January 5, 2014 -- Day 1 of ???

I had the idea, last year, to start this up, using photos of the wildlife I manage to find here in Lake County, north of Chicago, but with one thing and another it never got off the ground. A year later, I decided I may as well get to it, just to find a use for all these shots I take. Unfortunately, the weather this year has decided to start off on a decidedly indoor note -- tomorrow's high is expected to actually reach -10 F! So, I'll start things off with something from my Christmas trip to Colorado:

      Black-tailed Prairie Dog (Cynomys ludovicianus), Big Johnson Reservoir, El Paso Co, CO.  1/1/14

Although they're called Prairie Dogs, they're actually big ground squirrels. The most common of the 5 species of Prairie Dogs (genus Cynomys), they're found on the Great Plains of the US. Of the other 4 species, two are considered endangered -- the Utah Prairie Dog (C. parvidens) and the Mexican Prairie Dog (C. mexicanus).

Black-tailed Prairie Dogs used to occur in vast colonies, called towns. Some historic towns were estimated to cover several thousand square miles and have populations of 6 figures! Needless to say, quite a few other species use these towns. Burrowing Owls,  use the burrows, while Black-footed Ferrets and Ferruginous Hawks favor them for food. (90% of a ferret's diet may be Prairie Dogs!) Work done at Colorado State University in the late 1990s indicates that some species of grasshopper are found primarily on these towns -- species in the Oedipodinae were almost exclusively collected on the towns, while species in the Gomphocerinae were almost exclusively collected from the surrounding areas. (1) By cropping the vegetation around them as well as digging extensive burrow systems, they alter both the physical and the ecological structure of their landscape to a degree that few other species can match, so it's no wonder that they're often used as textbook examples of keystone species.

This cropping often brings them into conflict with ranchers, who see them as competing with cattle for food. Observers have, however, found that cattle in some areas prefer to feed on towns, and in other areas show no preference for feeding on or off towns. (2)

 

(1) Russell, Robin E.; Detling, James K. (2003). "Grasshoppers (Orthoptera: Acrididae) and Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs (Sciuridae: Cynomys ludovicianus (Ord)): Associations between Two Rangeland Herbivores".  Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society 76 (4): 578-587

 

(2) Guenther, Debra A.; Detling, James K. (2003). "Observations of cattle use of prairie dog towns". Journal of Range Management 56 (5): 410–417.