Heath Hen

The demise of the Heath Hen is a strong reminder of what can happen once a population level becomes too low and isolated to a specific area. The Attwater's Prairie Chicken (APC) is also a coastal bird that is affected greatly by the rapid human development.

With the breeding program put in place when their population began to plummet, one can not help but wonder how it actually will get the Attwater's back to a self sustaining population. Each year a large portion of the birds reared from the past spring are released into the wild, only to die off within the year. It is very well proven that releasing captive raised birds back into the wild have a very low success rate due to differences in behavior compared to birds naturally born and raised in a wild environment.

Here a photo I took while visiting the San Antonio Zoo and getting to see these wonderful birds up close.

Here are a few excerpts that should be touched on:

 "Typically, about half the adults die each year from predation or other natural causes"

The standpoint that the Attwater's dies off at a great rate pertaining to the number released, what point does it serve to release these birds other than to have the ability to say there are still Attwater's in the wild?

From the Houston Zoo website: "The 2008 breeding season saw the largest number of birds released into the wild ever in one season; an amazing 370 birds."

With so many birds being released on different sites, the number of remaining birds each year hardly changes from year to year. Essentially making no forward progress in the grand scheme of things. The million-dollar question is why the agencies are so against turning things over to private breeders across the country in a method that has brought back many species dangling on the brink of extinction. 

The Nene Goose, Hawaiian duck, Laysan Teal, Masked Bobwhite are a few examples of birds that went from very few birds in the wild to common place in captivity through allowing private breeders to participate. Not to mention the birds being spread throughout the country instead of attempting to do this in the state of TX alone. It is not to say that the current breeding program put in place is not working or will not work because the facts are they are producing young each year.

Wouldn't the approach of taking the offspring each year and instead of releasing them to die at a high rate in the wild be better to keep them to remain in the breeding program and increase the number produced by great magnitudes? 

Currently the program has been in effect for over 10 years and the population has not grown by any significant number. Simple math can dictate that is you took the number of birds that have died and even with a very small reproduction rate the population currently in captivity would dwarf what they have now. It seems as though the ideal that we still have wild Attwater's is an important hang-up that needs to be looked at again.

Having a wild viable population is vital but doing it with releases of small numbers of APC will never be able to get over predation casualties, birds inept for survival because they were raised in captivity and of other natural causes. The concept is to stop releasing a large portion of those produced into the wild and reserve those to breed and get the numbers high enough so larger releases of 1,000+ can be made each year and just by the odds alone will better the chance that X number of birds will in fact survive and reproduce and the causes of death will be less dramatic. If half of 1,000 birds survive this leaves 500, typically they release ~100 birds per year giving the 50 birds that survive. So which has a better chance of catching on and sustaining their own wild population, 500 or 50?

Here another photo taken of a male resting in the shade. Could not get a clear focus on him due to the fence.

The argument would be that we would no longer have wild APC's if the releases were to stop and conserve for a larger scaled captivity program. To end on this point, there are no such things as a wild APC for many years. Every bird released is of captive decent and are far from being what anyone would call a wild bird. Until the numbers increase on their own in the wild where they are sustaining their selves that will remain to be true.

More to come after some time to gather up additional comments and particular facts.