In the Great Plains, Landowners Are Banking On the Lesser Prairie-Chicken’s Survival

Dallas May can’t help but feel that something is missing. For more than a decade he’s been working to restore shortgrass prairie habitat to support wildlife on his family’s 20,000-acre ranch in southeast Colorado. His family rotationally grazes their Limousin cattle to give native grasses time to rest and recover, moving the 800 ebony and caramel-colored cows from pasture to pasture to feed on buffalograss and blue grama that grow near sand dropseed and little bluestem. Reintroduced black-footed ferrets scurry through tunnels in the loamy ground. Horned Larks and Grasshopper Sparrows sing from grass stalks, and elusive Eastern Black Rails scuttle through wetlands. But there’s one species May hasn’t seen move in yet: the Lesser Prairie-Chicken. “We’re hoping every day they show up,” he says.

If the grouse do take up residence, it’ll be obvious come mating season. In early spring the stocky birds with bushy orange eyebrows gather at breeding sites called leks, where they perform loud, elaborate mating displays. Males dance to woo females, and the drumroll of their rapid foot stamping interspersed with their bubbly booms and cackles can be heard up to a mile away. May has good reason to hope they’ll appear. Amid the region’s sea of inhospitable cropland, his ranch provides a verdant bridge between hotspots critical for the species’ continued existence in Colorado.

The Lesser Prairie-Chicken is in serious trouble throughout its range in the southern Great Plains. Over the past six decades the species has experienced one of the most precipitous declines of any bird in U.S. history, its populations plummeting more than 95 percent due in large part to habitat loss and fragmentation exacerbated by energy development and climate-change-driven fire and drought. The decline is worrisome not only for the chicken but also for an array of birds and other wildlife that depend on the dwindling habitat. “Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystem on the continent,” says Ted Koch, executive director of the nonprofit North American Grouse Partnership. 

Because 95 percent of prairie-chicken habitat is on private property, landowners like May are essential to reversing the trend and saving this species. But restoring and maintaining native grasslands and prairies isn’t cheap, and there are limited financial incentives for doing so—especially at the scale needed to protect the large tracts of relatively intact habitat the birds require. May makes his conservation efforts pay by working with Audubon’s Conservation Ranching Program, one of the nation’s largest nongovernmental efforts to protect grasslands. The program certifies landowners who develop a management plan that sustains high-quality habitat for target species in their region, allowing them to market their beef as bird-friendly and eventually sell it at a premium. Today 116 ranches encompassing 3 million acres participate in the program. Two of those properties, including May’s ranch, are in Lesser Prairie-Chicken habitat. 

While Audubon’s program is growing, it’s tiny compared to the U.S. farm bill—a package of legislation that governs food and agriculture programs. It includes the biggest pot of federal money for conservation on private lands, currently paying out some $6 billion annually to thousands of producers. However, that pool of money has failed to keep pace with economic realities for landowners, and future funding is uncertain in the current political climate. “The Lesser Prairie-Chicken just cannot seem to get enough support financially to do any really monumental, impactful changes,” says May, who has seen ranches around his family’s property converted to farmland.

New funding streams that put more money in landowners’ pockets could help change that—in Colorado and beyond. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) listed the grouse under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 2023, and the new protections mean that energy companies that disturb prairie-chicken habitat must pay for restoration. Conservationists anticipate that requirement will significantly increase the protected acreage in the energy-rich southern Great Plains. “The listing was driven by science, and the science is showing that the Lesser Prairie-Chicken needs more protected habitat,” says Felice Stadler, vice president of government affairs at Audubon. “The question is: What does that look like on the ground? What is it going to look like to get more protected habitat for this species?” 

For decades many have strived to stop the decline of these distinctive grouse, only to see prairie-chickens continue to dwindle. More money for conservation could offer producers fair market value for their efforts, potentially protecting a million acres of remaining habitat while accommodating energy industry needs—and perhaps finally shift the balance in favor of the bird. 

For millennia Lesser Prairie-Chickens thrived in the southern Great Plains, where their courtship displays inspired Indigenous dances passed down from generation to generation. The region’s rich mosaic of short and tall grasses, shinnery oak, sand sagebrush, and forbs provided cover for the birds as well as insects, leaves, and seeds for them to eat. Wildfire and grazing by bison and other native herbivores sustained the mix of vegetation and kept the grasslands largely free of trees. The hardy birds evolved to handle harsh weather, enduring heat waves and droughts that might kill half or more of their vulnerable chicks. Come wetter, cooler years, the grouse would bounce back.

But there’s only so much even a tough bird can take. The Lesser Prairie-Chicken’s historic range overlaps with the Permian Basin, the nation’s largest oil-producing region and a major source of natural gas, and the southern Great Plains are prime real estate for harvesting wind energy. The region also produces much of the country’s corn, cotton, and wheat—drawing unsustainable quantities of groundwater to do so. 

