1 week Ago By Brad Dokken
POLK COUNTY, Minn. – It’s a cold, frosty morning on the prairie, and like he has done so many spring mornings over the past five decades, Dan Svedarsky is out before dawn to witness a prairie rite of spring. On this particular morning, that would be sharp-tailed grouse, those prairie dancers known for their ornate mating displays, as males of the species gather on dancing grounds, called leks, in their annual quest to attract a female and propagate the species.
ADVERTISEMENT It’s quite a show they put on at times, these dancing sharptails, and the performance starts before sunrise. That means getting up at “Oh-dark-30” to be at the lek and in the viewing blind well before daylight. A retired natural resources professor at the University of Minnesota Crookston, Svedarsky, 80, is among the volunteers who help the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources count sharptails and prairie chickens each spring as part of the DNR’s annual population surveys.
On this particular morning, though, Svedarsky is hosting a couple of visitors to his “Sharpie Shack,” the homemade viewing blind he built a few years back, largely from salvaged lumber and other materials. The trailer on which the shack is built is at least 70 years old and came from the junkyard on the UMC campus, the door from a landfill, the tin for the roof was left over from Svedarsky’s barn, the rubber sheeting that covers the outside walls came from the roof of an ag building on campus, and an old elk antler serves as a door handle. “I’m not sure where I got that,” Svedarsky quipped.
“I may have bought a couple pieces of plywood, but otherwise, it was just scrap piles here and there.” Last year, Svedarky and one of his grandsons built a “penthouse” onto the roof of the Sharpie Shack using – you guessed it – materials from scrap heaps and dumpsters. It might look like something from the “Red Green Show,” the quirky Canadian comedy about the adventures and misadventures of the ragtag crew at “Possum Lodge,” but the Sharpie Shack serves its purpose as a viewing blind quite nicely.
The sharptails certainly don’t seem to mind. ADVERTISEMENT They’re not at their most active this morning – probably because no females are nearby, Svedarsky surmises – but every once in a while, a few sharptails kick it into gear. Heads down and tails up, the grouse cup their wings and spin around like feathery wind-up toys as they cackle and cluck to make their presence known.
Their rapidly moving feet make a clicking sound. Even the recent occasional snowy setbacks haven’t kept the sharptails away from the leks this spring, Svedarsky says. Snow actually helps; otherwise, he says, spotting brown birds in brown grass is difficult – especially from a distance.
“I took advantage of the snow cover because you could really see them,” Svedarsky said. About 20 sharptails use this particular lek in Kertsonville Township – Svedarsky’s survey area – but one of the first grouse to make its presence known as darkness lifts on this frosty morning is a prairie chicken. A haunting “woo-woo” sound – some describe it as “old Muldoon, old Muldoon” – the booming noise that chickens make by inflating air sacs in their necks seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
The chicken must be lost, we figure, since there’s a prairie chicken booming ground just over a mile away. The lone chicken booming just past the door of the Sharpie Shack is a first for this spot, Svedarsky says. ADVERTISEMENT “Sharptails tend to display on grass more than chickens do,” he said.
“The chicken leks, there’s only one that I know of in my township (survey) area that’s on grass. The rest of them are all on stubble.” By comparison, there’s only one sharptail lek on stubble.
There’s a fair turnout at the dancing grounds on this chilly morning. At times, upwards of a half-dozen sharptails dance in the area of grass Svedarsky flattened down in front of the Sharpie Shack. The flattened grass gives the sharptails a clear vantage point to see any predators that might be lurking.
The amorous males occasionally scuffle. “There’s a little chasing going on,” Svedarsky said, watching two birds scuffle. “The bird that was being chased is a stranger here and doesn’t have any status.
” The confrontation is pretty tame, as sharptail squabbles go. ADVERTISEMENT “I haven’t seen any honest to goodness fights yet,” Svedarsky said. “They can really go at it.
” Sometimes, he says, an especially aggressive male will grab another sharptail “by the tail and pull it around.” There’ll be no such fireworks this morning. Sharptails in Minnesota are limited to an area in east-central Minnesota, where the population is struggling, and northwest Minnesota.
Sharptails in the northwest are “thriving compared to prairie chickens,” which are gradually declining, Svedarsky says. Results from the DNR’s spring 2024 sharptail survey tallied 2,527 grouse on 159 leks in the northwest survey region, and sharptail numbers appear to be increasing in the northwest. Svedarsky has noticed a similar trend in his survey area.
“When I first came in 1969, there were two sharptail grounds in the whole area that I knew of – that was it,” he said; today, there are about 15 sharptail leks in this part of Polk County. ADVERTISEMENT “We have almost as many sharptail grounds as chickens – and (the leks) are bigger,” Svedarsky said. Sharptails are more aggressive than prairie chickens, which may explain at least part of the uptick in their numbers, he says.
There’s also more brush on the landscape, which sharptails find to their liking more than prairie chickens. Compared with 20 years ago, there’s probably 25% to 30% more brush in this particular area, Svedarsky says. The morning show is in full swing when an aerial intruder arrives on the scene and lands in the tall prairie grass several yards from the lek; Svedarsky believes it’s an immature goshawk, a medium-sized raptor Immediately, the sharptails stop dancing and stand at alert.
“Boy, that really froze the birds,” Svedarsky whispers, followed quickly by, “here he comes.” Then it happens: The raptor swoops in, dive-bombs the sharptails and – just like that – the morning show ends as the birds flush to escape the threat. ADVERTISEMENT “It’s amazing how their movements are so coordinated with each other,” Svedarsky said.
“Of course, evolution has fine-tuned that over the eons. That’s a life-or-death situation there.” All is quiet except for the croaking-like call of sandhill cranes somewhere off in the distance.
No grouse were visibly captured by the raptor – at least from the vantage point of the Sharpie Shack – and while a few sharptails returned about 20 minutes later, their enthusiasm had visibly waned. So it went on a chilly April morning on the prairie. In the Sharpie Shack.
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