Among America’s iconic native birds, the lesser prairie chicken can be especially hard to spot — hiding behind shrubs, seldom popping out except before sunrise in spring for flamboyant mating dances.
But now it may become Colorado’s first climate casualty.
A painstaking $428,000 state effort to avert extinction by relocating 205 of these chickens from Kansas to Colorado’s southeastern plains is failing, state records show. Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists, and bird experts, blame hotter, drier conditions. Federal authorities have cited climate change as a factor in their decline. CPW data show the relocated chickens decreased from 139 in 2020 to less than 90.
