Summary: Tallgrass prairie bird populations have seen precipitous declines in recent decades. Reversing these declines is imperative and can be particularly challenging in a privately owned landscape. Working with private and public partners in Kansas, we tested virtual fence (VF), as a management tool for grassland bird conservation. Virtual fence is a new technology that manipulates cattle movement and space use through GPS-controlled collars worn by the cattle. From 2022-2025 we experimentally excluded cattle from 11, 4-ha plots paired with control plots that cattle could access. Virtual fence succeeded in increasing site-level vegetation heterogeneity in ways that benefited the entire grassland bird community. Individual species responded to the experiment as predicted, and their response to the experimental treatments depended on inter-annual environmental variation. Our results demonstrate that novel technologies developed in the context of ranching efficiency can be adapted to provide win-win solutions for both ranchers and grassland birds.