Robert Penner’s rural Ellinwood bird feeders have been busy for the past 10 days. The normal crowd of scarlet-colored cardinals, lemony goldfinches, bouncy juncos and other regulars have kept him entertained.

But the building numbers of meadowlarks, tree sparrows, pheasants, quail and red-winged blackbirds have him concerned.

“Those are stuff that don’t normally come to feeders,” said Penner, Nature Conservancy of Kansas avian program manager. “That’s an indicator they’re really struggling to find food. There’s just not much out there with all of this snow.”

Actually there wasn’t much food or cover even before the two snowstorms that left 15 to 20 inches of snow over a wide swatch of Kansas.

Never easy on wildlife, these deep snows come after two years of extreme drought that had already left the landscape lacking food for wildlife, said Jim Pitman, Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism small game biologist. Pre-storm cover was already barely thick enough to offer protection from predators and the elements.

In the long run, the moisture could help rebuild habitat lost to the drought.

But for now, the one-two punch of poor habitat and the smothering snow doesn’t bode well for many animals, Pitman said, and could be especially deadly for some prairie birds.

Many prairie species have few birds to spare.

Penner said grassland bird populations on Nature Conservancy properties have “plummeted” since the drought began.

“We had eggs just getting fried in the nests because of the high temperatures, and then the young ones that hatched had no places to hide,” he said. “We’ve had almost no (reproduction) for two years. Populations were already dramatically reduced.”

Pitman agreed, saying Kansas’ pheasant population going into last fall’s season was probably the lowest in decades because of poor reproduction.

That resulted in a multi-million-dollar bite from the rural economy as sportsmen didn’t spend money on their annual quest for long-tailed rooster pheasants.

He fears hawks, coyotes and owls could further reduce a pheasant population that has few places to hide in the snow.

Bobwhite quail, which are generally more drought tolerant and have had decent populations the past few years, also could struggle to find food because of their small size.

Some habitat was lost after nearly 500,000 acres of Conservation Reserve Program grasses, places where wildlife have found shelter and food in past winters, was cut for hay or grazed by cattle last summer.

The federal government makes payments to farmers to grow native grasses instead of crops to reduce crop surpluses, combat erosion and provide good wildlife habitat.

It’s one of the few times in the program’s 27-year history that haying and grazing have been allowed to help reduce the stress on Kansas livestock owners.

Ron Klataske, Audubon of Kansas director, said the loss of CRP grasses “is going to have a possibly dramatic impact on the survival of many wildlife species.”

He predicted the missing habitat could lead to wildlife losses that could, if conditions don’t improve, take years or decades to recover.

Penner said another problem is that many birds also are being killed on Kansas highways.

There, thousands of birds have congregated on the cleared shoulders of roads to feed in areas opened by plows or chemicals.