Why the West Needs Prairie Dogs

Before Europeans settled in the region, an estimated five billion prairie dogs lived across the West, from Canada to Mexico. Over the centuries, people have viewed these animals as pests, doing whatever they can to exterminate them. Today, prairie dogs occupy just two percent of this area. In this High Country News feature, Christine Peterson follows a group of researchers in central Montana who are collaring and tracking prairie dogs to study and better understand them.

While some people continue to view prairie dogs as a nuisance to the landscape (they create holes that are hazards to horses and also eat the same grass that cows do), these critters do essential work both above and below ground. They graze and increase plant life, and create food and habitats for black-footed ferrets, swift foxes, bison, and mountain plovers. Underground, they build expansive systems of burrows and tunnels, which are habitats for other species, too.

Peterson writes an informative conservation story about one of “the most maligned and persecuted animal species” in the American West—and how researchers, tribes, and even tolerant landowners are coming together to save them.

Within this familiar story of colonization and species decline, however, are more hopeful stories of creativity and adaptation: Researchers are using pedometer-like devices to map prairie dogs’ underground tunnels, remote-controlled badgers to understand prairie dog alarm calls and Kitchen-Aid mixers to craft solutions to deadly disease. After decades of restoration work by tribal wildlife managers, prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, swift foxes and bison are once again roaming the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in north-central Montana, one of the few places in the world where all four species coexist. Some private landowners, meanwhile, are finding ways to tolerate the rodents. Together, these researchers, managers and landowners are striving to conserve the West’s remaining prairie dogs and the prairie that depends on them.