Westemeier says the managed grasslands also provide better habitat for other declining prairie nesters, including short-eared owls, dickcissels, and meadowlarks. Meanwhile, other areas are left to grow, accommodating Henslow's sparrows, northern harriers, and other creatures that need tall, dense stands of grass. Prairie chickens are not the only prairie birds in a tailspin. Many others have steadily declined over the past 30 years, as large, modern farms have replaced prairie and smaller, more traditional farms. Changes in agriculture, such as switching to early-harvest varieties of alfalfa, severely impacted those birds that adapted to nesting in grassy farm fields.
Earlier harvests mean nests, eggs, and young are destroyed when the early crop is collected.
Others have held steady, thanks to their differing nesting practices. For example, Oklahoma's state bird, the scissor-tailed flycatcher, remains common across the southern Great Plains. Instead of nesting in the grass, this whitish, pink-sided bird nests in trees and shrubs, many of which have been planted by farmers to buffer wind and conserve soil. This program pays farmers not to plant on about 16 million acres. While the soils rest, the fallow, weedy fields provide grassland birds with suitable nesting habitat.