Long-distance traveling prairie chicken covers 1,180 miles through Missouri and Iowa

One prairie chicken has logged enough miles since April 4 to have completed 45 marathons. In all, the chicken has traveled 1,180 miles through Iowa and Missouri, though sometimes it only goes around and around in circles. Still, it seems impressive for one small bird. (Photo submitted to Des Moines Register)

The long-distance traveler, No. 112, "is part of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ efforts to reintroduce a species that once gathered in great flocks of as many as 30,000 but disappeared from the Iowa landscape by the 1950s because of over-hunting and the cultivation of the vast majority of Iowa’s prairies and grasslands for agriculture," Mike Kilen reports for the Des Moines Register.

Hunting the birds "was outlawed in 1917 in Iowa, but the loss of habitat couldn’t sustain any re-population," Kilen reports. "In the early 1990s, wildlife officials brought in birds from Kansas but only a couple dozen were left by 2000. The DNR translocated 48 more birds in 2012 and 73 in 2013, this time from Nebraska to the Grand River Grasslands, a 70,000-acre project by both Iowa and Missouri natural resources departments and other conservation partners." (Iowa State University map)

No. 112, one of 10 birds fit with GPS monitors, immediately took off on a journey that took it in roughly widening circles, then a veer toward its old haunts. Jen Vogel of Iowa State University told Kilen, “We did expect a range of maybe 50 miles. We really didn’t expect this distance. Nobody really knows why. We might assume that since she came from Nebraska and we moved her to Iowa, she doesn’t know where the appropriate habitat might be. It seems like the bird is looking.” (Read more)