Prairie Dogs: The Inconvenient Animal

Before I begin, I want to thank my readers for their thoughtful and incisive comments on the last post. In reading them, I realize that there were a few things I did not make clear in my attempt to make a punchy, readable post. First, the hunters to whom I refer are hunting on a small strip of land, maybe ten acres at most, that adjoins our 80-acre one, a strip that they own. So they're taking deer that live largely on our land, something that inspires a conflicted mix of protectiveness and jealousy in me. Protectiveness, because I love watching deer (there were seven in our meadow this morning, and there's a fawn out there right now, in the snow--so plenty of them made it through!)

Jealousy? Yes. I am jealous of people who have the desire and wherewithal to take wild meat off their own land rather than buying sad, often tasteless bits of cow or pig, raised miserably in feedlots and stanchions and packed in Styrofoam and Saran. I'm not there yet. I may never get there. I have never learned to use a gun, and I'm not sure I have the right stuff to point it at a living animal and end its life to feed myself. But a big part of me wishes I were. Because to me, hunting on your own land makes some kind of elemental, vital sense.

My beef had simply to do with these particular hunters' bad behavior, being inconsiderate and sloppy. With being confined to my house for a solid week in gray old December. With the disgust at having to guard my tender boy from the shock of seeing a bunch of carcasses in his driveway. That's it. I believe in that kind of subsistence hunting; I see the need for it in every nipped-off branch and wildflower in the forest understory, and I wish I could do it. I'm not bashing hunting; I'm bashing bad behavior.

With that, on to North Dakota, and prairie dogs, and a whole 'nother kind of hunting, a kind I do not believe in.

Adorable, cuddly beasties or scurrilous varmints? You either love prairie dogs (and I suspect that 99% of my readers fall into that camp with me) or hate them. How can this be? Prairie dogs are universally persecuted for their way of life—of turning prairie or pastureland into a honeycomb of burrows and chambers. I have to confess that a prairie dog town is not a handsome thing, until you begin to watch the little animals going about their busyness, until you glance up to see the ferruginous hawk circling overhead, and down to see the gopher snake slithering into a burrow, or a burrowing owl claiming one hole as its own.

For there is a whole suite of animals that benefit from those burrows, including snakes, foxes, burrowing owls, Swainson’s and ferruginous hawks, and badgers. Most notably, black-footed ferrets depend on prairie dogs. This vanishingly endangered weasel was thought to be extinct until a farmer’s dog brought one to a Meteetse, Wyoming doorstep in 1981. Perhaps 200 black-footed ferrets survive in the wild, bolstered by an aggressive captive-breeding and release program. Nationwide, only six black-tailed prairie dog populations now exist that are large enough to support reintroduction of black-footed ferrets. The ferret will always be endangered, because the prairie dogs will always be kept on the brink of extinction. Read on...

From 1916-1920-- the year of my mother’s birth-- state, Federal and private agencies spread strychnine on 47 million acres of prairie dog towns, from North Dakota to New Mexico. New Mexico’s Animas Valley hosted a prairie dog town that, in 1908, comprised 6.4 million animals spread over 1,000 square miles. By 1938, the town had contracted to 50 acres. Between 1920 and 1958, when I was born, North Dakota had reduced its prairie dog towns from over two million acres to about 20,000 acres; by the time I was in college, in 1978, there were only 9,000 North Dakota acres in dogtowns. South Dakota, my natal state, has less than 300,000 acres in prairie dog towns, but a third of the continent’s surviving animals are in that state.

I've only seen a handful of prairie dog towns in my life, all small--minuscule by comparison with their former numbers. This one in North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park was a special delight, because the animals were acclimated to humans, and we could watch their behavior, which is charming by any measure. It was a stark contrast to the behavior of prairie dogs that I watched on a remnant bit of fallow farmland in Nebraska. Those animals simply disappeared when my car pulled up, and I saw no more than the tops of their heads until I drove away and got out the telescope. Even then, they were on high alert, barking and flinging themselves into the air to warn the others. They had clearly been persecuted, and were clinging to life on this prairie remnant.

