Yo(zt can wait too many,s in between hunts.
BIRD-HUNTING gentleman named Edwyn Sandys penned those words in 1902, then the pinnated grouse,
Tympanuchus cupido--a.k.a. the greater prairie chicken, prairie cock, prairie grouise or prairie hen--was still abundant through most of the Mississippi Valley and well into the Great Plains. Sandys went on to the cite the bird's "qualifications" for this judgment. It's a big, handsome bird, he said; "vigorous and prolific," strongly barred in black, huff and chocolate brown, providing nearly two pounds of succulent meat to the table; its grasshopper-eating proclivities make it a friend to the farmer; its ranges can be easily reached by railroad or buggy; it holds tight before pointing dogs; and most importantly "it gives the gun a fair, open chance, seldom being found in anything like really dif ficult cover"
Sandys even goes so far as to praise this "big, generous chicken" for offering fair sport to the handicapped: "a onearmed, one-legged, or nolegged man may enjoy his chicken-shooting with the best of them... for the chicken may be shot from either the saddle, or any suitable wheeled conveyance, without any need for the gunner to move from his seat. Shooting from the saddle is a method which is common in both West and South, but only the prairie in some form can offer reliable sport to the man on wheels."
Indeed, wealthy sportsmen of the late Nineteenth Century frequently invaded prairie chicken territory for a month or more at a time, summer and fall, basing themselves comfortably on their own private railroad cars, which would be parked on a siding, replete with manservants, wine cellars, ornate china and silverware, and fresh table linen, while the guns fared forth each day in their light spring wagons, following the dogs and easily killing forty or fifty "chickens" apiece between dawn and sunset.
Sandys saw a glorious future for this favorite sport. "Like the quail," he enthused, "the `chicken' follows the plough, which accounts for the gradual extension of its range westward, while the narrowing of the eastward limit is readily explained by the increased number of guns and other destructive agencies."
Nearly a century after Sandys wrote his paean to the greater prairie chicken, I had an opportunity to spend a day in pursuit of this wonder bird on the golden windswept plains of South Dakota. Alas, the things which Sandys hath seen can now be seen no more-at least not in the abundance he witnessed. For one thing, the prairie cock does not follow the plow-in the end, he flees from it. Though he did, for a short while at least, follow the lumberman's axe.
The greater prairie chicken once occupied a vast region where the Eastern oak forests phased into the tall-grass prairie, making its living before the snow fell from the seeds of big bluestem grass (Andropogon gerardi), sometimes called "Turkey Claw," and from acorns in the winter The bird's original range encompassed all or parts of what are now Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and the northwest comer of Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, and perhaps half to three quarters of the vast state of Texas.
There was even an East Coast race of the species, the so-called "heath hen," which thrived in the parklike, firespawned "oak prairies" and sandy blueberry "barrens" that occurred from Maryland and north-central Tennessee to southern New Hampshire and Maine. But finally, pressured on all sides by murderous humanity-my own beloved grandfather, a sometime market hunter, among them-the heath hen was reduced to a remnant population on Martha's Vineyard. The last of the race died in 1932. My granddad followed in 1957.
As the vast white pine forests of the upper Midwest were felled, to be replaced by small farms growing corn, wheat or millet, the greater prairie chicken-always more abundant than the heath hen-moved north into territories it had never occupied before, like the former North Woods of Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. For a brief while, the birds actually benefited from these new sources of feed, learning to glean among the harvested fields of small grains. As long as enough virgin prairie remained for courtship, nesting and brooding, they thrived. Finally, though, they were eliminated east of the Mississippi, and now survive in huntable numbers only in the true, mostly treeless grasslands of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota.
There they had burgeoned for a time in uncountable numbers-indeed, the time Sandys writes about, from 1880 through the 1920s---on the seeds of broomsedge and bluestem, wild berries and the mast produced by but- and blackjack-oaks, along with what small agricultural grains they could snatch from ever-expanding farmland. Often in winter they would congregate wherever oaks could be found in "great musterings" of a thousand, perhaps two thousand birds each. But a combination of bad winters, dust storms, and possibly the overhunting triggered by the Depression of the 1930s sent prairie grouse populations everywhere, spinning downward toward doom.
