Buffalo and a Booming Chicken

Our breakfast was scanty, made up of granola bars and trail mix. It started the morning out on a somewhat testy note, but we persevered to find the World’s Largest Buffalo, just a short drive from the hotel. He was certainly impressive, as well as anatomically-correct.







The boys enjoyed the nearby playground, and we were surprised to see another Indiana license plate (though—as we didn’t see it until we were pulling out of the lot—we weren’t able to greet our fellow Hoosiers).



From Jamestown, US-52 is multiplexed with I-94, so we followed the Interstate into Minnesota, where we exited just inside the state line at Moorhead where we picked up county road 52, which had been a former alignment of US-52.
It was a longish drive to our next stop, the World’s Largest “Booming” Prairie Chicken in Rothsay, MN.



Rothsay, like much of Saskatchewan, is proud of its prairie heritage, and they’ve chosen to express it in the form of the Greater Prairie Chicken, which (if memory serves) “booms” by using air sacs on either side of its head as part of a courtship ritual. At typing time, it was realized that only Katherine had actually skimmed through the informational signs, so it’s entirely possible that the booming is, in fact, part of some other ritual, like coming-of-age or drumming up earthworms or a local prairie chicken jazz night. Especially since the inflation of those air sacs would seem to imply a name like “Balloonhead Prairie Chicken” or “Whooshing Prairie Chicken.”