My maternal grandfather Klaas Clarence Ruigh, who was born in Firth, Nebraska, took my mother to see prairie dogs in Nebraska when she was a little girl in the 1930’s. Prairie dogs were already rare then, and had to be sought out. Everywhere they occur, prairie dogs are hunted as varmints. A Google search for "prairie dog hunting" in 2009 turns up 2,160,000 web pages (up from 167,000 in 2007). This is an ongoing, highly popular activity. Prairie dogs, unlike the deer our neighbors shoot, are never eaten. They are simply wasted, shot at great distances with high-powered rifles, sometimes aided by laser technology, and left where they lie. Our classification of prairie dogs as “varmints” provides justification that borders on religious fervor to the shooters (I will not call them hunters) who make it their mission to “vaporize” them wherever they still occur.

A mother prairie dog bringing home the vegetal bacon.

She's mobbed by her litter of pups, who fall to the feast. I was reminded of a fox bringing a duck to its den.

Prairie dogs provide food and burrows vital to the endangered swift fox and black-footed ferret, as well as the declining burrowing owl. Why should a mammal that by any argument is rare and local and confined to relict populations still be the target of indiscriminate shooting? The simple answer is that the prairie dog is an inconvenient animal. It is unable to live on the fringes of agriculture; its very nature is to stake out a town and inhabit it, consuming acres of land in so doing. Cows and horses fall into prairie dog burrows and break legs; tractors break axles.

Prairie dogs are expensive animals. And so they go. I recently read a news item saying that the state of South Dakota (which has one third of the global population) had resolved to keep prairie dog numbers at a level just high enough to prevent their being listed as endangered. This is not charity or forward-thinking wildlife management; this is pragmatism. For when the prairie dog becomes endangered enough to make the Federal list, landowners are forced to protect it. Nobody with an economic interest in his land wants that. Thus, we keep them on the edge of the abyss.

We actually want them to stop just short of dying out altogether. If learning this and looking at my photos of prairie dog life causes you to stop and think, to question the ethics and motives of wildlife management agencies; whether state, Federal, or private; to challenge yourself to wonder whether we're aiming for maximum biodiversity or maximum economic benefit in our wildlife management decisions, then this post has been a good day's work.

A Red Hatter, appreciating the protected prairie dogs at Theodore Roosevelt National Monument. She made me smile. Her bumper sticker reads, "It's All About ME!"

As it turns out, an apt description of our prairie dog management practices.

THIS JUST IN: Thanks to Adam Zorn, naturalist at Westmoreland Sanctuary who alerted me to Ted Williams' excellent "Incite" column in this month's Audubon Magazine. I've always loved Williams' take; he's like a retriever who picks up the biggest, gnarliest log in the deepest mud and lugs it up to you. I'm honored to have experienced a simultaneous need to talk about what we do to prairie dogs (although Ted probably wrote his piece months ago). You can read the entire text here. Go TED.

Despite appearances, this is not Bash a Hunter Week on Julie Zickefoose.blogspot.com. This is Question How We Treat Animals Week. Thank you for your attention.

Buck Fever

It's over.

As of today, gun season in Ohio ends. It's been a fun week. There's been a big pickup truck parked in our turnaround, smack in the middle of it, nobody able to get by, and that includes us and the paper delivery guy and the myriad other delivery people who use it. There's been a series of hunters perched in a tree stand a stone's throw off our driveway most of the week, too, all hunkered down in flame orange. We haven't come out of the house even to walk to the mailbox, figuring we might look a bit too much like whitetails. I'm still haunted, years later, by the memory of the woman in Maine who wore white gloves while hanging out her laundry in her own backyard and was gunned down by a hunter just inside the woods. He thought her hands were a deer's tail. A deer that was hanging up sheets on a line. Buck fever is a weird thing. So needless to say, all hikes were canceled for the week. Which makes me just a tiny bit cranky. And ever so slightly crazy. Like this post.

warning...graphic photo coming up.



On the third morning, there was this,




parked right where Liam and Phoebe wait for the bus every morning. Phoebe, at 13, is cool. And it was dark when she got on the bus, and I saw it, but she didn't. Liam, at 10, is not cool. And neither am I. I am not cool about a truck full of corpses in my driveway where my tender-hearted boy is concerned. Hmm. What to do?

The trick was to keep him from seeing them as we waited for the bus. (No, he doesn't read my blog). So, knowing this vision awaited us at 7:45 AM, when the sun would be coming up, Bill and I kept sweet Liam facing us in the car, engaged and gabbing, and then we flanked him like Secret Service agents as we walked him to the bus, and somehow we kept him from seeing it.

Helicopter parents? Hardly. We just know our boy. If I had seen that in my driveway at age 10, I would probably be the vegan CEO of PETA right now. Or ninja black, blowing up things for Earth First! And though I'm sure those are interesting life choices, I'd rather my son not start his little day with a bunch of dead deer in his driveway. He loves deer.