TODAY, A MAP of remaining prairie chicken distribution resembles a scattering of puny, amoeba-like blotches within the outline of their former range. The greatest number is found in the Flint Hills and adjacent grasslands of east-central Kansas, where in 1967 they were estimated at 750,000 strong. In that same year, Nebraska and South Dakota could count perhaps 100,000 birds apiece. Remnant, and usually protected, breeding populations remain in North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri. Oklahoma, to its credit, has been restocking greater prairie chickens in its northeastern grasslands, and there the population is growing. But in Minnesota, where 411,900 of the birds were killed during the peak population year of 1925, only 5,000 remained a mere forty years later.
By 1982, no more than 700 prairie chickens survived in Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois-"as out of place as wampum on Wall Street," wrote the late John Madson in his poignant study of the tallgrass prairie, Where the Sky Began (Sierra Club Books, 1985).
"They are relics that have long outlived the original prairies that brought them into existence. They now exist on artificial prairies that are their final strongholds east of the Mississippi-little reliquaries of flocks that once spanned the prairie horizons."
Back during the golden age of chicken shooting, Edwyn Sandys once killed, over a three day period, one hundred birds straight with as many shots from his trusty double-ejector gun on the rolling plains of South Dakota-sure testimony to the ease of shooting big, close-holding, raggedly-flushing birds in open country. But he found greater joy in hunting them on the small, hilly, brush-rimmed prairie "islands" of southern Wisconsin where I grew up forty years later and was first turned on to bird hunting by that same "drum-eared lover" -Tympanuchus cupido.
"Much of the timber of these hillsides is small oak, and the general appearance is parklike," he writes. "On such ground the shooting is excellent, there being just enough trees to keep a man keen and careful. Many other places present a snarl of low scrub-oak and hazels, seldom more than waist-high. In such cover the chickens lie like quail, and a good shot can walk them up singly and drop bird after bird till his coat can hold no more-then hey! for the following wagon, to deposit therein the slain, and to resume the beat till the coat is again too heavy for comfort. .. . It is quite true that the number of birds and the possible bags could never rival the possibilities of the mighty grasslands farther west, yet a gun could stop from a dozen to three times that number of birds during a day of hard work, and could a sportsman desire more? Your true sportsman is an artist, not a butcher..."
Well, if you say so, Eddie. As a kid growing up in southern Wisconsin, hunting with my single-shot 28 gauge Savage behind a pair of half wild Irish setters, I counted myself lucky to kill three or four birds a day, out of perhaps three covey rises of twenty or thirty birds each. Only a few times did I manage a double from the same flock. When dogs pin a covey of chicken, the birds rarely flush simultaneously Unlike quail, these birds get up in small, straggling groups, by fours and twos and singles, allowing a cool shot carrying a double gun with crisp ejectors to drop a pair, break the gun, stuff in a couple more shells, and if he's lucky, kill yet another brace as the final birds jump tardily skyward. If you're using a single-shot gun with no ejector, it's more than twice as hard to score a double.
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I can still recall as if it were yesterday the last double but one that I killed on chickens. I was fifteen years old at the time. It was one of "those occasional warm, windless, sleepy spells" of which Sandys had written so fondly at the turn of the century, "so strongly suggestive of the genuine Indian summer of the East. Then the fully matured birds lie like dead things, but rise swift and strong and go whizzing away on what surely will prove very long flights unless the lead prevents."
On that balmy October morning I was clad in my stylish warm-weather hunting garbhigh-top Keds caked with mud, faded Levis, a ripped white teeshirt which bore no logo in those days before we all became walking billboards, and a ragged straw fedora my dad had passed along to me. In lieu of a game bag, I carried an empty flour-sack looped to my belt. Rusty, the male Irish setter who usually accompanied me. was off on personal business that Saturday-perhaps a bitch in heat somewhere in the neighborhoodbut wise old Belle, his partner in crime, trotted ahead as I pounded the thousand acres of virgin tallgrass prairie that still remained between my house and the riverbottom.
