Prairie Dog Symbolizes Plains Eco-War

Excitedly, Kim Sytten led visitors upstairs to her master bedroom. “Here,” she said, sweeping an arm that eventually landed on the door of a walk-in closet. “He’s in here.”

Bunked in with the high-topped basketball shoes and the spare bedspread was a recently poisoned black-tailed prairie dog, which she was helping to nurse to health. Tired and barely up to speed, the bedraggled creature hardly seemed capable of being the flash point of local and national debate.

Yet to some, the yearling squirming in Sytten’s grasp represents no less than the loss of a piece of America’s pioneer heritage: the once-vast short-grass prairie and its vanishing ecosystem. To others, the squirrel-like mammal is emblematic of all that is wrong with the animal rights movement--a common pest that should be exterminated with prejudice at every opportunity.

The sight of a wild animal holed up in the walk-in closet of a tract home just outside Denver nicely encapsulates the prairie dog fight as it has played out in Colorado’s Front Range: Human encroachment onto prairie dog habitat has left many of the dogs smack in the midst of suburbia.

When developers or town councils choose to build on the land, the prairie dogs must go. When the method of choice is poisoning or bulldozing over dog towns, entire neighborhoods scream murder, in yet another clash between the forces of growth and conservation in the inter-mountain West.

The black-tailed prairie dog, all sides agree, is vanishing. Wildlife biologists don’t know their exact numbers, but they estimate that the black-tail now inhabits less than 1% of its historic range. It is no longer found in Arizona and exists in only small colonies in a few Rocky Mountain states. Two species of prairie dogs are already protected under the Endangered Species Act while other types of prairie dogs that have fewer predators, such as the white-tailed and Gunnison’s, are thriving.

So what? The problem is that as the prairie dog goes, so may go more than 100 other species--some threatened--that are associated with dog towns.

“The prairie dog is a keystone species, and that alone makes it worth saving,” said Paula Martin, co-director of the Denver-based Prairie Ecosystem Conservation Alliance, which has joined with other national organizations to support a petition before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the black-tailed prairie dog as a threatened species. The wildlife service has up to a year to act.

5 Billion Before Humans Took Over

When Lewis and Clark were searching for a waterway to the Pacific at the dawn of the 19th century, they noted the abundance of the animals they called dogs because of their barking calls. At that time there were perhaps as many as 5 billion prairie dogs in what is now part of the United States.

The little creatures shoulder a big ecological burden:

* They are the prairie’s most popular innkeeper. Scores of other animals share their elaborate burrows, including rabbits, burrowing owls, mice and a range of insects.

* They are good citizens. When bison ranged the Plains, the thundering herds packed the prairie earth. With their burrowing, prairie dogs aerate and open the soil.

* They help maintain grasslands in their original state by mowing down weeds, which die when cut. True prairie grasses grow back stronger and with added nutritional value after being dined upon.

* The black-footed ferret, North America’s most endangered mammal, is dependent on the black-tailed prairie dog, which makes up 90% of its diet.

* Among the other animals that prey on black-tailed prairie dogs is an array of raptors, including bald eagles, which, in the absence of prairie dogs, often find it difficult to feed themselves.

Little of this matters to those who live with prairie dogs in their backyards or on their grazing land. Another nemesis for the dogs is the cattle rancher, for whom they are little more than “prairie varmint.” Ranchers complain that prairie dogs destroy vegetation--food for cattle--and are therefore a pest.

“It’s a constant battle; our first reaction is to eliminate them,” said R.J. Jolly, who runs cattle on 18,000 acres in Kit Carson in eastern Colorado. “We probably have about 100 acres of prairie dog towns and we keep a close eye on them. They can wreck a lot of country in short order. If you look at their towns, the land is really denuded. I know they say that the grass that is there is more nutritious, but there isn’t much volume. There just isn’t much left for my cattle.”

Federal and state governments are also prodigious prairie dog killers, spending millions of dollars a year to eradicate them through licensed shootings or poisoning on public land. Some gun clubs refer to their shoots as Frequent Flier Clubs, for the way the animal is propelled through the air from the impact of the bullet.

Dan Chu of the National Wildlife Federation marveled at the fiscal waste. “The government spends millions a year to restore the near-extinct population of the black-footed ferret, while it also spends millions a year to kill the black-tailed prairie dog, the ferret’s only source of food. It makes no sense.”

