It's human nature to give people names to animals, especially those with individual identity; thus the last passenger pigeon of the countless millions that once blackened the skies was named Martha (after Martha Washington).

The doomed bird died alone in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden in 1914 at the incredible age (for a bird) of 29. The last heath hen, named Booming Ben (and Ben was not a "hen," but a cock) died sometime in 1932 on Martha's Vineyard, unattended and now largely forgotten.

A prairie fire in 1916 decimated the population from an estimated 2,000 to less than 200. By 1932 it was Ben alone, and then he was none.

There was a similar but less operatic finale in the 1980s when the last greater prairie chicken in the southern part of Missouri's Audrain County challenged an automobile and lost. His name was Fred for unknown reasons and he had more reckless courage than survival instinct. Perhaps his final act of defiance was a form of biological suicide -- an inexplicable imperative that if extinction is inevitable, play it out with a flourish.

I worked in Audrain County for a decade and did not know that it held a remnant of prairie chickens -- did not know such an animal existed or even what tallgrass prairie was. A North Missouri boy, I only knew corn and soybeans where once the land was given to Indiangrass, big bluestem and switchgrass.

Audrain County historically was tallgrass. So tall did the bluestem and Indiangrass grow that pioneer journals said a man could ride a horse through it and the horse would be hidden. But all that remained of that once flowing prairie were a few wisps of native grass along a railroad right-of-way. The rest had been plowed and the few remaining prairie chickens boomed on turned sod as they slipped toward oblivion.

Missouri Conservation Department biologist Don Christisen introduced me to native prairie and to the prairie chicken. It was Don who showed me a windswept booming ground in 1968.

My childhood home in north Missouri was in what had been tallgrass prairie when the settlers arrived in the early 1800s. But it was all gone by the time I moved there. In fact, of 30 million historic acres of Missouri tallgrass, only a few thousand remain. Even the rolling Green Hills of north-central Missouri where legendary biologist Charlie Schwartz did landmark prairie chicken research in the 1940s had given way to rowcrop agriculture and introduced grasses.

Oldtimers would say of the prairie grouse, "Yes, there was a lot of them when I was a youngster." But they lost the birds without being aware it was happening. No one consciously made the decision to do away with them. It was a sad and silent ebb. As my late and deeply lamented friend, South Dakota conservationist Tony Dean, wrote, "Americans treasure mountains, ancient forests, lakes and streams. Unfortunately, few stand in awe of grass."