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Making Room for Prairie Dogs
Smithsonian
They feel like little angels crawling up your
arm," says Jarid Manos. He is looking not
to the heavenly blue Kansas sky
above,
however, but to an empty lot below, in a town called Hutchinson.
There are probably 80 or more "angels" in this lot, Manos figures. And he
wants to find them all.
Sporting a raised-fist Earth First! tattoo on his shoulder, Manos
reaches into one of the hundred or so dirt-ringed holes that dot the empty
lot. His colleague Paula Martin, dirt smears on her face, uses a hose from a
nearby water truck to guide a mixture of water and biodegradable dish soap
into the opening. Using her fingers to aerate the water, Martin creates
frothy suds that fill the burrow below. The plan is that the suds will
irritate the eyes of any inhabitants and force them to crawl to the surface,
where Manos is waiting. Minutes later, soap suds begin to pillow out onto
the ground and Manos nods his head. He feels something crawling onto his
hand. Another angel. He deftly scoops up the critter, pulls it free of its
home, and holds it aloft by the back of its neck.
Manos might consider his prey a gift from heaven, but it's a creature that
many Westerners would call the devil: a black-tailed prairie dog. A wet,
soapy and none-too-happy prairie dog. Manos holds the animal still while
Martin dabs at its face with a towel and squirts saline solution in its eyes
to clear out the soap. The animal is then placed in a dog carrier half full
of hay. Manos checks the hole for stragglers, and he and Martin rise from
their mud-caked knees to drag the hose to another prairie dog mound.
As they move across the lot, Manos and Martin are surrounded by 30 or more
people: animal-loving volunteers, a troop of seventh-graders and curious
neighborhood residents. Also tagging along are newspaper reporters and two
television crews complete with carefully coifed reporters who later do
stand-ups while gingerly holding wet and wriggling prairie dogs. Prairie
dogs have been big news all summer in this central Kansas town, and everyone
wants to witness firsthand the fate of these controversial creatures. Some
in the crowd try to anticipate which hole will be flushed out next, and rush
there to stake out a good viewing spot. Others opt to stick as close as
possible to Manos and Martin, at times making it nearly impossible for them
to move their equipment. Once they settle in at the next hole, parents lift
small children onto shoulders and newsmen hoist heavy television cameras
over the crowd. Everyone wants to see.
Manos and Martin are astonished by all this attention. Members of the
Denver-based Prairie Ecosystem Conservation Alliance, they spend every
weekend trying to save
and relocate prairie dogs, and rarely does anyone pay
much attention at all. They have come to this particular lot--driving all
night from Colorado--to save a bunch of prairie dogs that the Hutchinson
town council had decided must make way for a new baseball field. Some
council members wanted to simply kill the pesky rodents and be done with it.
A few residents, however, didn't agree, and one wrote a letter of protest to
the newspaper. "It is unfortunate that the elected council of the city of
Hutchinson has no compassion on the matter of life," wrote Janet Laird, an
animal lover who lives near the lot. Laird, looking for alternatives to
killing the animals, urged Martin's group to come to Kansas. The city
council finally agreed to hold off on the ball field construction and even
supplied water for the rescue operation.
Manos and Martin and their newly trained local volunteers, including Laird
and her friends, work the field all day Saturday and Sunday, taking few
breaks from the 90-degree heat. By Sunday night 76 animals have been loaded
into dog carriers and are ready for transport to their new home. Monday
morning, a caravan of volunteers escorts the animals out of town, past
fields of wheat and sunflowers, to the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge in
Stafford, Kansas. There, the prairie dogs are placed inside a couple of
large, steel water troughs from which the bottoms have been removed and
which are topped with chicken wire. Food, water and a few starter holes have
all been provided. The hope is that the animals will be safe from predators
here until they can dig burrows. Dave Hilley, manager of the refuge,
estimates that, if all goes well, they will dig out of this protective
enclave in a few hours, by which time "they'll have some ownership of
the
holes."
