The prairie chicken: Chapman's warning, and the last bird

1880 to 3 April 1972

The warning, 1880: Of the prairie chicken Chapman wrote the most prophetic sentence in his natural-history chapter: the bird remained, but "if not carefully protected, must ere long follow the wild turkey, never to return." The chicken was the prairie's own bird — a grouse of the open grass, booming on its leks each spring — and St. Joseph County's prairies, Portage Prairie among them, stood at the eastern edge of its Indiana range. Chapman's conditional proved out almost to the letter: protection came late and thin, the prairies went under the plow and the ditch, and the bird followed the turkey — except that no restoration followed it back.

The end, dated: Indiana's prairie chickens contracted westward into the Kankakee sands country of Newton County, west of this county, and the state's record of the end is a single named observation. On the chilly morning of 3 April 1972, Robert D. Feldt, an Indiana Department of Natural Resources wildlife research biologist who had worked on prairie chicken research since 1963, walked a ditch bank on the Atkinson tract in northern Newton County and found one cock prairie chicken, booming alone on the stubble. "Then he flushed, and that was the last time I ever saw an Indiana prairie chicken," Feldt wrote. "To my knowledge, that was the last authentic [confirmed] prairie chicken sighting in Indiana. That bird may very well have been the last of his race in Indiana; a race that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands in our state." The range tables of the modern ornithological record carry the same verdict in one line: Indiana — population extirpated, 1972. No St. Joseph County last-bird record exists; the county's chickens left no dated farewell in the sources reached, and the file does not invent one. What the county holds is Chapman's warning, written while the birds were still here to be warned about.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, pp. 340–343.
2. Steve Jones, "After the Boom: The Demise of the Indiana Prairie Chicken," Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History (Indiana Historical Society), Spring 1992 — Feldt's account of 3 April 1972, the Atkinson tract, Newton County; the state population's decline in the same account.
3. Birds of the World (Cornell Lab of Ornithology), Greater Prairie-Chicken range-trends appendix — Indiana, population extirpated 1972.