A few dozen of the birds used to breed on and near her land, Selman says, but she hasn’t seen them in a few years, and she has started to worry. “I think they’re gone—it just breaks my heart,” says Selman, who leads birding tours for festival-goers and other visitors. “I like the experience of people coming out here and enjoying the prairie-chickens and the prairie. The thought of not having those birds makes me really sad.”

It took about a year for the Permian Basin Petroleum Association’s lawsuit to reach a West Texas courtroom on a steamy June day in 2015. After months of legal wrangling, the foreseeable fate of the lesser prairie-chicken came down to this: a half-empty courtroom, a judge who asked a lot of questions without expressing a hint of emotion, and three months of waiting for a ruling. Finally, the decision came in: The judge had sided with the oil and gas industry, ruling to de-list the lesser prairie-chicken.

The decision surprised parties on both sides. And it marked yet another pivotal moment in a battle over a bird that had been going on for decades. Deep in the heart of oil and gas country, the plight of the lesser prairie-chicken has, in that time, come to offer a unique window into the inner workings of the Endangered Species Act—its potential and its limitations. Because the bird lives primarily on private land, it also raises questions about how a federal law can—or should—be implemented to protect it.

“There’s no doubt that the species needs some help,” says Christian Hagen, an ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who studies lesser prairie-chicken conservation efforts in the southern Great Plains. “The question before all of us is: What are the best methods to help?”

As yet another petition works its way through the federal review process, some experts think the lesser prairie-chicken may herald the rise of a new model of conservation—one that relies less on the hammer of the law and more on the power of negotiation. If the strategy works—even amidst shifting political winds—it could alter the future for other species, too, by acknowledging the complex and competing interests on lands where development and conservation increasingly struggle to coexist.

Dick Wilberforce—a Texas-based wildlife photographer who was named artist of the year for the 2017 Lesser Prairie-Chicken Festival—started helping biologists study the birds in the 1960s. He has been leading tours to see their leks for two decades. In the early days, he remembers going out with a biologist friend and tracking down 22 leks, with 30 to 40 birds on each one. “I thought the world was made of prairie-chickens,” he says.

Last spring, wildfires destroyed large swaths of lesser prairie-chicken habitat in several states, including a lek that Wilberforce would take visitors to. Those fires, along with threats like overgrazing, droughts, and energy development, have put Wilberforce in a constant state of worry about the birds. “Now, if someone says, ‘I have a lek,’ that’s pretty darn good,” he says. “If a big rancher says, ‘I got three leks,’ that’s tremendous.”

In 1998, the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the bird met the requirements for listing under the ESA. But other species were considered higher priority and the agency lacked the resources to protect them all. Instead, the lesser prairie-chicken joined more than 200 species on a waiting list known as “warranted but precluded,” where it sat for more than a dozen years. Starting in 2010, Tutchton filed a lawsuit attempting to push the agency to move forward with listing the species. It was like a black hole of inaction, Tutchton says. And during the long wait, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the species’ population declined from an estimated 300,000 in the 1970s to 50,000 in the mid-90s and around 34,000 in 2012 (with only half as many estimated the following year).

The lesser prairie-chicken’s moment finally came in 2012, when the Fish and Wildlife Service officially proposed listing the species as threatened, setting in motion a process of review, comment periods, and mounting concerns among people with a stake in the land.

When a species is listed under the ESA, it becomes illegal not only to kill or harm individuals but also to damage their habitat, and those restrictions can cause major headaches for businesses and landowners. That was particularly true when federal attention turned to the lesser prairie-chicken, which thrives on habitat that happens to be loaded with oil and gas. Some 20 percent of the oil produced annually in the United States came out of the Permian Basin, making it the country’s most prolific oil-producing region, according to the 2014 lawsuit. (It’s now closer to 30 percent.) The land is also prime real estate for wind turbines, electricity transmission lines, and crops such as wheat, corn, cotton, and soybeans. A listing had the potential to curtail, or at least slow, all sorts of business interests in the region.

Concerns about the lesser prairie-chicken have long been complicated by another twist. Unlike the high-profile conservation story of the sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), which lives mostly on public lands, more than 95 percent of the lesser prairie-chicken’s habitat lies on private property in a region that tends to be deeply conservative and suspicious of federal regulations. Even with a listing, enforcement of the law would be difficult in a place where few people want the federal government poking around on their land.

“It’s not easy to live here. The weather is hard. And making a living here is very hard,” Selman says, referring to conditions that breed resilience but also stubbornness and pride. “Some of these ranchers are open-minded and they’re going to listen. And some of them are just going to say, ‘Get the hell off my land.’ That’s just the way it is.”

When lesser prairie-chickens mate, the action starts early. Before dawn in April and May, males stomp their feet in the prairie grass like they’re warming up for a track meet. As they dance, they inflate bright red air sacs on the sides of their necks and raise feathered neck tufts. With these displays and a chorus of warbling squawks, the males chase and fight each other in an attempt to win the right to mate with as many females as they can. It’s an entertaining display of hormones, all condensed into one small area. Outside the breeding season, when the birds disperse, they require much more space.

A single breeding group, which includes an average of 14 adult prairie-chickens, needs about 10,000 acres of land with a particular combination of grass, shrubs, and insects that can support every stage of life, Nichols says. In most cases, several breeding groups combine to make up a population of a few hundred birds that requires about 25,000 acres, or 39 square miles, to survive through all of the species’ life stages.

