A lesser prairie-chicken doing its mating dance in northern Oklahoma. | Nattapong Assalee/Getty Images/iStockphoto
The bird above is not your typical charismatic species. It’s no bald eagle, no peregrine falcon.
It’s a groundbird known as the lesser prairie-chicken that lives in the southern Great Plains. It’s not even the greater prairie-chicken, another, related avian species, that’s a bit larger.
Today, however, this bird is very much worth paying attention to.
In 2023, lesser prairie-chickens — which are actually fascinating birds, not least for their ridiculous mating rituals — were granted protection under the Endangered Species Act, the country’s strongest wildlife law. Scientists say this protection is justified: The population of lesser prairie-chickens has crashed since the last century from hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of birds to roughly 30,000 today.
Now the Trump administration is trying to axe those extinction-thwarting protections. In a motion filed earlier this month in a Texas court, the administration argued that federal officials made an error when listing prairie-chickens under the Endangered Species Act. The listing — which makes it illegal to kill or harm the birds, with a number of exceptions — should be tossed out, the administration said.
The move isn’t totally unexpected. Prairie-chickens overlap in some areas with oil and gas drilling. And President Donald Trump has signaled that he will prioritize drilling over environmental safeguards.
Yet it reveals that his administration will take extreme steps to undo wildlife protections if they stand in the way of his agenda. If his administration is successful in delisting the bird, it will signal that no endangered species is safe — especially those, like these chickens, that happen to live where fossil fuels are buried.
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The dance of the prairie-chicken
Male lesser prairie-chickens are extremely extra.
Each spring, they come together in breeding grounds called leks to dance for females, hoping to attract them as mates. They inflate large sacs on their neck, flare yellow combs above their eyes, and raise wing-like feathers behind their heads. Then they stomp their feet and start booming, producing a noise that sounds like sped-up yodeling. (These are not to be confused with the greater sage-grouse, a bird in the same family that has a similarly spectacular display.)
The Great Plains were once filled with these unusual dancing birds, which play important roles in grassland ecosystems: They provide food for raptors, spread seeds, and control insects. But in the last few centuries, prairie-chickens lost most of their habitat — largely to the expansion of oil and gas, commercial farming, housing developments, and, more recently, wind energy. Scientists estimate that the range of lesser prairie-chickens has shrunk by 83 percent to 90 percent since European settlement.
“Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystem on the continent and in the world, and nowhere more so than in the southwestern Great Plains,” said Ted Koch, executive director of the North American Grouse Partnership, a bird conservation group.
Facing extinction as a result of powerful industries, the prairie-chicken has been caught up in a game of political ping pong.
The government first granted them federal protection in 2014. Then, in response to a lawsuit filed by an oil-industry trade group and several counties in New Mexico, the Texas court tossed out the listing in 2015. They were officially delisted in 2016. The suit argued that in granting federal protections the government didn’t adequately consider existing voluntary efforts, such as habitat conservation, to conserve the birds.
Shortly after, the Interior Department — the government agency that oversees endangered species listings — reevaluated the bird and once again determined, under the Biden administration, that it is at risk of extinction, even with those voluntary efforts in place. In 2023, Interior added the chickens back on the endangered species list.
That brings us to the present day, when these forsaken birds could once again lose protection.
Trump moves to strip endangered species protections on a technicality
The Trump administration is arguing that the Interior Department made a mistake when it recently listed the birds again.
It comes down to a somewhat wonky technicality. Briefly, the Endangered Species Act allows the government to grant formal protection to a species or to a population of a species — if those populations are important on their own, and at risk. That’s what the Biden administration did: It determined that there were two distinct populations of lesser-prairie chickens and it granted each of them slightly different protections. One of the populations is in the northern end of the birds’ range, including Oklahoma and Kansas, and the other is in the southern reaches of its range, in Texas and New Mexico.
Under the Trump administration, Interior claims that it didn’t provide enough information to show that the two bird populations are distinct. That’s reason enough to delist the birds, the administration argues, while it reviews their status over the next year. If the species is delisted — even temporarily — the government would be able to permit activities, such as energy projects, even if they might harm the bird and the endangered grasslands it’s found in.
Avian experts, meanwhile, say the reasoning behind the original listing — which was the result of months of work and more than 30,000 public comments — is sound, and these birds are very clearly in trouble. “The North American Grouse Partnership agrees completely that listing of chickens is warranted,” said Koch, a former biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the division within Interior that implements the Endangered Species Act.
