Episode 8 - Completely Chicken: Prairie Chicken

You can be chicken, but don’t be completely chicken. Grab your favorite shotgun and go prairie chicken hunting.

Greater Prairie Chicken, also called pinnated grouse, once roamed from Long Island (Heath Hen subspecies) to the Dakotas down to the Texas Gulf Coast (Attwater’s prairie chicken.) They are now limited to remnant native prairies in parts of ND down to Oklahoma and west as far as eastern Colorado. Hunting them is a connection to our pioneering past and the wild, grassland landscape that once defined middle America.

As unusual adventures go, prairie chicken hunting ranks right up there. Most hunters have pursued pheasants, probably some type of quail, but not many have sought the original all-American, native grasslands prairie chicken, a true grouse of the wilds.

You don’t visit a shooting preserve for chickens. They are all wild bred and born. To find them you must first find some remnant of our once vast American prairies. South Dakota. Nebraska. Kansas. A bit of Oklahoma.

Here I am with the first prairie chicken taken from our old Dakota homestead in an estimated 80 years. The reestablishment of grasslands (CRP) in enabling the birds to expand their range.