But expansive stretches of habitat have become scarce in the central U.S. In a 2012 analysis, the Fish and Wildlife Service pointed out that the availability of patches of suitable habitat larger than 25,000 acres has fallen. “There are a very limited number of patches that are greater than this,” Nichols says. “Everybody agrees they need large spaces. How large of a space do they need? That’s where it gets touchy.”

In Oklahoma alone, according to a 2011 study, an estimated 40 percent or more of nesting habitat has been degraded or destroyed by oil, gas, and wind-energy development, making the land potentially unlivable for lesser prairie-chickens. Growing human populations and an increase in habitat fragmentation are problems throughout the species’ range. And the birds have little tolerance for tall structures, such as power poles, oil and gas wells, and wind turbines, which they won’t approach within a mile—likely because those structures serve as perches for hungry raptors.

Development shows no signs of slowing down in the range of the lesser prairie-chicken. In a recent study of publicly available satellite imagery, Li and a colleague found recent disturbances on more than 258,000 acres of lesser prairie-chicken habitat between September 2015 and April 2017. New construction during that period included 946 wind turbines and 311 oil and gas well pads. In 2016 alone, the team estimated that between 85,000 and 184,000 acres of scrubland and grassland were converted into agricultural fields.

From its inception, WAFWA’s Range-wide Conservation Plan and other agreements encouraged participants to take part with the promise that the strategy would help the species enough to avert listing—something that industry stakeholders and many landowners desperately hoped to avoid. To measure how well it’s working, WAFWA has been conducting annual helicopter surveys, and the results might offer hope, depending on how they’re interpreted. In the past five years, lesser prairie-chicken numbers dropped from about 37,000 in 2012 to below 20,000 in 2013, but then ping-ponged back up to about 33,000 in 2017. That same time period also saw the region emerge from a severe drought, which relieved one pressure on the birds.

But not everyone is quick to celebrate. “Some folks pat themselves on the back and say this is really amazing what we’ve done,” says Hagen, who is also a science advisor to the Lesser Prairie-Chicken Initiative. “We’ve got to be a little careful.”

To determine whether the new suite of agreements, all of which are voluntary, can work without a federal listing will require patience with the long, slow process of science, Hagen says. Plenty of studies are ongoing, including those conducted by his group, which has been placing transmitters on individual birds to track their movements and help biologists assess long-term outcomes like reproductive success in areas where trees have been removed to make way for grasslands.

The clearest results so far have come from small studies of interventions like mesquite shrub removal, prescribed burns, and carefully managed grazing practices. That research has helped guide the recommendations that Hagen and colleagues provide to landowners who enroll in the Lesser Prairie-Chicken Initiative. But it’s too soon to know for sure how bird populations are responding to what Hagen calls a “grand experiment:” conservation through partnerships that rely on cooperation and trust without, at least so far, an enduring listing under the Endangered Species Act. “We’re trying to not get too excited if things look great or too despaired that things are going horribly wrong, because all sorts of things play in” to how the bird is doing, Hagen says. “It’s like the stock market.”

Until better data are available, the need for a federal listing remains a matter of great debate. Some suspect that, in the case of the lesser prairie-chicken, the ESA could make things worse—fueling mistrust of the federal government and reluctance among ranchers and business-owners to engage in agreements that would serve to clue in the Fish and Wildlife Service to the existence of birds on their land. Hints of this kind of fallout followed the proposed listing in 2012, after which enrollments in the Lesser Prairie-Chicken Initiative plummeted—and continued to decrease, even after the species was delisted.

Recognizing the delicate balance that the government has to manage in order to protect species without alienating landowners and businesses, Li is supportive of programs like the Range-wide Conservation Plan. He also thinks the post-listing drop in enrollments is understandable. Even if a listing isn’t necessary to protect the bird, he says, a threat of listing might be.

“One of the arguments that oil and gas made in litigation was that listing isn’t necessary because people will voluntarily sign up for conservation,” he says. But his satellite analysis found that just 15 to 20 percent of impacted habitat had been volunteered for protection since the listing decision was reversed.

“Given just how much habitat the species has lost and how little enrollment occurred during this time frame after delisting, we feel that a listing is necessary at this point to ensure that there’s enough participation in the Range-wide Plan,” he says. “What incentive is there to enroll if there isn’t a threat of listing?”

Today, the political battle over the lesser prairie-chicken is far from over. Shepperd, of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, says the original and brief listing of 2014 struck people he knew as politically motivated by anti-oil sentiment in the Obama administration at the time. Now, four years later, the Fish and Wildlife Service is without a director and has been since President Trump took office in January 2017.

That lack of leadership—within an industry-friendly, anti-science administration that has already taken steps to weaken the Endangered Species Act—may make the agency even slower to process listing petitions, environmental groups have argued. In that context, conservation deal-making might take on new significance, while marking a shift in how species protection happens—with or without help from the ESA.

The Act will soon get another test. A few months after the Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the lesser prairie-chicken, in July 2016, environmental groups including Defenders of Wildlife filed another listing petition. The Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to release its latest species assessment for the bird later this year. A decision to list or not will follow sometime after that. Based on two decades of history, lawyers might want to keep their phones close by when that happens.

Wilberforce doesn’t care much for politics, and he won’t talk about religion. He does, however, want people to know about the birds, even as some ranchers have told him they’ll be glad when all the lesser prairie-chickens are gone so they won’t have to worry about dealing with them anymore. Among the people he has guided over the years, he remembers a woman with stage 4 cancer, who died a few days after coming to see the birds. “She said, ‘Do you mind if I sit here for a while?’ I said, ‘Ma’am, you can sit here as long as you want,’” he says. “It’s the love of the lesser prairie-chicken that gives me hope.”