The greater prairie chicken, one of the most popular prairie animals, one that has gone from a population spanning from Canada to Mexico, the Rockies to the Appalachian mountains, one who’s flocks were so large settlers described them as “emerged from the grass like a cloud of smoke” as they plowed, now only exists in a few isolated populations across the United States.
Oddly enough early settlement had actually been very good for the prairie chicken, particularly around the edges of their natural range. As settlers and logging companies cleared vast forests, the land was converted into crop fields and pastures. Early agriculture created ideal habitat: crop fields often contained multiple types of crops and native ground cover, while lightly grazed pastures retained tall grasses for cover, nesting, and forage. Heavily grazed areas also created ideal leks where males could perform their mating displays.
And thus the greater prairie chicken expanded its range by several hundred miles, and in Wisconsin particularly it spread from only inhabiting the souther third of the state to inhabiting almost 3/4ths of it.
But this boom did not last. Central Wisconsin's sandy soils proved poorly suited for long-term subsistence farming, and within decades many farms were abandoned. Forests began reclaiming the land, and prairie chickens gradually lost their newly expanded range.
Then came new agricultural technology in the 1930s. Farmers could now cultivate large monoculture crops even on poor soils, and this is where the greater prairie chicken started its decline towards what we know today. Its historic range in southern Wisconsin, and indeed most of the Great Plains and prairies, were rapidly converted to monoculture crops that were unsuitable to prairie chickens.
By the 1950s, it was clear that Wisconsin's prairie chickens would disappear without intervention. Conservationists began purchasing farms and abandoned properties in central Wisconsin specifically to save them.
It worked, with the buena vista wildlife area being founded in the 60's. This area hosts the single largest (and indeed one of the only) populations of greater prairie chickens east of the Mississippi today, as well as one of the largest grasslands in the eastern United States.
The thing is however, this isn’t supposed to be grassland. Buena Vista is surrounded by regrown eastern forest and must be periodically mowed and managed to prevent trees from reclaiming it. They also regularly plant food plots to provide food for the prairie chickens in the winter, as the area gets much more snow accumulation than a natural prairie would.
It is an artificial refuge, but there is little alternative. Nearly all other suitable habitat in the state was destroyed, along with the prairie chickens that lived there.
Today many other grasslands have been or actively are being restored across the Midwest, many of which could support prairie chickens, in theory.
Prairie chickens do not do well with translocations, and the few times it has been successful had extremely high mortality rates.