40 Fun Facts About Prairie Dogs

The largest prairie dog town ever recorded, covering 25,000 square miles of Texas, held roughly how many animals?

400 million is the estimate reported for that single town around 1900; today most towns cover less than one square mile.

Which affectionate-looking greeting do prairie dogs share with their own family group but never with outsiders?

Kissing, a quick touch of mouths, lets prairie dogs check who belongs to the family; members then often groom one another.

Despite the canine name, prairie dogs are burrowing rodents belonging to which animal family, alongside marmots?

Squirrels count prairie dogs among their ground-dwelling members, close cousins of woodchucks rather than of any dog.

Prairie dogs are rodents, so which doglike habit led early explorers to give the animals the second half of their name?

Barking is the prairie dog's warning call, a shrill yelp the animals often give while sitting upright at the burrow entrance.

Which endangered nocturnal predator of the plains depends on prairie dogs for up to 90 percent of its diet?

Black-footed ferret numbers fell with the prairie dogs, and the species was declared extinct in 1979 before a small wild population was found two years later.

Which US president received a live prairie dog shipped east by the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805?

Thomas Jefferson had sent the expedition west, and the prairie dog, caught on the plains in September 1804, survived the long journey to reach him.

A 2007 viral video of a prairie dog turning its head to dramatic music wrongly names which animal in its title?

Chipmunk stuck as the title even though the five-second clip, from a Japanese TV variety show, stars a prairie dog. Its music comes from the film Young Frankenstein.

Which accidentally introduced disease can kill more than 99 percent of the prairie dogs in a colony?

Plague reaches prairie dogs through infected fleas; in wild rodents it is called sylvatic plague, and it is caused by the same bacterium as the bubonic form that strikes people.

Before a 2003 ban, pet-trade collectors pulled young prairie dogs from their burrows using which surprising tool?

A large vacuum device sucked the young out of their tunnels each spring, because prairie dogs are hard to breed in captivity.

Because their towns feed and shelter so many other animals, ecologists give prairie dogs which label?

Keystone species hold an ecosystem together, and biologists count more than 170 kinds of vertebrate affected by prairie dog towns.

Before settlers arrived, prairie dogs often founded towns on land already grazed to the ground by herds of which animal?

Bison and prairie dogs helped each other: the big grazers kept the grass short, then came back to the towns for fresh, nutritious regrowth.

Ranchers long justified destroying prairie dog towns with the claim that the burrows broke the legs of which animals?

Horses were the supposed victims, yet a writer who spent years asking ranchers for a real case reported not finding a single example.

Named after the prairie dog's lookout pose, the slang term prairie dogging describes heads popping up in which setting?

A cubicle office is where it happens: a noise sends several workers peering over their partition walls at once, like startled prairie dogs.

Which US president, namesake of a North Dakota national park, wrote that prairie dogs are never found singly?

Theodore Roosevelt, who ranched in the Dakota badlands, also called prairie dogs the most noisy and inquisitive animals imaginable.

Prairie dogs clip down tall plants around their towns, even ones they never eat, mainly to gain which advantage?

A clear view of danger is the point: short plants leave a stalking coyote nowhere to hide, and the town ends up looking freshly mowed.

Burrowing owls nesting in old prairie dog burrows scare off intruders by imitating the sound of which other animal?

Rattlesnake noises, a rattle and a hiss made from underground, protect the owls, which rarely dig burrows of their own.

How did Lewis and Clark's men finally capture a live prairie dog on the plains in September 1804?

Pouring water down its hole worked only after hours of effort: five barrels vanished into one burrow without filling it.

Biologist Con Slobodchikoff, who records prairie dog alarm calls, argues that the animals possess a simple form of what?

Language is his word for it: he reports that the calls encode what kind of predator is coming, its size, its color and its speed.

Which word for a tight-knit circle of friends do biologists also use for a family group of black-tailed prairie dogs?

Coterie is the term, and a typical one holds a single adult male, several adult females and their offspring, all sharing one defended territory.

A large prairie dog town is split by physical barriers into sections, each with several family groups, called what?

Wards is the term, borrowed from city maps, and a single town may hold 15 to 26 family groups spread among them.

