This morning’s random object from the Random Object Randomogrifier was a little prairie dog figurine, and I dug straight into their history and quirks.
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Prairie dogs belong to a family that split off 30-35 million years ago, with their own lineage emerging about 3 million years back. They’re closely related to ground squirrels, but in looks and social habits they remind me a lot of meerkats, though unlike meerkats, they’re strict herbivores.
There are five recognized species: black-tailed, white-tailed, Gunnison’s, Utah, and Mexican. Most of us in Texas, Oklahoma, and the surrounding Southwest see black-tails. The white tail and Gunnison’s are in the Wyoming, Montanna, Colorado area. They weren’t very forthcoming on where to find the Utah and Mexican varieties.
As rodents, prairie dogs are pretty stable but The Utah and Mexican species are in trouble, facing both habitat loss and a nasty plague that can wipe out whole colonies. Prairie dogs don’t reproduce at the rapid-fire rate you might expect from a rodent. They average one litter a year with 5-8 pups, and only about half survive to adulthood. If they escapte the hawks, fox, coyotes, and humans, then their entire population still grows less than 20% annually.
Prairie dog towns, those sprawling colonies, can house anywhere from 20 to over 100 individuals per burrow complex, each with dedicated bedrooms, nurseries, and ventilation shafts. When things get crowded, a group will move about 100 feet away and start fresh. That movement, plus their grazing, seed spreading, and soil-aerating digging, makes them keystone species in their ecosystem. They create habitats for owls, reptiles, and insects, and help maintain plant diversity.
So why do farmers often see them as pests? Those same burrows that support biodiversity can break a horse’s leg or ruin a row of crops. Historically, farming methods like the one described in Leviticus 25, letting a field lie fallow one year in seven, might have given prairie dogs and agriculture room to coexist. Modern intensive farming rarely leaves that kind of space, so conflicts rise. They’ve been flooded, poisoned, shot, trapped, and there have been attempts at relocation.
Relocation isn’t always the fix people expect. In Lawton, Oklahoma, for instance, moving prairie dogs from a National Guard armory to Fort Sill just doubled the number of colonies. The ones they managed to catch and move started a new colony, while the few they missed back at the armory got busy repopulatin. With the aforementioned population growth rate around 20% a year, even partial removals can backfire. The truth is, in the wide grasslands from Mexico up through Montana, prairie dogs are right at home, and they’ve been here far longer than we have.
Click here to watch the prairie dog episode of Sketch & Coffee, Live!
If you would like a free, no-strings, 20-30 minute lesson plan about prairie dogs, follow the link below:
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