Many years ago while returning from a bird hunting trip in North Dakota we stopped along a gravel road in NW MN and met a few gentlemen with some strange looking birds sitting on their tailgates. I had just shot a few sharptails and was familiar with both ruffed grouse and spruce hens, but these were something different. When I asked about them, they told me that they were Prairie chickens. After some research I learned that Prairie Chickens once covered a majority of Minnesota but now only exist in small pockets of open prairie and that in order to hunt them you needed to put in for a lottery. So the next year I applied for that zone and was lucky enough to draw a tag. That fall I stopped to hunt the same general area with my two dogs. We had walked the tall grasses just like I always do for sharptail and pheasants until I got tired and decided to head back. I took a shortcut across what looked to be cut clover and it wasn’t much longer than a mowed lawn, just then my 2 labs went wild and kicked up a bird for me. Low and behold I had shot my very first Prairie chicken! I was hoping to mount it but my young dogs had played tug’O war with it and tore it up pretty well. Either way it was a fun adventure and one for the books.
Fast forward many years later I had moved from the northern boreal forests to the glacier lakes area of west central MN. As I began learning more about the area I found out that Rosthay MN is considered the Prairie Chicken capitol of MN, in fact they have a giant statue of one to celebrate it!
And so this past fall I applied for a Prairie chicken tag and once again I was lucky enough to get drawn. This time my zone was just north of Rosthay which is about an hour from my home. I spent a fair amount of time scouting the area looking for public land to walk and had contacted local biologists and friends who had much more experience with these birds.
The season is a week long and although I hit it hard it wasn’t hard enough to find any birds. I had brought the dog with me to school and squeezed in a few evening hunts and had it put on more than a few miles in search of some birds. On the last day of my season I ended up flushing a few birds in the wide open grasses far out of range. I was humbled once again by my quarry and decided my first victory was just blind luck, better luck next year.
As the school year progressed I learned that our local DNR office has a blind that can be reserved to observe the spring Prairie chicken mating dances. The birds will show up around a “Lek” or what is nicknamed a “Booming grounds” where they conduct a unique mating ritual. I reserved the blind for this spring and was lucky enough to make it out there. We had to hike out in the dark and get there well before sunrise. Pretty soon the Prairie darkness was filled with sounds of birds cooing, hooting and giggling. There was 19 males dancing and chasing each other off vying for the attention of one lone female. It was really something to see and makes me appreciate the efforts being made to promote expanding prairie chicken habitat.
If you’d like to see some of this behavior in action, here’s link to a video from the MN DNR and more details can be found at the MN Prairie Chicken Society