Hutchinson's debate over the fate of a prairie dog town is one that is
becoming increasingly common in Western states. Ranchers have long despised
the animal, believing it eats grass rightly meant for cattle, and that its
burrows and entrance mounds tear up the land and pose a hazard to livestock
that might stumble and break
a leg. They are hard-pressed to see anything
angelic about the animal. In ranching circles, "it is verboten to even
mention the name 'prairie dog' unless you are swearing
at them," quips Jon
Sharps, a wildlife consultant who studies them. More recently, contempt for
the animals has spread from countryside to cities and suburbs, as housing
developments and strip malls take over land that no one but the prairie dogs
wanted before. Developers now find they must somehow deal with the
animals—burying them alive with bulldozers being one option. Homeowners are
finding that, while it's fun to watch the animals down the road as they
chatter
and fret and throw up their paws in alarm, those next door are not nearly
so cute when they are chewing up carefully tended lawns.
Yet even as prairie dogs gain more enemies, they are finding new friends:
animal lovers like Martin are taking up their cause, and biologists are
warning that prairie dogs are actually good for the environment, even vital
to a healthy prairie ecosystem. Some say that these animals are so
important, and in such trouble, that just like gray wolves and manatees,
they should be protected as endangered species. Of the five species of
prairie dogs--black-tailed, white-tailed, Gunnison's, Mexican and Utah--only
the latter two are protected. The others, say wildlife advocates, are
declining fast.
In the early 1800s explorers Lewis and Clark reported seeing an "infinite
number" of prairie dogs. Infinite might be a bit of an
exaggeration, but it probably wasn't too far off. Even a hundred years ago,
prairie dog towns occupied an estimated 100 million to 250 million acres,
with parcels scattered along the short- and mixed-grass prairies from Canada
to Mexico. The total number of animals probably topped 5 billion. One Texas
town alone covered 25,000 square miles and held an estimated 400 million
animals.
For years prairie dogs happily shared their land with bison, which tramped
down vegetation and made it easier for prairie dogs to spot predators. The
ranchers who settled the West never did like the prairie dogs, however. They
saw these small, cinnamon-colored rodents eating the same grass as their
livestock and decided they must go. Their disdain for the critters was
greatly bolstered in 1902 when one C. H. Merriam, director of the U.S.
Biological Survey, declared that prairie dogs decreased the productivity of
rangelands by 50 to 75 percent. "It's not at all clear how he came up with
those numbers," says Rich Reading, director of conservation biology at the
Denver Zoological Foundation. "They are vastly in error." Fabricated or not,
Merriam's numbers gave an "aura of scientific legitimacy" to the ranchers'
claims, says Reading, and the campaign to eradicate the prairie dog took
off. States, counties, individuals and the federal government poisoned
millions of acres of animals with strychnine. By 1960, because of this
poisoning, as well as conversions of natural prairie to farmland and
suburbs, prairie dogs had been wiped out in at least 98 percent of their
habitat.
Eradication programs today are not as extensive as in years past, but they
do continue in both urban areas and public lands. Landowners and agencies
such as the National Park Service and the Forest Service (which manages
national grasslands) now try to control prairie dogs using toxic zinc
phosphide baits or aluminum phosphide gas. Some property owners pay $1,000 a
day to have the animals sucked into a vacuum truck and hauled away. Most are
killed or injured in the process. (So are other creatures who frequent the
burrows.) South Dakota, which like many states considers the animal an
official pest, in the early '80s poisoned out a 450,000-acre complex--the
largest remaining town in the United States. On top of the poisonings, the
smaller size of the towns makes the animals more vulnerable to bubonic
plague, a disease that overnight turns prairie dog colonies into ghost
towns.
Only about one and a half million acres of prairie dog towns now survive in
the West, and their existence is precarious, warn
biologists. The cumulative impact of all these threats could, they say, lead
to the disappearance of the species, and an "ecological train wreck" on
the prairie.
