Peanut Butter Pellets Help Keep Prairie Dogs Plague Free

PUEBLO, CO – A half-dozen Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists spent last week flipping blueberry-shaped plague vaccine pellets onto the ground over the 850-acre Pueblo County cattle ranch owned by Gary and Georgia Walker.

The peanut-butter flavored treats, created in CPW labs in Fort Collins, are meant to protect colonies from fast-spreading plagues that can knock out a whole prairie dog community. Biologists visited the Walker's ranch and another ranch in Holly, Colorado to disburse the peanut-butter pellets, riding ATVs across the wide-open prairies.

Even though the biologists like prairie dogs well enough, it's other species – the highly endangered black-footed ferrets and burrowing owls – they are trying to protect.

Prairie dogs are considered a "keystone species" who provide a direct food source for the ferrets as well as foxes, badgers, bobcats, coyotes, rattlesnakes and raptors. Prairie dog burrows also create homes for salamanders, mice, turtles and frogs, and the endangered Western Burrowing Owl.

“Healthy prairie dog populations are essential to the persistence of black-footed ferrets, whose primary prey is the prairie dog,” said Ed Schmal, CPW wildlife biologist who was overseeing the Walker Ranch plague vaccine work in a statement. “When prairie dog populations crash, like when plague hits a dog town, ferrets take the hit too. If you want to reintroduce ferrets, it is essential to do plague management in those areas.”

Unlike European rats in the Middle Ages, prairie dogs do not carry the plague, but they are extremely susceptible to the disease, usually dying within 72 hours of encountering the fleas that carry it.

The Walkers are were the first ranchers in Colorado to choose to allow the reintroduction of black-footed ferrets – the rarest mammals in North America – on their land, Colorado Parks and Wildlife said.

In southeastern Colorado, few human developments threaten prairie dog colonies.

“We need 2,000 acres of black-tailed prairie dog colonies to consider a property as an appropriate place to reintroduce black-footed ferrets and Walker Ranch was ready for the challenge,” Schmal said. “We’re lucky to have partners like Gary and Georgia Walker to help us protect these endangered species, this work cannot happen without ranchers like the Walkers.”

In rural areas, prairie dogs have more of a fighting chance. But that's changing on the Front Range, where so called "urban prairie dog colonies" have coexisted with human settlements for decades. Now are being exterminated by developers hungry for Colorado farmland, who gas them or bulldoze their colonies. About 95 percent of prairie dog colonies have been eliminated in the west.

Some advocates of the chubby ground squirrels even trap and relocate colonies to spare them from the bulldozer. The City of Longmont has been trapping and relocating prairie dog colonies onto open space.

"How we manage prairie dogs is really an urban interface between wildlife and development in the state," said David Bell, Longmont's natural resources manager in a 2017 interview. "We'd rather see our prairie dogs as part of a functioning ecosystem."

Related: Prairie Dog Rescuers At Work on Front Range

Image via Northern Colorado Prairie Dog Advocates

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