Abstract - A Prairie Dog Companion

Grossman, John. 1987. A Prairie Dog Companion, From sunup to sundown, from February to July, zoologist John Hoogland tracks the lives of the furry inhabitants of a 1,600-hole community. Audubon. pp. 53-67.

Abstract

For six months of the year John Hoogland presides over some 1,600 holes in the ground. The holes, which are mounded like miniature volcanoes, dot the bowled floor of a scenic little valley in the Black Hills of South Dakota and could, Hoogland imagines, predate the signing of the U.S. Consititution. Hoogland, then, is a relative newcomer. Some newcomer. Going on fifteen years now, sunup to sundown, usually seven days a week, from early February on into July -- for something like one-sixth of his waking hours since birth -- the thirty-eight-year-old zoologist has been watching these holes and studying the furry little creatures that emerge from them. It's quite possible that nobody has studied a species of animal in the wild in North America as long and intimately, or, for that matter, as ebulliently, as Hoogland has observed the black-tailed prairie dog. Little wonder he's been called "a prairie dog companion." Photography by Terrence Moore.