Wilderness Without Wildlife Is Just Scenery

by Yvonne Boudreaux, Prairie Dog Pals

The prairie dog is certainly one of the most beleaguered of all species in the modern world.  Of the 13 original species only 5 remain. Over the last 100 years, the remaining 5 species of prairie dogs have plummeted to 1%-2% of their historical range with a resulting decline of populations.  The Utah and Mexican Prairie Dogs are protected, but the fact is they number fewer than several thousand, meaning this animal is highly threatened, mostly by lack of knowledge.

Prairie dogs are important to as many as 160-170 other species of wildlife, such as burrowing owls and ferrets. Besides being a key link in the food chain they provide homes or shelter to many species. They enrich plant communities in their habitat, and help to maintain the health of arid grasslands, which means they actually help cattle, by making the grasses more fertile. In fact, the burrowing animals, like prairie dogs, open breathing tubes in the Earth.  The underground aquifers act like a lungs in human bodies. The moon as it passes raises and lowers the underground water table like tides and the earth breathes, through the many fissures and tubes they create. Nine species are considered completely dependent on prairie dogs as prey, including the Black-footed Ferret, another very endangered mammal. 

It’s unfortunate that prairie dogs are lumped within the huge taxonomic order of rodents.  They miss out on the agility of squirrels and the sexual reproductive prowess of mice. The only rodent with worse “public relations” is the rat!  But here are some facts:

• Prairie dogs are the victims of plague, not the vectors. Fleas carrying the Yersinia Pestis bacteria are brought into the colony by wild animals, roaming cats, or off-leash dogs. They have no immunity, prairie dogs die within days.
• Prairie dogs are territorial. They remain in or near their ancestral habitat.  The prairie dogs towns you see in Albuquerque are the remnants of vast prairie dog towns that go back hundreds of years.
• Prairie dog burrows are complex, with a different area for each function of life.  There are chambers for sleeping, nesting, food storage, toilets, and flood.
• Poisoning prairie dogs is not only cruel, causing a slow agonizing death that may take several days, but ineffective. While a mature colony tends to expand at approximately 2% annually, a poisoned colony can expand at an annual rate of 70%.

Something else you did not know. Prairie dogs have the most complex language of any animal ever studied.  They have over 200 words and can form sentences. Bark, snitch, yap, chirp, yip, chatter, yelp, twitter, chip, squeak, chirrup and woo hoo are all prairie dog sounds that humans can identify.  Dr. Con Slobodchicoff, a researcher at Northern Arizona University, has used state of the art equipment to parse the sounds that prairie dogs make. What he discovered was astonishing, a language that is way beyond the limited comprehension of other species. Prairie dogs possess a rich and remarkable language that may surpass the complexity of whales and dolphins. 

What was the most surprising?  As you would expect they identified intruders, but they also identified size, color, speed, direction and risk. Experiments revealed a real coyote elicits a clear and identifiable response, but a silhouette of a coyote run on a wire through the same colony elicited a different response, their word for coyote, but distinctively different. A language skill called displacement: the ability to talk about something that isn’t actually there.  When a similar experiment was conducted by running a black oval through the same prairie dog town, they created a new word. The members of the colony agree to describe and assign meaning to the unfamiliar object.  That, my friend, is productivity – one of the highest levels of language, aside from being able to “rap” extemporaneously.

Following years of controlled experiments, Dr. Slobodchicoff was also able to discern that prairie dogs are frequently separated by regional dialect. An Arizona prairie dog would sound a little different compared to a New Mexico prairie dog, and both would sound different compared to a Texas dawg,… fer shurr ya’ll.