Abstract - Prairie Dog Town Report, Wind Cave National Park

Cole, James E.. 1948. Prairie Dog Town Report, Wind Cave National Park. 16+ p.

Abstract

There were six prairie-dog towns in Wind Cave National Park when an investigation was made in September 1947. The largest one is in the northern part of the park and consists of several units as shown on the attached topographic base map (NP-WC-5325) [map not included].

At Wind Cave the competition between black-tailed prairie-dogs and herbivores for forage requires consideration. The amount of competiton now is not very significant, but it can be and undoubtedly will become a problem if the prairie-dogs are permitted to increase without restraint. The rodents will kill off the grasses most palatable to buffalo and eventually denude large areas. With regard to direct competition for food, experiments in northern Arizona indicated these rodents eat nothing not eaten by cattle and that the two eat grasses in the same order of preference. Other investigations do not fully support these conclusions. Prairie-dog diet, when the two species use the same range, probably consists of about 60 percent grasses palatable to buffalo and the remainder of miscellaneous vegetation shunned by the larger herbivores. It is evident both from observation and study of the literature that large grazing animals cannot compete successfully with prairie-dogs and that in the natural condition prairie-dog populations increased in spite of predation and other controls until they occupied towns ranging up to hundreds of square miles in extent.

The second problem concerns topographical features of the areas considered in relation to the preferred habitat of the black-tailed prairie-dog. Most writers in describing the habitat of this species agree that these rodents prefer the open country, paricularly level prairies, and avoid, if at all possible, forested or brushy ground and even bottom lands containing rank vegetation.