Colorado developers are running afoul of the dogs’ defenders, neighborhood groups such as the one Kim Sytten organized when she discovered her local dog town was being poisoned. She and her neighbors enjoyed watching the prairie dog families frolic on an empty lot and eagerly waited for the seasonal arrival of raptors that preyed on the dogs.

Her prairie dog rescue began when she was horrified by the dogs’ slow death by poisoning. The neighbors organized a protest march, called animal rights groups and erected small white crosses near empty prairie dog burrows.

Amid the fighting, some green developers have started using “humane relocation” of prairie dogs. The Boulder-based McStain development firm, for instance, is working with Martin’s prairie conservation group to set aside a land trust for a permanent prairie dog home.

Lisa Lucero, who works in community development for McStain, said other developers are experiencing a backlash from publicity surrounding the mass kills. “It’s such a passionate topic. It’s one where you can only be proactive.”

Providing Refuge Can Be Difficult

Even when the dogs are rescued, often there is no place to take them. Land at the federal Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge in suburban Denver used to be the first stop for prairie dog relocation in the area. But now it no longer accepts rescued dogs.

There isn’t enough available land to sustain a prairie dog town, said Dave Serry, who manages the refuge’s prairie dog population. Although he targets about 4,500 acres to be set aside for black-tailed prairie dogs in the future, at present they are given only 884 acres.

“We’ve lost most of the prairie, we’ve just got a few pieces left,” Serry said. “The prairie supported a biomass greater than the Serengeti, with bison, elk, antelope, prairie dogs.”

The virgin short-grass prairies that used to stretch from mid-America to the eastern edge of the Rockies are all but lost, more decimated than the rain forest but, alas, for those who would save it, not nearly as photogenic.

Taking a visitor on a walking tour of a gently rolling grassland area, Fran Blanchard, the director of the Plains Conservation Center in Aurora, Colo., sees something else entirely. She points out that the seemingly barren plains are teeming with life when viewed up close. One square yard of short-grass prairie may sustain a dozen or more species of plants and several dozen species of insects. The fungi and bacteria in prairie soil are of a sort that excites biologists.

“We really won’t know what we’re missing,” Blanchard mused, gazing across her own limited conservation area to wooden silhouettes of houses rising on the horizon. “We won’t know what’s lost, biologically. We have no idea the impact on the greater ecosystem.”

Social Creatures Greet With a ‘Kiss’

Scientists are still learning about the nuances of prairie dog behavior. They have a highly organized social system. Dog towns are broken into wards, containing several coteries, or family units. Family members greet with a “kiss,” a robust teeth-clacking that allows them to identify each other.

Housing developers could learn much from the prairie dog’s burrow construction. At the top of the burrow a sentinel stands on the high mound, serving as a lookout. Just inside is a listening post, cut into the side of the tunnel, providing a safe place to listen for predators lurking above. Deep in the burrow’s labyrinth are birthing chambers, storage rooms, sleeping quarters, a toilet, tunnels to other burrows and several escape hatches.

But it is the complex language of prairie dogs that sets them apart. Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University records the dogs’ alarm yips and uses a computer to analyze the sounds. To his surprise, Slobodchikoff discovered a sophisticated language.

Slobodchikoff said his studies showed the prairie dog has a different alarm call for each of its predators. He found the dogs could discern color and could affix “adjective” calls to their general informational calls. He postulates that this allows colonies to distinguish among predators. Prairie dog towns remain in place for years, and the dogs see the same predators day after day. They become familiar with the individual quirks of each: which coyote likes to hide in the brush and that Swainson’s hawks tend to swoop in from behind hills.

Slobodchikoff also noted what he called social chatter, a sort of shooting-the-breeze vocalization between two prairie dogs that appeared to have no purpose. All of which ascribes to prairie dogs an ability to think and communicate that has made Slobodchikoff’s findings controversial to other scientists who are skeptical.

“These animals can form concepts about species and predators and have knowledge of hunting styles,” he said. “That implies they have a fairly high cognitive ability. That leads to the notion that animals can think, that they are sentient beings. That’s the problem.” If so, their destruction “becomes an ethical question.”