I love upland game birds, including watching, photographing, hunting, and eating them. One of my favourites is the prairie chicken, also known as the prairie hen or pinnated grouse. Prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse — the other so-called “prairie chicken” — are outwardly quite similar. The easiest way to distinguish the two is by the tail. The prairie chicken has a short, square, black tail, whereas the sharp-tailed grouse (aka the sharp-tail or “sharpie”) has a longer, pointed, whitish tail.
Sadly, the prairie chicken has been extirpated from Canada. One of the last places it was known to inhabit was Ontario.
A tremendously informative booklet about Ontario’s game birds, including the prairie chicken, is Ontario Grouse, published in 1956 by J.L. Baillie, who spent 48 years with the Royal Ontario Museum.
Prairie chickens were formerly found only in the tallgrass prairie habitats of the southwestern counties of Essex and Kent, Baillie wrote. Numerous accounts describe how widespread land clearing, logging, and agriculture in both Canada and the US initially benefited the birds. Their numbers swelled into the millions, attracting swarms of market hunters and upland bird gunners.
Most prairie chickens were found on the western prairies, but continuing habitat changes, coupled with relentless market hunting, caused populations to plummet. In Ontario, the prairie chicken had disappeared by about 1900.
Then came a surprising development. In approximately 1925, prairie chickens appeared on St. Joseph Island and at the western end of Manitoulin Island, having crossed from mainland Michigan. At about the same time, they also established themselves in parts of Alberta, where they had not previously been recorded.
Baillie noted that on Manitoulin Island, prairie chickens were interbreeding with sharp-tailed grouse — a rare phenomenon. The sharp-tails themselves were also recent arrivals, believed to have originated from a widespread southward movement of northern birds during the winter of 1932–33.
By the 1950s, the hybrid population on Manitoulin was thriving. By the 1970s, however, prairie hen populations had once again taken a turn for the worse across Canada and in many parts of the United States. Around that time, I scribbled a note beside Baillie’s chapter, Prairie chicken. “Less than 100. Very rare. Near extinction in Canada.”
Between then and now, the prairie chicken disappeared from Canada once again. Sharp-tailed grouse, however, remain common to abundant over a large swath of western Canada and Ontario, including St. Joseph Island, Manitoulin Island, and parts of the adjoining mainland.
Fortunately, healthy populations of prairie chickens still survive in parts of the United States. A couple of years ago, I was able to plan and carry out a three-day hunt for prairie grouse in Nebraska.
Along with my good friends Guy Winterton and Kinu Savard, I hunted with Gobble’n Grunt Outfitters and their pointing dogs for wild prairie grouse — both prairie chickens and sharptails — in an area where the two species have long coexisted.
The country we hunted resembled parts of Manitoulin Island, St. Joseph Island, and Ontario’s North Shore, although it was drier, less settled, and had fewer conifers.
It seems that prairie chickens have more restrictive habitat requirements than sharp-tailed grouse.
Could prairie chickens once again find suitable habitat in Ontario? Probably not, given the sharptails’ proven success in the agricultural landscapes of Manitoulin, St. Joseph Island, and the North Shore. The highly intensive agricultural practices now common in Essex and Kent are unlikely to favour prairie chickens, either.
But in the future? Somewhere else in Ontario? Who knows? With climate change, almost anything seems possible. By the way, I did bag a prairie chicken — and a couple of sharpies — in Nebraska.
Originally published in Ontario Out of Doors' Hunting Annual 2026-2027
