Overwinter Survival of Greater Prairie-Chickens in Western-central Minnesota
The Greater Prairie-Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) occupies tallgrass prairies and is an area-sensitive species that us used as an indicator species (Kates, 2005). In recent years, most research on Greater-Prairie Chickens has been collected during the breading season, so there is a need for more winter information. To acquire this information, we used VHF telemetry to track birds from September to February in Western Minnesota to obtain overwinter survival of this species. Each previously collared bird was alive at the time of data collection, resulting in a Kaplan-Meier mean value of 1.0. However, we did not find all the birds we looked for each month, as 23 birds were searched for each month and only an average of 10 were found. Several limitations like weather, equipment malfunction, time, and lack of previous winter bird movement information limited our ability to find all birds each month. We recommend that if this study is repeated in future years that telemetry flights be utilized to find birds that move out of the study area. Survival of marked birds was high this year, but it was a mild winter and may not be representative of more sever winters.