Fall & Winter 2012: Volume 33, Numbers 3 & 4 - Missouri Prairie ...

allow mosquitoes to swarm. We used
glow-sticks and an ever-evolving series
of hand signals to communicate as
we made our final capture approach.
Roughly a third of hens captured in
spring were recaptured during summer
night-lighting annually; about a third of
all capture attempts was successful.
In 2010, small, glue-on transmitters
were placed on summer-captured
juveniles for the first time. Due to
higher-than expected mortality among
translocated juveniles following their
release, the two-phase translocation
process was discontinued. During 2011
and 2012, all birds were brought to
Missouri during spring. Overall, 435
birds were translocated between 2008
and 2012. Greater prairie-chickens are
relatively short-lived; even on good habitat
most do not survive past two years.
As a result, the offspring of translocated
birds, not the Kansas birds themselves,
comprise the bulk of the population
now residing at and around Wah’Kon-
Tah Prairie.
We took a very conservative
approach to trapping individual leks.
No more than 20 percent of males were
removed from a lek in any year, and
we avoided removing dominant males
to help maintain the established social
order on the lek. This required trappers
to tear down and rebuild trap arrays
nearly every day, but this labor-intensive
approach helped assure that counts on
Kansas leks remained stable throughout
the project. We also spread trapping
across a larger area each year to minimize
potential negative impacts to the
Kansas population.
Monitoring Translocated
Birds in Missouri
Dispersal: Results of translocation projects
conducted by other organizations in
other states indicate that greater prairiechickens
are more likely to disperse from
sites where habitat is dissimilar to that
of their origin, and from sites not occupied
by native birds. We expected some
translocated birds to disperse from the
Wah’Kon-Tah release site.
Greater prairie-chickens translocated by year, sex, and age class.
Year Adult Males Adult Females Juveniles Total
2008 52 24 27 103
2009 50 25 26 101
2010 41 29 18 88
2011 28 53 - 81
2012 18 44 - 62
Total 189 175 71 435
NOPPADOL PAOTHONG/MDC
One of six grassland grouse species in
North America, greater prairie-chickens
(Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus) once ranged
throughout native prairies of central
North America from southern Canada to
Texas. Historically, they probably occurred
in 20 states and four Canadian provinces.
However, their distribution has changed
drastically over the past 200 years. Today,
greater prairie-chickens are plentiful
enough to be a game species in Kansas,
Nebraska, and South Dakota, but the birds
are absent from Canada, and only small
populations remain in Wisconsin, Minnesota,
Illinois, Oklahoma, and Missouri, where
fewer than 100 individuals native to the
state still survive.
Greater prairie-chicken trapping locations in
the Smoky Hills Region of Kansas. New leks
were trapped each year to assure a conservative
approach. Trapped birds were transported
to Wah’Kon-Tah within six to eight
hours of capture.
Kansas Leks Trapped &
Hen/Chick Capture Locations 2009
Vol. 33 Nos. 3 & 4 Missouri Prairie Journal 13