We trudged from windmill to windmill, a mile at least. The windmill water breaks were imperative for the dogs. If you think it's tough, consider the dog, wearing a fur coat on a humid 70-degree day, stuck in the thick grasses where even a faint breeze doesn't reach. Prairie chickens existed in one form or another all the way from Martha's Vineyard to the Rocky Mountains. The heath hen of the East Coast vanished long ago, to be joined later by another subspecies, Attwater's prairie chicken of south Texas.
Today there are only greater and lesser pinnated grouse.
Market hunting didn't help, but agriculture did more to whack the grouse than hunters did. As an example, prairie chickens once roamed 15 million acres of Missouri prairie and were the most common game bird in the state. Usually only the breasts of these birds were used for food. Today, there are only a few thousand prairie chickens in Missouri on less than 75,000 remaining acres of native prairie, scattered in small chunks. A white-tailed deer can adapt to anything.