The burrowers:
Rescuing America’s wild prairie dogs

To farmers and developers, they’re pests, and 98% of their habitat has been lost to development.

This is despite the fact that to the ecosystems around them, prairie dogs are heroes. They’re known as a keystone species, meaning they play a vital role in supporting the other nature around them. All that work they do digging burrows helps to keep soil healthy and promote plant growth. And bigger predators such as eagles and foxes are always glad to see them too.

But when the bulldozers arrive, prairie dog colonies face being poisoned or having their burrows destroyed. Before their vital ecosystem role was understood, prairie dogs were subject to massive eradication campaigns. Millions of them once covered the plains from Canada to Mexico, but only 5% of their original populations remain.

Luckily, teams of conservationists from organizations such as the World Wild Fund for Nature, HumaneWatch and Buffalo Nations Grasslands Alliance are ready to go out of their way to rescue the prairie dogs before it’s too late, and give them a fresh start someplace new. We spent some time with them in Colorado and South Dakota.

The work in the hot prairie sun can be brutal and exhausting, but the efforts are beginning to pay off.