The Attwater’s Prairie Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido attwateri) is a species of grouse that once numbered at least a million along millions of acres of the coastal prairies of Texas and Louisiana. As people became more and more industrialized, more and more native grasslands were plowed for crops and pastures. By 1919, the Attwater’s prairie chicken had vanished from Louisiana and their numbers in Texas were dwindling. By 1937, hunting of the Attwater’s ended because only around 8,700 of the birds were left in Texas. In 1967, they were listed as endangered and in 1973 they were protected by the Endangered Species Act. Now these birds are down to just three small tracts of prairie land – The Attwater’s Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge (APCNWR), The Nature Conservancy’s Texas Prairie Preserve (TNC), and some private land near Goliad, Texas.
So few Attwater’s Prairie Chickens were left in the wild, that a captive breeding program had to be created to save the species. The program began in 1992 and the Houston Zoo joined the effort soon after that.
The Houston Zoo works in cooperation with five other zoological institutions as part of the Attwater’s Prairie Chicken Recovery Team: Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, San Antonio Zoo, Sea World of San Antonio, Caldwell Zoo, and Abilene Zoo. These facilities work in conjunction with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and The Nature Conservancy in order to help the Attwater’s Prairie Chicken population grow in the wild through captive breeding, rearing, and release into the wild.
Attwater Prairie Chicken Part #1 was posted 2/16/10
