Proof:
(photo from the Audubon 2007 Watch List)
Does this not look to you like an anxious man pacing, like one who is waiting to be told if it's a boy or a girl? Such a charming creature, if bizarre in appearance and behavior.
Like zebras, the banding on the lesser prairie chicken helps to camouflage it in the grasses. I was amazed at how well-concealed the birds were, especially when they weren't moving. It took me some time to find the females out in the grass (of course, at first I didn't realize that they were in the grass; I thought the lek (or mating display field) would be out on the bare earth in front of our van). We could hear them well before we saw them, before the sun even really thought about coming up.
(video by DisapprovingRabbits on youtube)
The plainer specimen is the female (very nice sexual dimorphism); while the population of about 4,000 in the Milnesand breeding range is fairly evenly divided between males and females, we only saw a handful of girls in comparison to the boys. We joked that the females came out when they felt like it, and reported back to all the other girls still having their morning coffee.
You can't see it in that video (not mine, by the way; I was too far away to get good pictures or video, though I could see them really well in my binoculars), but the males also stamp their feet while they run back and forth. It's a booming noise that I'm sure is quite sexy for the ladies.
While we were in Milnesand, which is where we saw the prairie chickens, we camped out (in wind so strong that we couldn't pull the rain fly all the way away from the tent, so it was a moot point anyways), had good food cooked by the sweet ladies of the town, and marked four miles of fences so that the chickens would see them when they are flying away from predators.
Mentioning predators, we also saw a male golden eagle in captivity. He was just kind of hanging out in the back of this guy's truck, looking around imperiously. There was a dead hare at the foot of his perch, which was covered in Astroturf for some reason. He had apparently been killing and eating livestock in Montana (?), and the government stepped in to have him relocated at the rancher's request. The guy that took him has some sort of agreement where, even though he is not a government entity, he can capture the eagle and take him around and show him off. I thought it was awesome.
One last image:
I like the way you write. Enjoyable read.
ReplyDeleteLOL about the goofy chickens. So true, so true.
And I totally didn't realize that the golden eagle had been killing livestock... that's pretty vicious... But I'm not shocked: that was one big-ass (for lack of a better word) bird.