The first time Mike Morrow met the Attwater prairie chicken in the wild, it was the middle of the night. It was 1983 and he was a young graduate student at Texas A&M, helping another researcher. They arrived early, before sunup.

“You’re sitting there in the pitch black and then all of a sudden you start hearing these birds fly in,” says Morrow, now a longtime biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “And then not too long after that, they start their vocalizations – their cackling, they’ll start booming. All of this is when you can’t even see them. Then, as the morning dawns and it starts to get light, you see all these antics on the booming ground