Don’t count on seeing any prairie chickens in Douglas County. They’re gone.

“It looks like they’ve crashed,” said Alexis Powell, an avid birdwatcher and past president of the Jayhawk Audubon Society, referring to the flock of greater prairie chickens that used to delight area nature lovers every spring by putting on a show — called “booming” — on a patch of grassland a couple of miles south of Lone Star Lake.

“As far as anyone knows, they were the last prairie chickens in Douglas County,” Powell said.

Once commonplace throughout the Midwest, prairie chickens have been in steady decline in recent years.

“I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about this,” Powell said. “The prairie chicken is like the bison. It’s an icon of the Great Plains. But we lost the bison, we’ve lost much of the prairie and now we’re losing the prairie chicken.”

Powell said he first learned of the Douglas County birds in the mid-1990s.

“Anytime I’d go out there in April or early May, I’d see between eight and 15 males ‘displaying,’ which is the dance they do to attract a female,” he said.

But in 2002, there weren’t nearly as many birds.

“I went a couple times and didn’t see any,” Powell said. “I went two more times and saw two birds.”

Birdwatcher Alexis Powell looks for prairie chickens just north of Globe. Powell has seen the prairie chicken population in the area decline significantly over the last several years, and apparently disappear.

He went several times last year but saw only one bird. He hasn’t seen any in 2004.

“They are gone,” he said.

No one knows what happened.

“It’s somewhat of a mystery,” Powell said.

The birds’ disappearance might, in part, be tied to area landowners burning their pastures every year instead of every second or third year, he said. The burning could have taken too heavy a toll on the birds’ nesting habitat.

“But this is an area that’s been burned annually for several years, so I don’t know how much of a factor that would be,” Powell said. “The other thing is that this was a fairly small population, and small populations are vulnerable to any number of things like disease, hunting, a harsh winter, or maybe it lost its roosting site. Who knows?”

Increased development, too, may have been a factor, said Brian Obermeyer, director of the Kansas chapter of the Nature Conservancy’s effort to preserve the Flint Hills.

A male prairie chicken takes to the air after sparring with another prairie chicken in a pasture west of Washington.

“Prairie chickens are very sensitive to what’s called habitat fragmentation — things like roads, buildings, power lines,” Obermeyer said. “They need quiet, remote, wide-open spaces.”

Randy Rodgers, a biologist at the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, said the birds’ exit was not unexpected.

“It’s typical of what we’re seeing in a lot of areas,” he said. “East of the Flint Hills, prairie chickens are in serious decline. In the Flint Hills, the numbers are stable, but that’s after a long-term decline.”

Much of the population’s decline in Flint Hills has been attributed to annual burning.

Not all the news is bad.

“Out west and in the north-central part of the state, we’re actually seeing an increase,” Rodgers said.