I SUSPECTED, AND BELLE SOON CONFIRMED, that the flock of chickens we'd jumped a week earlier was still "usine" in the bluestem near a brush-choked gully that lead down to the river. The birds rarely fed more than a few hundred yards from the gully's edge, so that they could quickly fly back into the tangled sumac, scrub oak and crabapple jungle when threatened. Our strategy, as usual, was to circle wide to the east and pussyfoot our way along the edge of the of the brush until we were between the birds and their hidey-hole, at which point I'd send Belle into the tall grass to seek a point. What little breeze there was that day blew from the northwest, and soon Belle's red-feathered tail told me she had whiffed our prey After loading the gun and taking a spare shell from my pants pocket to hold between the fingers of my fore-end hand for a fast reload, I hied the old girl on.
A hundred yards in, she locked up-head low, ears cocked, tail high and trembling. I came up behind her, my nerves as always atingle, as if I were walking into a minefield laced with Bouncing Betties. As I passed her, she broke point and raced in ahead of me, flushing the flock. Five birds jumped up, and I dropped the trailer in a flurry of white and brown feathers. Then three more flushed as I broke the gun open, groped with clumsy fingers to free the empty casing, and fumbled the second shell into the gun. The second three were well out of range by the time I snapped it shut, but then a single erupted from the grass and flailed away into the breeze. I centered it, angling away to my right, and it tumbled to earth with a satisfying thump. Finally, as I stood there, too stunned even to grin at my good luck so far, much less to reload the Savage, Belle flushed the remaining six birds in the covey I watched them out of sight, alternately beating and gliding on a long, swift slant for the wood-edged riverbottom half a mile away.
Belle brought me the first bird, and as I dropped it in the flour sack an angry voice ruptured my joy
"Hey kid! Whatcha doin? Ya damn near shot us!"
Two red-faced men in work clothes came stomping toward me through the bluestem. They carried surveying geartheodolite, chain, rod, clipboards.
"Bird hunting," I said. And I quickly reloaded the Savage, remembering my run-in with tramps while duck hunting near the railroad tracks the previous fall. "I didn't know there was anyone else in the field. And I was shooting high, anyway you weren't in any danger."
"Don't gimme none of your lip," one man yelled. "We work for the county; I oughta report you. There's a road going in here, and a bunch of new houses, starting next spring. Now get your ass outta here before I call a cop. No hunting allowed!" He was visibly shaking-whether with rage or fear, I couldn't tell. His partner looked at the ground, clearly embarrassed.
Belle brought me the second bird. I put it in the sack and turned to go.
"Maybe you oughta give me those birds," the man hollered after me as I walked back toward the distant road. I just kept going. "Hey, kid! What's your name-I'm gonna report you!"
I turned again and looked at him, the gun upright in one hand but angled slightly in his direction. Then I marched on.
It was a sour way to end a love affair with a splendid gamebird, and for years afterward-while I hunted other birds in other placesthe memory of that seemingly final encounter with prairie chickens still rankled. So last year; when the opportunity arose to spend a day on the South Dakota grasslands in pursuit of prairie grouse, I had to do it. I'd been hunting pheasant at the Paul A. Nelson Farm near Gettysburg, South Dakota, and though the shooting at Nelson's was splendid, it felt a little artificial. We pushed the birds through strips of millet and sorghum, pinning them between lines of drivers and stands of blockers, killing them in great numbers as they finally had to fly. This is a time-honored American method of pheasant hunting, but it certainly wasn't like pounding the prairie for wild, native American birds. So I arranged to spend the day on the true prairies with a local guide name Bob Tinker and his English setters.
At the crack of dawn on that memorable Wednesday, I rendezvoused with Tinker at his home on the outskirts of Pierre. "Don't tell anyone where we're hunting," Tinker told me as we drove out of town. He's a tall, rangy, dark-bearded man of 35, a former track star (hurdles) with the legs to prove it, affable and witty but understandably anxious to protect the exclusivity of his hunting grounds. "We'll see mixed coveys of sharptails and prairie chickens; the limit is three birds per gun of either species."
I flashed on Edwyn Sandys, and his admonition to the "artist" sportsman to limit his kill to three dozen chickens a day.
