Love in the Afternoon

I pridefully reject the label “chaser,” but I will admit that the point of our 1,100-mile trip to New Mexico this week was a single species: Lesser Prairie-Chicken. A couple of unexpected days off, a congenial group of fellow travelers, and explicit directions from Ernie at the Roswell BLM office combined to make this a perfect opportunity to finally chase (that word again!) the sole remaining Great Plains breeding species I hadn’t seen.

We dallied happily at a couple of sites along the way, but I kept an eye on the clock and we arrived at the lek in New Mexico’s choppy hills about 4:30 Wednesday afternoon. Less than an hour later, the first cocks strolled in, and suddenly, just about 6:00 pm local time, that familiar but still heartstopping general arrival took place, with nearly 30 birds walking and flying to the lek from the surrounding grassland.

I’ve wondered for literally decades whether I would be able to distinguish the bird visually from Greater Prairie-Chicken, and I’m afraid that at rest they so closely resemble their larger tallgrass cousins that I don’t think I could. I tried counting the bars on the breast feathers, I tried analyzing the pattern of the back feathers, but no luck.

That changed, of course, once they started to dance and sing.

No ghostly “old muldoon” booming here, just a weird, high-pitched bubbling cackle, sometimes resembling the distant gobbling of a tiny Wild Turkey. They also gave an ascending cack-cack-keer and the loud keening yeer-yeer indistinguishable to my ear from the cries of Greaters, but the sound of the lek as a whole was quite different.

And the neck sacs truly are reddish, not orange.

Great birds! I’m considering running an Aimophila Adventures tour next year to see the spectacle; let me know if you’re interested, since it will certainly be limited to a very small number of birders.