Conservancy buys 6,000 acres to protect lesser prairie chickens in Texas High Plains

Former Fitzgerald Ranch is group's first conservation purchase in the region

San Antonio, Texas — The Nature Conservancy of Texas has purchased the 6,000-acre Fitzgerald Ranch in the High Plains of West Texas to protect habitat for lesser prairie chickens and other native wildlife found in the region, officials with the organization announced Monday. Located about 40 miles southwest of Lubbock in Yoakum and Terry counties, the property is the first land purchase the non-profit, habitat-conservation organization has made in this area of the state.

The Nature Conservancy will create a nature preserve on the former ranch as the foundation of its Yoakum Dunes Project, named for the Lea-Yoakum Dunes system, which is characterized by deep sand with dunes rising to 30 feet high, vegetated with native grasses and small shrubs. These dunes are part of a series of dune systems straddling the border shared by northwest Texas and eastern New Mexico.

Lesser prairie chicken.

© Tom Harvey/Texas Parks and Wildlife Department

“This one of the most wildlife-rich parts of Texas and the ranch is in a new landscape for The Nature Conservancy’s work,” said Jeff Francell, The Nature Conservancy’s director of land and water protection, who represented the organization in the land purchase. “We hope to build on the established work of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department here to provide a research and conservation-demonstration site for grassland and wildlife-habitat enhancement.”

TPWD has been working in the region for more than a decade, noted Texas Parks and Wildlife Commissioner Mark Bivins of Amarillo.

“I’ve been to the Fitzgerald Ranch, and I can tell you this important property shows the great value of private land stewards,” Bivins said. “For several generations, this ranching family has taken good care of their land, working with Texas Parks and Wildlife biologists and others. That’s why you can find lesser prairie chickens there today, because the natural habitat is in excellent condition.”

He added it is important to realize that, besides helping one rare bird, restoring and protecting native range helps a wide variety of other prairie wildlife. “Habitat is the key, and good land stewards are the key to good habitat,” he said.

The lesser prairie chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) is a keystone species of the southern Great Plains and a close relative of the greater prairie chicken, although the ranges of the two birds are separate. A candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act, the lesser prairie chicken has seen a decrease in its population of more than 90 percent since the early 1900s, primarily due to the conversion of its habitat from grasslands and rangeland to cropland, poor grazing-management practices and habitat fragmentation. About 32,000 lesser prairie chickens remain in the wild today in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

Due to land stewardship efforts on the Fitzgerald Ranch, the property conserves the native grasses and shinnery oaks found on sandy soils that provide habitat for these prairie chickens. More than 300 lesser prairie chickens have been observed on the ranch by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologists.

Melba Fitzgerald of Plains, Texas, the former owner of the property with her son-in-law, Clay Helms, said her late husband’s family established the Fitzgerald Ranch in 1904. Her husband, Johnnie Fitzgerald, was the third generation of Fitzgeralds on the land. They were married for 57 years until his death two years ago.

She recalled frequent sightings of lesser prairie chickens on the ranch, along with plentiful pronghorns and mule deer. “One day soon after we were married, Johnnie and I were out in our old red Jeep working on a windmill and the deer came right up to us, within six or seven feet and just stood staring at us,” she said. “I guess they were curious about that red Jeep.”

She has mixed emotions about selling the land, but said she and her husband had decided before his death that she should sell the place. “I had four daughters, not four sons,” she said with a chuckle.

“One of the reasons I decided to sell the ranch to The Nature Conservancy was that I felt the land and the wildlife would be preserved and be taken care of,” she said. “That was important to the family.”

The Yoakum Dunes Project lies in the center of more than half a million acres of contiguous native rangeland – one of the few remaining large, intact parcels of Shortgrass Prairie in Texas – surrounded by lands whose owners are interested in conservation. Biologist Heather Whitlaw, a wildlife diversity specialist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department based in Lubbock, noted that permanent conservation of this land is important to the survival of lesser prairie chickens. The entire 6,000-acre property provides good prairie chicken habitat.

“Prairie chickens need large blocks of suitable habitat to maintain healthy population numbers,” she said. “Without large blocks of habitat, lesser prairie chicken populations will become more fragmented and continue to decline. Conservation of the species is also important to private landowners in the region, who hope to keep the bird off the endangered species list.”

Whitlaw added that land conservation here also benefits the playas – small isolated wetlands filled periodically with rainwater and surface-water runoff – that are a primary source of recharge for the Ogallala Aquifer in Texas’ High Plains, which provides water for human consumption and irrigation for the region.

She noted that the Fitzgerald family allowed TPWD to use the ranch as an official Study Area for monitoring lesser prairie chicken populations to determine long-term population trends for more than 10 years, and the property also is used by Texas Tech University to conduct TPWD-funded research on the species there.

Population studies show that prairie chicken numbers on the property have been growing steadily and have recently leveled off, while neighboring landowners have reported finding prairie chickens in places they haven’t been seen before. “That could mean the birds on this land could be providing a source for new populations of lesser prairie chickens,” Whitlaw said.

Grasslands are regarded by conservation scientists as the most endangered ecosystem in North America, and the birds of the grasslands have shown steeper population declines than any other group of North American species. Other birds that will be protected on the new preserve include Cassin’s sparrow, lark bunting, ferruginous hawk, western burrowing owl, northern bobwhite quail and scaled quail.

The deep sands of the area are unusual in the High Plains of Texas, found only in the southwest and northeast portions of the Panhandle. Unique grass species found in the region include sand reed and sand bluestem, and the grasslands are dotted with shinnery oak and sand sage, both small shrubs. The dunes were created by wind-deposited sand that originated from a Pleistocene-epoch geologic formation, called the Blackwater Draw Formation, approximately 1.5 million years ago.

The ecological wealth of the High Plains is threatened by conversion of grasslands to other land uses and fragmentation of the land into increasingly smaller parcels. Healthy land functions also are challenged by the suppression of naturally occurring fires and the spread of invasive species. The High Plains lie within in an area that scientists call the Southern Shortgrass Prairie Ecoregion, covering parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming.

The Nature Conservancy paid $1.2 million for the land. The purchase will be funded through a 3-to-1 matching grant from the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Program through the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. This means the Conservancy will have to raise a quarter of the purchase price – along with more than $200,000 in startup costs – from private donors.

The Conservancy also has been in discussion with other landowners in the area whose property may eventually be added to the new preserve.

Photo downloads:

Shortgrass prairie 1 - Photo credit: © Lee Elliott/The Nature Conservancy
Shortgrass prairie 2 - Photo credit: © Lee Elliott/The Nature Conservancy

Caption: The Yoakum Dunes Project in the Texas High Plains will conserve 6,000 acres of shortgrass prairie.

Lesser prairie chicken 1 - Photo credit: © Gerard Bertrand/Texas Parks and Wildlife Department
Lesser prairie chicken 2 - Photo credit: © Tom Harvey/Texas Parks and Wildlife Department

Caption: The lesser prairie chicken, a keystone species of the southern Great Plains, is a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The Nature Conservancy is the leading conservation organization working to protect the most ecologically important lands and waters around the world for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at nature.org. In the Lone Star State, The Nature Conservancy of Texas owns more than 30 nature preserves and conservation projects and assists private landowners to conserve their land through more than 80 voluntary land-preservation agreements. The Nature Conservancy of Texas protects 250,000 acres of wild lands and, with partners, has conserved 750,000 acres for wildlife habitat across the state. Visit The Nature Conservancy of Texas on the Web at nature.org/texas.