"Where I'm taking you," Tinker continued, "the birds haven't been pressured much yet this season. They ought to hold tight in front of a point, no wild flushes. The sharpies, if you haven't hunted them before, they're a bit slimmer and lighter than the chickens, with short, pointed tails-kinda like immature hen pheasants. You can tell the chickens by their strong barring, dark brown and almost white on their breasts and wings ... . Hey, look-there go some sharptails!"
The birds, maybe eight or ten of them, had flushed from a roadside ditch as Bob's truck roared past. They flew with the same flap-flap and then glide wingbeat of chickens, and put down in the short grass a few hundred yards from the gravel road. "Let's have a crack at them," said Tinker.
While I broke out my gun, Bob released his senior setter from the dog box; he was a handsome, square-headed chap name Colt. We circled downwind and well into the prairie, then hunted back toward where the birds had landed. Colt was quartering well before us-head up, sampling the wind. But we'd walked too far in from the road, and suddenly the birds flushed wild, out of range to our left. They whizzed a long, long way, as they will "unless the lead prevents."
Just as well, I felt-the encounter had seemed too much like road hunting for my effete Eastern taste: spotting the birds from the truck, dismounting, and walking them up where they'd landed. Then I remembered Saint Sandys' wagons and his no-legged hunters, and had to laugh at my sanctimony. For all Tinker knew, my legs were made of Silly Putty.
BY NOW THE SUN was well clear of the flat horizon and the prairie faded from a rosy gold glow to the flat yellowishwhite of autumn-dried grass, blotched in spots-like the map of fin de siecle prairie chicken distribution-with squiggly amoebas of green and purple where water still encouraged some life. Well away from the highway to Pierre, well into the wild prairie, we stopped on a lonely, poorly maintained dirt road overlooking a rolling sea of grass, stretching vast and seemingly lifeless to the west until a dusty horizon met the windstreaked sky. A lone hawk circled far in the distance.
I took a deep breath, recalling the Wisconsin of my boyhood. And with the first step away from the road, I was back there.
What it's about: walking the grasslands near dawn. Oh sure, the day would become a scorcher, with the mercury touching ninety, but in that hour following sunrise the air was still crisp and fresh. The prairie rolled out before us in an endless scroll, and the dogs-this time Bob's younger setters, named Rajah, Scorch and Aussie-were still frisky, all of us delighted to be alive and hunting up a morning like this.
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And when Scorch locked on point a short while later, down near a damp green line of streambed, well beyond sight of the truck or the road, with only the hawk still circling overhead, nearer now, and the other dogs honored his frozen point, and Bob walked in, and the birds started getting up-big chunky birds, barred brown and white, with that initial leap well into the sky, that flurry of primaries-I had been there long, long before. I shot once, twice. The wind muffled the sound. Two birds fell. And I stood there again as I had long ago, awed and delighted, and too stunned at my good luck to reload.
More birds got up, of course, but I didn't shoot.
"You could have had three from the bunch, if you'd only reloaded," Tinker told me when the smoke cleared. "Your limit, Man."
"I guess," I said, and let it go at that.
But it was the first double I'd shot on prairie chickens in nearly half a century. I guess I didn't want to spoil the symmetry.
That night I slept well. The memory of the red-faced surveyor who'd spoiled my last hunt for prairie hens had been laid to rest, his image erased by this final South Dakota double.
Yes, the surveyor had done his work, all right. The following spring the virgin prairie across from my home in Wisconsin quickly turned into a housing subdivision. Whereas I'd once been awakened by the distant boom of courtship rites as practiced by the Drum-Eared Lover, now all I heard was the whirr of lawnmowers and the thump of backyard basketballs: pleasant enough in its own suburban way, but not quite the same.
"It is a lonely, wild sound made by a lonely wild bird," wrote my friend John Madson of tympanuchus cupido's mating rituals. "It has the quality of an ancient wind blowing across the smokeflap of a wickiupcompanion noise to an Indian courting flute and the drum of unshod pony hooves on bluestem sod. In all of modern America, there is no more lost, plaintive, old-time sound than the booming of a native prairie chicken. And when it is gone, it shall be gone forever. All our television will not bring it back, and none of our spacecraft can take us to where it vanished. It is the last fading voice of the prairie wilderness,. echoing after the lost clouds of curlews and plovers, crying farewell."
Copyright Hearst Magazines Summer 2000
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