"I'm not mad at 'em. I just can't live with 'em," Miles Davies explains
while bouncing across his ranch in a dusty red pickup. "We had a few small
towns here a few years ago. I thought they were cute. But I found out you
can't keep just a few," he says, driving toward some of the cattle he raises
on 3,000 acres just east of Denver. He points to a wheat field on his left.
"That whole field was covered with prairie dogs,"
he says. "A pair of them
came in 1981 and I ended up with 500 acres of them in ten years." Davies
tried to coexist with the animals, he says, but found it impossible.
"They
ate all the grass. There was
none left for the cattle. You can't afford to have 500 acres that you don't
get anything out of." Last year Davies decided he'd had enough and laid out
poison bait. Nearly all the prairie dogs died, and he is planning to dispose
of the last of the stragglers soon.
Davies is probably more accepting of prairie dogs than many ranchers, given
that he
did try to live with them. Many of his colleagues just flat out hate
them. But they are misguided, say prairie dog researchers. It's true, they
do munch on grass, and a Department of Agriculture publication says they
remove as much as 90 percent of the available forage. But studies by Dan Uresk, a Forest Service research biologist, and others show a different
picture: prairie dogs eat no more than 4 to 7 percent of the grass that
would otherwise be eaten by cattle. In other words, if a rancher gets rid of
prairie dogs, his cattle will enjoy at most a 7 percent gain in forage.
Other studies have shown, Uresk says, that cattle actually prefer to feed on
prairie dog towns because the rodents' never-ending grass clipping helps the
forage to stay greener and more succulent.
Ranchers also fear prairie dog invasions because of the "broken leg"
phenomenon.
But that always seems to have happened to someone else. "There
has never been a documented case of that happening except in John Wayne
movies," says Sharps. "Those are old wives' tales." Sharps tells of posing
the broken leg question at a conference in South Dakota. "I had a captive
audience of a couple hundred ranchers.
I said, 'If anyone knows of a cow or
a horse that has broken a leg in a prairie dog town, please raise your
hand.' Nothing. Silence. It's a myth. Everyone says, 'Oh, yeah, I've heard
that,' but when it comes right down to it, they can't come up with
anything."
So why do ranchers continue to despise the prairie dog, in the face of all
this modern research? "There is absolutely no rationale to it," sighs
Sharps. "They just do it. Their daddies did it, their granddaddies did it,
they are going to do it. Their minds are made up."
The hunting community has also made up its mind: prairie dogs make darn good
targets. "I'd love to have some on my land," says Marc Minkin, vice
president of the Varmint Hunters Association. "I'd like to be able to step
out my back door in the morning and take a couple shots before my morning
coffee." Prairie dogs are one of
the more popular varmints to shoot, for the
45,000 members of his South Dakota-based group, says Minkin. "It's something
you can do as a family. You're not wearing camouflage, freezing in a tree
stand." The best places to shoot, says Minkin, are the "uneducated towns"
that haven't been shot at a lot, where the animals are still naive to the
danger posed by hunters. The prairie dog has "no friends in the human or
animal world," insists Minkin. "It's really a prairie rat."
A favorite activity among hunters is the competitive prairie dog shoot, with
prizes for whoever bags the most animals. Probably the most famous such
contest was held in Nucla, Colorado, in the early '90s, attracting entrants
from all over the country, as well as protesters and much negative
publicity. Nucla had to discontinue the event three years ago because so
many of the dogs had succumbed to plague, there just weren't enough left to
shoot.
Despite Minkin's assertion, many people do like prairie dogs. Some say it's
because they remind us of little humans, living in family groups, kissing,
grooming, and squabbling like siblings. Any intruder, whether a dog, hunter
or hiker, sets off a chain reaction of warning calls. Black-tailed prairie
dogs display the comical "jump-yip" alarm call, throwing their front paws up
in the air and arching their backs while calling out a high-pitched
"chirp-chirp-chirp." Others scurry to hide in a burrow, sometimes peeking
over the edge. After a few minutes the animals let down their guard and go
about their business, but they never roam far from a burrow entrance. These
underground warrens, some a hundred feet long, provide warmth in winter and
coolness in summer, nursery areas, places to mate and to sleep, listening
posts, and, of course, refuge from predators.
