: A Brief History of Humanity’s Relationship with Birds” remains open at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, through September 27.