Today about 85 percent of the intact grasslands the chickens once inhabited have disappeared, and the presence of oil and gas wells, power lines, and wind turbines can drive birds away from places they might inhabit—tall structures provide perches for raptors, so the grouse keep their distance. An estimated 26,500 chickens survive in isolated patches of grasslands in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. This remaining habitat is largely unprotected private land in a region that is expected to become increasingly hot and dry due to climate change, making it that much harder for the bird to hold on.

Two major voluntary initiatives arose in the early 2010s to try to stave off a listing under the ESA, which makes it illegal to harm or kill a protected species without the government’s authorization. Landowners, energy companies, conservationists, and wildlife managers—many of which had long been at loggerheads—crafted an offset program as part of a range-wide conservation plan. Companies paid to mitigate harm they caused the bird and agreed to avoid or minimize disruptive activities, like drilling in the early morning hours during mating season. A nonprofit representing state wildlife agencies distributed the money to landowners who agreed to improve chicken habitat. Meanwhile, the federal Lesser Prairie-Chicken Initiative sought out landowners within the bird’s range to enroll in the farm-bill-funded Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which provides funding and assistance to enhance soil and water quality and strengthen wildlife habitat on working lands. 

EQIP isn’t the only farm bill program that has helped prairie-chickens. While EQIP allows producers to grow crops and graze cattle on the improved acreage, an older initiative that has been instrumental in protecting the birds pays farmers and ranchers to take land out of production and plant grasses and forbs that support wildlife. Through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), created in 1985, landowners across the Great Plains renewed swaths of a landscape that had been degraded during the Dust Bowl. Farmers in the shortgrass prairie ecoregion, which includes the Smoky Hill River Corridor area of northwest Kansas, planted an especially diverse mix of native grasses, attracting Lesser Prairie-Chickens back to what is now home to two-thirds of the entire species. 

A recent successful translocation project further underscored the importance of protecting grassland habitat. From 2016 to 2019 biologists moved 411 chickens from the Kansas stronghold to rebuild populations in the Comanche and Cimarron National Grasslands, along the southern Kansas-Colorado border. Those sites once made up the bulk of public land with good chicken habitat, but drought wiped out most of the grouse that lived there about a decade ago. When scientists tracked the relocated birds, they found that nearby agricultural land conserved and improved through the CRP provided important habitat continuity: Some birds dispersed and set up new leks and nesting grounds there, while others used the privately owned acreage as stepping stones before settling on the public grasslands.

“We know what works,” says Matt Bain, the Southern High Plains Grassland project manager for The Nature Conservancy. “It’s not that complicated.”

But there are significant challenges to funding habitat restoration. For instance, CRP contracts last for only 10 to 15 years unless a landowner re-enrolls, and the amount of money they can make hasn’t budged from the $50,000 cap set when the program began 40 years ago. Enrollment has dropped significantly from a peak of 36.8 million acres in 2007 to 24.8 million acres in 2024. More landowners would likely enroll if the government increased the payment cap and number of acres eligible for the program, conservationists say. Today the CRP pays landowners less than $80 per acre, and with the payment cap, the most they can enroll is roughly 625 acres. 

In contrast, by planting corn, a farmer could earn around $135 an acre. Leasing to energy developers can bring in far more: $500 per acre for oil and gas production, $800 per acre for solar installations, and $15,000 per acre for wind turbines. “People are having to make business decisions that affect how much money they can save for their kids’ college,” Bain says. “They have to earn a living just like everybody else.” 

As of 2022, landowners had enrolled more than 1.8 million acres in the CRP across the species’ range, and the Lesser Prairie-Chicken Initiative had signed up more than 900 landowners to improve 1.6 million acres of habitat through EQIP. The voluntary offset program, meanwhile, had collected $14 million from 127 energy companies and contracted 12 landowners to conserve nearly 53,000 acres.

Yet the voluntary efforts weren’t enough to save the species, the FWS determined in 2022. The agency had previously listed the bird in 2014, a decision a federal judge overturned in 2015, siding with oil and gas interests that contended the FWS had overlooked existing conservation programs. Environmental groups filed a new petition to list the bird and a lawsuit against the first Trump administration alleging inaction, which led to a 2019 settlement that required the FWS to make a new decision. Effective March 2023, the prairie-chicken’s northern population was listed as threatened and the southern population as endangered. So far legal attempts to reverse the latest action haven’t succeeded. “I think it’s safe to say that this is one of the most contentious listing decisions, if not the most,” says Jonathan Hayes, executive director of Audubon Southwest. “The listing and the regulations that come with it are a necessary restart,” he adds. “We’ve exhausted all other possibilities.” 