On the fourth morning, the hunters left, leaving only footprints, a pile of plastic trash, a bunch of reflective flagging, some bloody latex gloves, a few candy and snack wrappers, a badly barked tree, and a huge gutpile under where they'd had their tree stand. That's how we could tell they were all done. If you hope to shoot some more deer, you don't leave a gutpile under your stand. Hey, it's their land, and they can do what they want. It's not what I'd do. I'd pick up after myself. As we will pick up after them. At least the crows are enjoying the innards.

But you know, I hunt, too. I especially like hunting bucks. Like this one, who came into our meadow the first afternoon of gun season. Sweet little six-pointer. Had 'im dead to rights.

Blam!
And I shot him again, as he plunged into the purely theoretical safety of our 80 acres of posted land. I particularly enjoyed taking that last shot.


Bill posts the borders every year. He takes it seriously. Here, he's using the newspaper delivery bag with which he delivered the Marietta Times as a teen.

Since he's taller than most anybody around here, and he stands on a joint compound bucket when he posts, trespassers have a harder time ripping our signs down now. Learned that one the hard way.

That's a big bear, scratching on his tree.

I got a real nice ten-pointer last week. Baited him with sweet talk. He came right in. Lung shot.


Another lung shot

and then a flank shot

and a parting shot.

Never did manage to drop him. Never wanted to.

It's sixteen degrees, a pink and blue dawn, powdered sugar on everything. Finally, a real killing frost. No roses will make it through this one. Three deer feed in our meadow, materializing from dark blobs to a doe and her two fawns. Somehow they've had the sense to stay here all week, in the center of our land, wide open and often visible from our house. The gunshots ring out all around as I write, in a closing day frenzy. Tomorrow, I walk again.

Hamster Loaf, Zickefoose Underwear

These social networking sites, I dunno. You can get kinda wrapped up in 'em. Like last night, I posted a photo of my HamLoaf, which is a meatloaf shaped like a hamster. Before cooking, it has a distinctly fetal quality, which several of my Facebook friends pointed out. I can assure you that it is much more appetizing when nicely browned. My little family can demolish an entire HamLoaf in a sitting, with only a little fighting over the crispy feet and tail. 40 comments came in about HamLoaf, including requests for the recipe (there is none; I just throw stuff together). Yeah, Facebook can be fun.

Social networking aside, I ask you: Why not sculpt your meatloaf? It's right up there with stopping to smell the flowers or to notice the dropping on the trail, in my book. Everything is there, waiting to be sculpted, smelt, identified, and it's all good, all free for the taking.

Moving along that train of thought, we all wear underwear, so why not have amusing underwear? Even better, why not own amusing underwear sporting anatomically accurate Zickefoose art?

In my career as a freelance illustrator, I've painted band logos on drumheads, Jersey cows on milk cans, bird feeders on packaging. I've done dozens of wildlife t-shirt designs, horse portraits, dog portraits, cat portraits; I've even done art for two marble headstones. I've done several kickin' tattoos which are walking around on live human beings. Nothing is off limits when you're trying to feed your family and pay the mortgage with art. And, like the flowers and the meatloaf and the dropping, all those experiences were good for me, all grist for the mill. I've enjoyed every minute of it, although the headstone gig did get a little weird.

So when Bill of the Birds asked me to help make real his idea, which had aged for about 15 years, of designing bird boxers, I jumped on that like butter on a pancake. Behold:


Need help with the joke? I thought you might.

They're kind of subtle.


This is my husband's humor, what makes living with him special, each and every day. (Thanks to Anne Taussig for invaluable design and production guidance.)

Christmas is roaring up. These boxers would make the perfect surprise gift for your husband or boyfriend, who lurks on my blog but never comments. Lurky lurk lurk.

Or for you. Yes, you! (I know this is primarily a chickblog; I'm not kidding myself.)

I like to wear boxers while gardening on really hot days. They're like super-comfy short shorts. And it's easy to sprint for the side door when you hear the Fed-Ex truck rumbling up the driveway.

So. They come in M, L, XL and XXL. And you can order them HERE.

I know I cannot have the hamsters, but I fervently hope they will give me a piece of HamLoaf. I know the difference. I cannot eat hamsters, but I can eat HamLoaf. Right, Mether?

Right, Chet Baker. But not too much, because there are onions in it.