Wind-power growth could put prairie chickens on endangered list
State wind-power growth could put prairie chickens on endangered list

By John David Sutter

Published: August 3, 2008

A plucky little bird in northwest Oklahoma — known for its comical mating dances in which it patters around like a jittery wind-up toy — has found itself pitted against an unlikely environmental foe.

Huge power-generating wind turbines are expected to pop up all over the lesser prairie chicken's habitat in coming years, and biologists say the development could push the birds onto the endangered species list or even into extinction.

"We're very concerned they could go into a nose dive that they wouldn't recover from,” said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the National Audubon Society.

That's not because the birds fly into the turbine blades.

"They can't really strut their stuff anywhere where there's something tall nearby,” Butcher said.

Lesser prairie chickens usually won't go near wind turbines — much less breed in their midst, according to information gathered through radio collar tracking. The stocky birds see the turbines and transmission lines as hideouts for their predators, namely hawks and eagles.

Their already limited habitat is expected to be further fragmented by the wind industry, pushing them into small groups that have low chances for survival, biologists and wildlife experts said.

The situation has environmentalists scratching their heads as they wrestle with their desire to protect a vulnerable species and promote renewable energy.

Can the lesser prairie chicken and the wind industry co-exist on the plains? Experts say it will be tricky since no regulations protect the bird.

Eighty-seven of the 96 known lesser prairie chicken breeding circles in Oklahoma are within five miles of "excellent” wind farm territory, according to a federal report.

The birds mate only in those locations, which are called leks. The mating circles are at relatively high elevations where the birds' dances and calls can easily be seen and heard by potential mates, said Russ Horton, a supervisor and wildlife biologist at the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.

Biologists fear wind farm development will scare the prairie chickens away from those important spots.

"Without those leks, there's not going to be baby prairie chickens in the next generation,” Butcher said.

Bird attendance at mating ceremonies already is decreasing for a variety of reasons, Horton said. Thirty-five to 40 birds used to attend the mating ceremonies. Now, six birds is more the norm, he said.

Scientists also fear wind farms will push the birds into smaller and more vulnerable groups. A group of prairie chickens requires about 25,000 acres to survive and be healthy, said Jay Pruett, director of conservation at the Nature Conservancy in Oklahoma.

Don Wolfe, a senior wildlife biologist at the Sutton Avian Research Center in Bartlesville, has been putting radio collars on lesser prairie chickens for 10 years so he can track their behavior.

"As you see isolation happening, you can pretty much count on overall population rates going downhill,” Wolfe said.

With no regulations to protect the birds, conservation groups are looking for alternatives. The Endangered Species Act offers federal protection.

While the lesser prairie chicken isn't an endangered species, the bird is a "candidate species” for listing.

"It basically means that we don't have the time and financial resources to work on that one yet,” said Elizabeth Slown, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Albuquerque.

Pruett said an endangered species listing would just cause "a royal bucket of headaches for everybody involved.”

More effective would be a conservation easements program, he said. That would entail paying landowners not to let wind farms go up on their property. It will be difficult to make it worth a landowner's while, though, Pruett said, since wind leases are becoming more profitable.

The Nature Conservancy is also looking to buy up private land to make a preserve for the lesser prairie chicken, Pruett said. But that likely will prove too costly, also.

Land leases for other energy forms, like oil and natural gas, must be approved by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. No similar process exists for wind, and conservationists would like to see protecting wildlife become a mandatory part of wind leases.

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