A GPS-tracked prairie chicken has traveled 1,182 miles this summer, and keeps ending up in the same place.
"We did expect a range of maybe 50 miles. We really didn't expect this distance," Jen Vogel, a post-doctoral research associate at Iowa State University, told USA Today.
Bird "Number 112" is part of an Iowa State Department of Resources initiative to reintroduce the birds to the state of Iowa. There was once a population so abundant that the wild chickens would flock in groups of 30,000, but they died out around the 1950s, USA Today reported.
Bird 112 was fitted with a GPS collar along with nine other chickens, but decided to take an unusual path. She looped all the way around Missouri and back into Iowa several times.
"Nobody really knows why," Vogel told USA Today. "Everyone is taken by surprise by the distance she has traveled."
"We might assume that since she came from Nebraska and we moved her to Iowa, she doesn't know where the appropriate habitat might be. It seems like the bird is looking," she said.
The chicken's route turned out to be the best choice. Out of the nine other GPS-tracked chickens, one shed the device and the rest were killed by predators.
One of the main factors contributing to the bird's initial eradication was human hunting. One account suggested 400,000 chickens were sent to East Coast dinner tables when the bird's populations were abundant.
Hunting the endangered birds was deemed illegal in 1917, but loss of habitat due to agriculture was too serious for the populations to recover.
In the 1990s prairie chickens were set loose in the area in hopes of restoring the population, but there were only a few dozen birds left by the year 2000. Now researchers are making another attempt at restoring the species to Iowa.
"They are an iconic bird for the prairie. They are a symbol," Stephanie Shepherd, a wildlife diversity biologist at the Department of Natural Resources, said. "It would be sad to think of them not here."