The listing could spur unprecedented investment in improving the landscape. Not only will landowners receive federal payments to enhance habitat, the decision also requires a new, mandatory offset program. “I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been in my career,” says Jonathan Reitz, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologist who worked on the recent translocation project. “For the first time ever, there’s money to lock in land for long-term prairie-chicken management.” 

Mark Gardiner’s ranch in southwest Kansas has the prairie-chickens that Dallas May longs for—plenty of them. Gardiner’s family does most of its work on the 48,000-acre property on horseback, and when he rides through the mixed-grass prairie where his Angus cattle graze the birds occasionally fly up in front of him or emit cackles and clucks. “I’ve heard them all my life. A lot of times you’ll hear them without seeing them, and it just makes you smile,” says Gardiner, whose family has owned the ranch since the 1880s. “Where we are is the absolute epicenter of the Lesser Prairie-Chicken.”

Those thriving chickens led Wayne Walker to knock on Gardiner’s door a couple of years before the birds were first listed. Walker runs Common Ground Capital, a company that sells credits to developers to offset their environmental impacts and then uses that money to pay landowners a market rate to permanently protect and restore habitat strongholds—a system called conservation banking. Population data had identified the area on and around Gardiner’s property as high-quality habitat, ideal for a conservation bank. It was a good fit when Walker sought to help a power provider in Colorado voluntarily compensate for the land it would disturb to build transmission lines. Through the deal Walker brokered, Gardiner received a seven-figure lump sum to put more than 3,000 acres of chicken habitat, including leks, into a permanent conservation easement. “We have to start paying these landowners for being good stewards,” Walker says.

Under the Lesser Prairie-Chicken ESA listing, developers who disturb the species’ habitat must mitigate the impact—and conservation banking is one of the main ways of doing so. For every acre of habitat that oil and gas or renewable energy companies develop, two must be identified, restored, and enhanced. In return, energy companies avoid legal liabilities that can total millions of dollars if their activities unintentionally harm the birds. The government approves the industry permits and the sites for conservation banking on private property, and Common Ground Capital brokers deals (currently the only approved private-sector entity to do so). Since the listing went into effect, it has facilitated easements for three projects totaling roughly 12,000 acres.

The FWS estimates the conservation banking system could safeguard one million acres of habitat. The United States had record-breaking growth in renewable energy capacity last year, and wind and solar production are expected to dramatically accelerate thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIL), which allocated a combined $97 billion for clean energy development. Oil production also rose to record highs in 2024, and the Trump administration has vowed to increase fossil fuel production, which could generate tens of millions of dollars for prairie-chicken habitat conservation. 

The birds need every protected acre they can get, Hayes says, and he’s optimistic about the conservation banking ratio. “Two to one doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, but it’s a great starting point,” he says—especially if those acres can provide connectivity among big areas of core chicken habitat. “There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful about our ability to come together, to mount a real effort to save this bird.”

At the same time, uncertainty looms. In January lawmakers in the Senate and the House introduced legislation that would strip the species of its protected status, though those bills haven’t moved out of committee. Last year Congress extended the farm bill for one year, but whether legislators will renew it when it expires in September or maintain its conservation funding is unknown. 

Additionally, the renewable energy development that could both help incentivize habitat restoration and address the climate crisis faces new pressures. President Trump has pledged to halt federal support for clean power, and on January 20 he paused disbursement of IRA and BIL funds for a 90-day review period. For now, there’s no telling whether the pause, which affects wind and solar projects already underway, will be temporary or become permanent. 

Gardiner doesn’t know what will come of the posturing. What he does know is that multiple neighbors have expressed interest in conservation banking and that these new funding programs make it easier to maintain the prairie-chicken strongholds. The birds were there long before he had an easement, he says, and they remain because of his family’s efforts, not in spite of them. “We’ve taken care of the land, so it’ll take care of us,” he says. “That’s going to be good for all kinds of wildlife, as well as the people and the cattle we work with.”

For Colorado producers like May, there’s a new avenue for doing just that. After a drought threatened to wipe out all of its Lesser Prairie-Chickens, last year the state made conserving habitat for the species a top funding priority. Through the Colorado Wildlife Habitat Program, a pool of some $12 million will be available annually to farmers and ranchers who maintain tracts of healthy grasslands and prairie. 

May has seen the benefits of restoring habitat, both for his bottom line and for an array of native wildlife—including the prairie-chickens he’s spotted passing through his property. As the grasses and forbs green up this spring, May will be keeping an eye and ear out, eager to welcome Lesser Prairie-Chickens should they at long last return to make the land he manages their home. “Someday I hope they stop and set up a lek,” he says. “And then we’ll do everything we can to keep them there.”

This story originally ran in the Spring 2025 issue as “Banking on a Bird.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.