Given that prairie dogs spend more than half their lives underground, it is
perhaps
not surprising that one researcher studied them for seven years
before making a remarkable discovery: prairie dogs, cute as they may be, are
stone-cold killers. Mother prairie dogs regularly practice infanticide and
cannibalism in the privacy of their burrows. And contrary to many other
species, they are not killing nonrelatives in hopes of ensuring the survival
of those closest to them genetically, but are killing and consuming very
close relatives: nieces, nephews and siblings. According to the researcher,
John Hoogland at the University of Maryland, the nursing mothers are
probably desperate for food.
Odder still, says Hoogland, is that a few weeks after this rampage, when the
babies move aboveground, mothers will nurse pups they once tried to kill.
Such behavior might seem altruistic or perhaps even apologetic, but the
motive may very well be still entirely selfish. Having someone else's babies
around provides a bit of a buffer zone from predators. Despite his
discovery, Hoogland remains a fan of prairie dogs. If you get them young
enough, he says, they make great pets, greeting human companions with a
gleeful jump. Indeed, thousands of young prairie dogs are sold each year
worldwide for as much as $150 each. They do, however, have a nasty little
habit of trying to dig burrows in sofas.
Prof. Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University is another fan. He is
convinced that they have one of the most sophisticated languages of all
animals and that a seemingly generic alarm call could actually be saying,
"The dangerous man wearing
a green shirt and carrying a gun is here," or,
"The harmless guy is back, no problem." Slobodchikoff has spent countless
hours in a wooden blind recording the chirps of animals in response to
events such as a student or a coyote crossing the town. He
and his students
then analyze the vocalizations, playing the tape into a computer that breaks
down each seemingly monotone chirp into a graphic representation of its
numerous harmonics. Statistical analysis of those structures reveals that
different events elicit very different calls, which apparently are obvious
to a prairie dog.
"Each chirp is actually a fairly complicated statement," says Slobodchikoff.
He doesn't know yet just how much information can be packed into one chirp,
but so far his studies have shown variations in response to a predator's
species, size, shape, color, speed of travel and level of threat. What's
more, the prairie dogs have good memories, he says. In one experiment, two
people walked through a prairie dog town that had experienced a fair amount
of hunting; one was a "hunter" and carried a simulated rifle. The prairie
dogs, as expected, gave a different call for each person. Weeks later, when
the hunter showed up without his rifle, says Slobodchikoff, "they still gave
the call for when he had the rifle. The exact same call."
So what if prairie dogs are cute and smart? Do we really need to worry if
there are a
few less rodents in the world? Yes, say wildlife biologists.
They consider prairie dogs keystone species, which actually create a
particular type of habitat, and warn that we could lose not just several
species, but an entire ecosystem. "The prairie dog is like the earthworm of
the prairie," explains Larry Shanks of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"It creates shorter grasses, tunnels for burrowing owls, a food source for
ferruginous hawks. It's a real nucleus of an ecosystem." The prairie dog
ecosystem supports at least 170 species, including black-footed ferrets,
hawks, eagles, mountain plovers, owls, coyotes, badgers, bobcats and foxes.
"Some of those are 'obligate' species, like the black-footed ferret," says
Jon Sharps. "Ninety-one percent of its diet is prairie dogs and 100 percent
of its habitat requirements are prairie dog colonies. There are also
'semi-obligate' species like the swift fox; about half of their diet is
prairie dogs." The near extinction of the black-footed ferret, in fact, was
caused largely by the decline in prairie dogs.
Foes of the prairie dog point to the many pockets of animals found in the
West and
ask how they can possibly be in trouble when they seem to be
everywhere. It's not simply a matter of numbers, respond biologists. Today's
populations are too small and too far apart. A prairie dog ecosystem might
need to be as large as 20,000 acres to be healthy, but most today are only a
few hundred acres at best. Such fragmentation leaves them vulnerable to
disease, natural catastrophes and genetic problems.
