Date: 1/28/26 7:00 am From: Joseph Neal <0000078cbd583d7c-dmarc-request...> Subject: SOLILOQUY FOR CHICKEN HOUSE PRAIRIES January 28 2026
https://ebird.org/checklist/S296690493 https://ebird.org/checklist/S296688638 Seems like only yesterday I had a full crop of dark hair and walked through endless prairie fields with binoculars around my neck and a Bushnell spotting scope on a rifle sling strapped on my back. Ready for LeConte’s Sparrow to flush and fly low to perch in broomsedge bluestem.
Yes … thoughts on a gray morning ... Then there’s an old friend, sun, popping through, all radiance and promise. It won’t bring back my hair. Does elevate the spirit. All of nature appreciates the moment, including this bird watcher.
I hope none of you who read these thoughts will feel despair about this. I sure don’t mean it that way. Just the facts, Mam … in a country where close to 50 years of winters have been full of harriers and I assume at night, Short-eared Owls. Where in a time now long gone before living people prairie-chickens called home.
Now different kinds of chickens reign supreme. The white kind, by tens of millions, in long silver barns. Our chicken house prairies.
According to signs posted along the road, what was long before me Tallgrass Prairie will be 129 new homes. And the new home owners will without doubt think about future shade and plant trees where not that long ago grew Big Bluestem and Indian Grass.
If I was Alice Walton I would have bought all of this when it went up for a sale last year. 200+ acres. Would have made a decent preserve. But I’m not Alice. When it came to making the big money, I made other choices. It will be 129 new homes.
I’m making my peace with it. The place where I live in Fayetteville used to be something else, too. I came to live in what was once a Tallgrass Prairie oak barren. Like how 129 new homes will be coming to Tallgrass Prairie.
This is a soliloquy for back country where for ages Northern Harriers reigned supreme. Where if I look hard enough on a June day Grasshopper Sparrows still sing. Probably, also soliloquy for the guy who used to have thick dark hair who is today, as they say, “on the sunny side of 80” and seeing how so many things pass away.
As a birder, I know other spots where I can turn sideways on an unpaved but graded country road for a better look at White-crowned Sparrows -- without the new comers who don’t know me calling deputies to report a outbreak terrorist.
The good stuff for birding opportunity is not all going to disappear because of 129 new homes, but I can see the storm coming. The sky is getting all purple and dimpled. I’m enjoying other chicken house prairies.
