Jesse Boulerice, research ecologist with the Smithsonian Institution, inspects a prairie dog his team trapped at American Prairie in Montana. The researchers aim to better understand prairie dog movements.
A prairie dog is collared by Smithsonian Institution scientists at American Prairie.
THE PRAIRIE DOG CAUGHT IN TRAP 69 was angry. And who could blame her? After waking up in her burrow on a mid-September morning, she’d waddled innocently outside for a breakfast of mini marshmallows and carrots, only to find herself stuck in a wire cage and carried across the prairie. Then a pair of human hands had gripped her like a burrito while two more hands put a black rubber tracking collar around her neck.
The situation was worse than she realized: Prairie dogs are among the most maligned and persecuted animal species in the Western U.S. So maligned, in fact, that a 2020 survey in northern Montana found that well over half the area’s landowners believed prairie dogs should not live on public land.
To make matters even grimmer, this particular prairie dog had fleas. And those fleas could have been carrying the bacteria that causes plague — the Black Death. “It’s not great,” commented researcher Jesse Boulerice as he adjusted his gentle grip around her midsection.
The rodent responded by biting into Boulerice’s leather glove, hanging on with her two front teeth while researchers swiped a black streak of Clairol’s Nice’n Easy hair dye down her back.
Though black-tailed prairie dogs have a long-standing reputation as pests, their ingenious tunnel systems and industrious prairie pruning make them one of the West’s primary ecosystem engineers. Some researchers call them the “chicken nuggets of the prairie”; if a prairie species eats meat, it almost certainly eats prairie dogs. Without prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets would never survive outside zoos and breeding facilities, and we would have far fewer mountain plovers, burrowing owls, swift foxes, and ferruginous hawks.
Before 1800, an estimated 5 billion prairie dogs lived from Canada to Mexico, covering the West with underground apartment complexes that shifted over the centuries like sand dunes. The Lakota, Dakota and other Indigenous peoples of the prairie shaped and depended on the ecosystems prairie dogs created. Some relied on prairie dogs for nourishment during thin times, or used them as a ceremonial food.
But European settlers were remarkably effective at shooting and poisoning prairie dogs and plowing up their burrows. Today, the five prairie dog species occupy just 2% of their historic range, and some occupy even less.
Prairie dogs still survive in many of their historic territories: Black-tailed prairie dogs, known for their especially large, dense colonies, persist in isolated pockets of the prairie east of the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico. White-tailed prairie dogs live in parts of Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. Gunnison’s prairie