Why can’t the black-tailed prairie dog get with the program? Why can’t it fulfill its assigned part?
Doesn’t this cuddly critter know it’s supposed to be hanging on to survival by the thinnest of threads, dangling over a dark cliff before a possible slide into the abyss?
Instead of cooperating with this grim tale of species collapse, the prairie dog keeps rewriting the script. As a result, we read stories like this recent one from the Boulder Daily Camera: “They’ve put up fences. They’ve marked boundaries with opaque ‘visual barriers.’ They’ve trapped the animals and moved them . . . and finally trapped them, frozen them and sent them off to become raptor food.
“But despite Boulder County’s vigilant efforts, prairie dogs on county open space keep popping up where they’re not wanted.
” ‘Their annual population growth is far greater than whatever we’re going to be doing out there in any given year,’ said Ron Stewart, director of the county’s Parks and Open Space Department.”
It’s not as if Boulder is inhospitable to prairie dogs. Far from it. For years the county has set aside prairie dog habitat conservation areas. But the animals don’t stay on their reservations. They migrate to where they’re not wanted. And the county, reluctant to simply exterminate the offending nomads, dutifully trudges the extra mile in finding many of them new homes.
Oblivious to such absurdities, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is in the process of evaluating, yet again, whether the black-tailed prairie dog should be listed as a threatened or endangered species. Which it did just a few years ago.
Never mind that estimates of the prairie dogs’ habitat have grown from 364,000 acres nationally in 1961 to 676,000 acres in 2000, to 1,842,000 acres in 2004. By then, the federal estimate for the total prairie dog population was in the neighborhood of 18 million — with the possibility of a much bigger number. Never mind, too, that when Fish & Wildlife removed the animal as a candidate for an official listing in 2004, it declared that the prairie dog was “not likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future.”
None of this matters to those who look at the historical range of the prairie dog — which some claim reached 100 million acres — and imagine the creature cavorting across that vast expanse again. So environmentalists keep petitioning the federal government to reassess its attitude toward the prairie dog in light of supposedly heightened threats, such as the plague and energy development.
In places like Boulder County, of course, the prairie dog is not so much dying off as taking over. No wonder the Endangered Species Act remains one of the most mistrusted and debated pieces of environmental legislation ever conceived by Congress.
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Humans have spent their entire history substituting automated mechanical power for human muscle. A slow learner, I have to be reminded of this fact every now and then.
First it was the hand-cranked ice cream maker that I insisted on buying. What fun it would be to take turns cranking it on a glorious summer day. And it was, maybe twice.
Last year my fancy turned to an old-fashioned reel mower — not because I’m worried about my family’s “carbon footprint” but because of its simplicity and quiet. But the allure faded after a summer spent mowing much of the lawn twice every time out and cursing at how even little sticks seemed to stop the machine in its tracks.
My carbon footprint may rise with my next purchase, but at least my blood pressure won’t.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