Wildlife experts cite the prairie dogs' woes as a prime opportunity to put
into practice "ecosystem management," a relatively new approach to
conservation. Instead of throwing millions of dollars at each species that
has the misfortune to become endangered, this theory holds, why not try to
preserve and manage an entire ecosystem at once, preferably before anybody
gets into serious trouble? A bit of effort to save the prairie dogs now,
biologists argue, could result in a big payoff--ecologically and
financially--for all the species that depend on them.
The Front Range area of Colorado is prime prairie dog habitat—and prime
people habitat. Consequently, the state is losing thousands of acres of open
space each year to housing developments, highways and strip malls. Although
Paula Martin and her volunteers are saving as many prairie dogs as they can,
the animals are being pushed off one chunk of land after another.
Driving around Denver's suburbs with Dave Weber, a state biologist, it's
easy to feel sorry for the animals. Weber pulls into a lot behind a new
strip mall, expecting to find
a farmhouse and acres of prairie dogs.
Instead, he discovers that town houses have taken over at least half the
habitat. "Last time I was here those houses weren't there," he says, parking
next to construction trailers. "I saw ferruginous hawks sitting on the
ground right where the houses are now." Not all of the prairie dogs have
been routed just yet. Some still make a living on land east of the new
homes. Weber points to two white smudges in a distant tree. "Bald eagles,"
he notes. Eagles and other raptors migrate here each winter to escape colder
climates, expecting to find prairie dogs. "They probably won't be here next
winter.".
Other Front Range towns, faced with similar development pressures, have
moved to protect prairie dogs. The city of Boulder, 30 miles northwest of
Denver, led the way
in 1987 by setting aside land for prairie dogs, now
nearly 5,000 acres. Boulder, in fact, was the first town in Colorado to
officially consider prairie dogs in its management plan. Farther north in
Fort Collins, the issue arose in the early '90s, when a housing development
wiped out 120 acres of animals, says Karen Manci, a city environmental
planner. "We started asking, how can we stop this from happening again? The
writing was on the wall that we were going to lose them all to development." In 1992, that city's natural areas plan assured that the acreage would be
set aside for prairie dogs. Even more important, says Manci, the attitudes
of residents changed. "In seven years I've seen this community go from
saying, 'What the heck, they're varmints,' to becoming aware of the value of
prairie dogs. Before 1990 we had 268 acres of prairie dog colonies. Now we
have 1,700."
Conflicts do arise, however. On the western edge of town, where the
grasslands rise into the Rocky Mountain foothills, Manci tramps through a
three-year-old housing development to a wide strip of designated prairie dog
habitat. Between the houses and the animals is a buffer zone and a
two-foot-high fence. "Look, there are two prairie dogs on the wrong side of
the fence," she says, pointing to animals lurking perilously close to the
houses. Last spring, a ruckus erupted over the city's plan to poison some
prairie dogs that had migrated onto private property here and elsewhere in
the city. "We got bad press as killers," sighs Manci. "And we're the ones
who saved 1,700 acres." The city agreed to hold off on the fumigation so
Martin and her crew could relocate some of the wanderers. Even so, "not one
neighbor has said to get rid of them all," Manci notes with a smile. "They
all just say, 'Keep them on your side.'".
Not all rescues have happy endings. Prairie dogs were taken out of
Hutchinson, Kansas, in three separate batches. In their new homes they were
protected from humans, but not their natural enemies. Every last one in the
first two batches of 76
and 44 was killed by predators. Some believe that
they were placed in an area where the grass was too long for them to see
anything approaching them. Others said that they were "city" prairie dogs
and did not have the necessary survival skills. The 17 animals in the third
batch were placed in an existing prairie dog town and are believed to have
survived (none was marked). Undeterred by the losses, Martin is out every
weekend, one step ahead of the bulldozers, saving one prairie dog at a time.
Colorado-based Catherine Dold last wrote on how rescue dogs are trained. She is now equally fond of the prairie variety.
March 1998
Catherine Dold
PO Box 4424
Boulder, Colorado 80306
303-543-2390
11/11/02