AttwatersPrairieChicken_StormsandFloods_Rossignol_Terry_ColumbusTX_23January2021_Reel4048.mp3

Terry Rossignol [00:00:00] The last couple of years that I was working at the Refuge, we experienced the 2016 Tax Day flood. Couldn't, a flooding that, on the magnitude that pretty much I think about a third of the refuge was totally underwater. I mean, I'm talking about with a foot or more of water, was covering the whole entire Refuge.

Terry Rossignol [00:00:28] And it happened right at nesting time, April of 2016. Couldn't have happened at a worse time. We had, I believe, a record number of hens that were on the ground. Of course, all of those nests were wiped out. We essentially had no reproduction on the Refuge that year, and thought, OK, another bad year.

Terry Rossignol [00:00:53] Well, 2017, we had Hurricane Harvey hit, if you remember that. That's probably one of the worst hurricanes that hit the Texas coast. Well, that hit, I believe, it was in August of 2017, right at a time when we were releasing prairie chickens from the captive flock. And again, all of our efforts for that summer pretty much went down the drain with many mortalities of prairie chickens, you know.

Terry Rossignol [00:01:29] And, you know, after those two years, we're sitting here going, you know, what's it going to take to see some real positive stuff occur with this species?

Terry Rossignol [00:01:43] And it, to me, it was pretty apocalyptic at that time. It was like, OK, you know, what do we do?

Terry Rossignol [00:01:50] Well, obviously, the following year, I believe in 2019, prairie chicken numbers in the spring dropped to an all-time low, I think, don't quote me exactly, but it was something like 26 birds estimated in the wild. That's about as low as you can get without pretty much going extinct.

Terry Rossignol [00:02:10] And we knew that was going to happen because of the past two events, at a really bad time.

Terry Rossignol [00:02:17] And you know what? This past spring, in 2020, we had a spring count. We had the highest number of prairie chickens - just, what, two years later or so? At the highest number of prairie chickens we've had ever in the spring, since the mid-1990s.

Terry Rossignol [00:02:45] So these birds can really rebound quite rapidly, even after being down in the dumps. Within a couple years, a couple of good years of weather, really sticking to the, being able to to bring, you know work on captive breeding, we had some record number of releases in those couple of years.

Terry Rossignol [00:03:07] I mean, things can go the other way, just can go in a positive way just as fast as they can go in the negative direction. And so I think we're just not quite, me personally, I don't think we're quite ready to pull, to pull the plug on this species.

Terry Rossignol [00:03:23] I think there's still hope. And I think there's still, there's still an ability to bring these guys up, out and over that hump, to get them going in the right direction and start really seeing some positive stuff.