The prairie dog's scientific genus name, Cynomys, joins the Greek word for dog to the Greek for which other animal?

Mouse is the second half: Cynomys comes from the Greek kuon, dog, and mus, mouse, though the animal is neither one.

Lewis and Clark noted in 1804 that the prairie dog had already been named by traders of which nationality?

French traders called them petits chiens, or little dogs, and William Clark recorded a village of the animals covering about four acres.

In 2003, pet prairie dogs in the Midwest passed which virus to people, its first appearance in the Western Hemisphere?

Monkeypox, now called mpox, reached the prairie dogs from African rodents imported from Ghana and housed beside them by an Illinois dealer; every patient had been in contact with an infected prairie dog.

What happens when one black-tailed prairie dog performs a jump-yip, rearing up with forefeet in the air and calling?

Neighbors copy the move in a wave across the town, and the animal that started it seems to use the response to judge how watchful the others are.

Black-tailed prairie dog burrows include a small chamber near the entrance that the animals use for which purpose?

Listening for predators before surfacing is its job, while the grass-lined nesting chamber sits far deeper, near the bottom of the burrow.

Which city's Double-A baseball team, the Sod Poodles, takes its name from a local nickname for the prairie dog?

Amarillo got the Sod Poodles in 2019, when a franchise moved from San Antonio; the team plays at a ballpark called Hodgetown.

The Prairie Dog Town Fork, which flows through Palo Duro Canyon, is one of the two main forks of what?

Red River is formed by two major forks, and this southern one bears a name translated from a Comanche phrase meaning Prairie Dog Town River.

A prairie dog town lines the park road at which rock formation, the first national monument in the United States?

Devils Tower has a small town of several hundred prairie dogs on about 40 acres, and rangers ask visitors never to feed them.

Which threatened species, marked by dark eyebrows and a tiny range, is the smallest of the five kinds of prairie dog?

Utah prairie dog colonies live only in the southwest of that one state, where the species has been federally listed as threatened since 1984.

Canada's only black-tailed prairie dog colonies live in and around Grasslands National Park, in which province?

Saskatchewan marks the northern tip of a range that once ran all the way south to Chihuahua in Mexico.

In 2016, the US Fish and Wildlife Service planned to deliver an oral vaccine to wild prairie dogs by what means?

Drones were to spread the vaccine across towns, guarding the animals against a flea-borne disease that can wipe out a whole colony.

Studies of prairie dog alarm calls found the whole colony rushes underground when the call announces which arrival?

A human sends every prairie dog below, whereas a coyote alarm brings the animals to their burrow entrances to stand and watch the hunter.

Pregnant prairie dogs and mothers with litters sometimes add which unusual item to their diet for extra moisture?

Snow stands in for a drink in winter: prairie dogs normally get all the moisture they need from the plants they eat.

Which explorer, namesake of a famous Colorado peak, recorded the name wishtonwish for the prairie dog?

Zebulon Pike wrote the word down while travelling along the Arkansas River, two years after Lewis and Clark first met the animals.

Which island country lists every species of prairie dog as a prohibited new organism that may not be imported?

New Zealand bars all prairie dogs under a 1996 law, and the European Union separately banned imports after a 2003 disease outbreak among pet prairie dogs.

Pispíza is the word for prairie dog among which Native people of the northern Great Plains?

Lakota has its own word for the animal, one of several indigenous names that long predate the English one, in use since at least 1774.

Infanticide wipes out many black-tailed prairie dog litters; which colony members are most often the killers?

Related nursing females are the usual killers, apparently to cut competition for their own young and gain feeding ground.

When prairie dogs reach maturity, which family members leave their birth group to defend a territory elsewhere?

The sons move out, while daughters stay in their birth group for life, which makes females the steady core of every prairie dog family.

In North Dakota's badlands, prairie dogs sometimes surface with blackened fur after burrowing into seams of what?

Coal seams lie close to the surface there, so a digging prairie dog can come up dusted black instead of matching the pale dirt of its mound.

Which ground-nesting bird of the Great Plains favors the bare soil of prairie dog towns for its nest sites?

Mountain plover numbers rise and fall with prairie dogs, whose digging and grazing expose the open ground the birds need.