Driving from the Walmart to the nursery, just before the gate to the nursery and on the right is a veritable metropolis of prairie dogs! It’s pretty impressive.
There are prairie dogs everywhere. There are three of them watching you now. There is an elaborate tunnel city under your house running on fusion power and controlling a world-wide surveillance network.
There was a big town of them by the YMCA where we used to swim when I was a kid. We’d come out they’d be chilling by the car. My mom would be like “Don’t go near them they have the plague!!!” (Me: “but they’re fuzzy!”)
Wow so it really did come from somewhere. When the Amarillo team trotted that out as a possible name, they said it was an old term for prairie dogs but no one I knew had ever heard it before. You're the first person who's actually had a reference for it 🤣
I liked how the zoo ones I saw always let the whole community know when an airplane went over cause moving things in the sky were serious business worthy of an alert 8-)
They got really crazy here for awhile, spread from their established colony in a park to all variety of random grassy spots, even small medians in the road, but now they're mostly back to being in the park and in rural areas where they belong.
Comments
(this is your fault, btw, that they're my first thought when anyone mentions burrow owls =P )
"Prairie dog network. Nature's delivery service."
https://www.azgfd.com/2024/11/21/bringing-endangered-black-footed-ferrets-back-to-aubrey-valley/
And people have been able to volunteer for a long time to spotlight them for AZGFD.
It's on my list of "things to do when I've the time"
(Slinks off)