The move to delist prairie-chickens appears to be an effort by the Trump administration to skirt wildlife regulations that some perceive to stand in the way of the oil industry, said Jonathan Hayes, executive director of Audubon Southwest, a regional office of the National Audubon Society, a large environmental nonprofit.
“Whether it’s true or not, this chicken symbolizes a challenge, or an impediment, to oil and gas development for industry,” Hayes told Vox. “We would expect this administration to push back on regulations that may or may not impact oil and gas. That’s what it feels like is happening here.”
In a statement to Vox, the Interior Department said it has an “unwavering commitment to conserving and managing the nation’s natural and cultural resources…and overseeing public lands and waters for the benefit of all Americans, while prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people.”
The new administration can quibble with the technical points of the listing, Koch said, but that will do nothing to change the reality: The bird is at risk of extinction and needs to be protected.
“Whether somebody wants to engage in debate on technicalities is up to them, but simply and fundamentally lesser prairie-chickens are threatened with extinction,” Koch said. “Delisting lesser prairie chickens on a technicality is going to do nothing to address the underlying threat to these ecosystems.”
The future for threatened species in the US
There’s no guarantee that prairie-chickens will lose protection.
The Trump administration’s motion to delist the birds came in response to a pair of lawsuits filed by both the state of Texas and groups representing the oil and livestock industries. The suits allege that the Interior Department made a mistake in splitting the birds into two distinct populations and failed to follow the best available information. (Interior’s spokesperson told Vox they will not comment on ongoing litigation.)
Before Trump took office, the government was planning to defend its decision to protect the birds — and to split them up — in court, in response to those lawsuits. Now it’s reversing course and agreeing with Texas and the oil industry to toss out the listing.
It’s possible that the judge overseeing this case could agree to remove protections, said Jason Rylander, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. In that case, groups like his would try to appeal to block the delisting.
The court could also tell the government to review the bird’s status while keeping existing protections in place, Rylander says.
What’s key here is that the decision to list lesser prairie-chickens involved a formal rulemaking process with public input. It’s not clear that the government can simply reverse its decision and yank federal protections without going through that process again.
“The government can’t act in a capricious way,” Hayes of Audubon said. “It can’t just blow with the wind, and that’s exactly what it did here. They just changed their minds when the administration changed. I’m not sure how they will legally defend their complete 180.”
But no matter how this plays out, this effort to delist lesser prairie-chickens puts other threatened species in an even more precarious spot, especially those that live in regions with oil and gas.
One example is the endangered dunes sagebrush lizard. It’s a small, scaly reptile that lives in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, the largest oil-producing region in the country.
The state of Texas similarly sued the government after it listed the dunes sagebrush lizard as endangered last year. The suit — which asks the court to vacate the endangered listing — alleges, among other things, that the government didn’t rely on the best available data to evaluate the lizard’s extinction risk. That case is still pending, though environmental advocates fear that the Trump administration could side with Texas and claim it made a mistake when listing the lizard.
Then there’s the beloved monarch butterfly.
Following decades of population decline, the government proposed federal protections for the iconic insect late last year. Monarch habitat similarly overlaps with the oil and gas industry, as well as commercial farmland. Fossil-fuel groups have already asked the Trump administration to reconsider the listing.
“As the Trump administration is in power, we can expect that endangered species protections are going to be under attack,” Rylander said. “I think there’s a chance we can stop this in court,” he said of efforts to delist the prairie-chicken, “but I think if we don’t, we will see more efforts to remand and vacate listings that they [the Trump administration] don’t want to have in place anymore.”
It’s important to remember that wildlife protections benefit people, Koch said. And prairie-chickens are a good example. Most of the remaining birds live on sustainably managed, private ranchlands in the Great Plains, he said. Those lands — those working grassland ecosystems — are under threat from energy development and other industries that are more profitable.
Saving prairie chickens means saving those lands. And saving those lands benefits the ranchers that live on them, he said.
“The purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to conserve the ecosystems upon which we and all other species depend,” Koch said. “People depend on grassland ecosystems, and so do lesser prairie-chickens. We need to save grasslands for both of us.”
Clarification, May 16, 3:30 pm ET: This article was originally published on May 15 and has updated with more information about where the dune sagebrush lizard lives.
