is exceedingly difficult to cope.”
The federal government, with what Merriam termed “universal support,” started to investigate efficient ways to “combat the evil” on private and public lands. Prairie dog eradication changed from a backyard occupation to a federally funded campaign. The government purchased and applied poison grain laced with strychnine and provided subsidies for ranchers to do so on a colossal scale. More recently, strychnine was replaced by 1080, zinc phosphide, and Rozall, but the effect was just as lethal. After treatment, sites were revisited to ensure a complete kill. Stragglers were knocked out with targeted burrow application of bisulfide, pyrotechnic gas cartridges, cyanide flakes, or a homemade concoction called “hoky poky on cobs.”
Prairie dog poisoning became a full-time job for thousands of people. Eradication was a sure-fire campaign platform for any governor or congressman in a prairie state. Poisoning was both politically popular and well funded in order to remove an “impediment to the economic development of the west.” Between 1915 and 1965, western states eliminated more than 37 million acres of prairie dog towns, driving populations to less than 5 percent of their former range. They left only small, overlooked pockets of prairie dogs in the back corners of a few expansive ranches, public grasslands, and tribal lands. These pockets today continue to be targeted by government-sponsored poisoning campaigns, with only some small populations being managed in protected environments.
• • •
I return to my truck and leave the prairie dogs to start their day. I find in the bottom of my backpack a granola bar, oats and other grains molded into a snack that is thankfully strychnine free, and think of C. Hart Merriam as I eat my breakfast. Reading his 1902 article, I thought that Merriam sounded interested in the ecology of prairie dogs. He seemed almost fond of prairie dogs when he referred to the black-footed ferret as “one of their [prairie dogs] most relentless and terrible enemies, and if sufficiently abundant would quickly exterminate all the inhabitants of the largest colonies.” Yet his document now can be seen as a masterful piece of political propaganda aimed toward securing funding for his agency through prairie dog eradication.
I wonder if he ever realized, or possibly regretted, his role in forever shifting public opinion of prairie dogs as a symbol of the West to that of a pest. Even the founder of modern wildlife management, Aldo Leopold, originally subscribed to the eradication view for a time, shooting wolves on sight in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico where he was a forest ranger. Yet one day while staring down at a wolf he shot and seeing the “green fire” extinguishing from its eyes, he had a vision for the future that would forever change the way we view and manage wildlife. Leopold’s feelings of sentimentality and mourning brought about the birth of a land ethic and greatly advanced the conservation movement. Unfortunately, C. Hart Merriam did not have a similar vision for wildlife. History now remembers him as a man after whom several wildlife species were named, many now extinct, with the most notable exception being a subspecies of turkey.
Today, natural selection seems to favor the generalist: the raccoon or dandelion that persists in the city, suburbs, and national park; the grub that can feed on multiple backyard plants rather than be restricted to one, thereby minimizing its vulnerability to the plight of a single bush. As the human footprint expands and homogenizes the landscape, specialists are often those rare holdovers we both marvel at and want to conserve—species like the panda of the bamboo forests in Asia, desert pupfish of small pools in the deserts of the southwestern United States, and the oyster mussel of clear Appalachian streams, that are at the top of many conservation priority lists as the species at greatest risk of extinction.
Just as ecological theory would predict, the decline of prairie dogs has been accompanied by the decline of their specialist predator. Black-footed ferrets have always been cryptic and difficult to find, but by the mid-1900s they were becoming exceedingly rare. In the span of less than a hundred years, the black-footed ferret would go from the high status of being the most effective specialist in North America to one of the most critically endangered animals in the world. By the late 1960s and early 1970s ferrets would become known not as the “most relentless and terrible enemy” of the prairie dog, but—thanks to legal protection afforded them under the Endangered Species Act—as the saving grace for their prey species. Endangered predators relying on declining prey, the ferrets became the bellwether of healthy, large prairie dog colonies on the handful of sites where they still existed.
I look out the truck windshield past the prairie dog colony I had just left. In the distance I see a series of other small colonies on benches leading down toward the Missouri River. They are just patches of bare ground and burrows on the flat tops of hills separated by narrow draws, where I know that at least a handful of prairie dogs would be coming above ground for the day. Through government protection and proactive restoration, prairie dogs have persisted here over time. It is a small victory in the long-term battle to save the few last pieces of intact native prairie. I hope that someday, in my lifetime, we might be able to restore ferrets back here. To have the rarest eat the rare. It would take me hours to get anywhere with a name on the map, but I am in the middle of everything.
CHAPTER 2
Decline toward Extinction
During summers when I was young boy, I would go with my father to his office. In the early morning, the building was filled with scientists crossing paths as they either headed into the field or started their day of typing on computers. Barely knowing how to type, I volunteered to work in the field with Rob Hinz. Rob was a pastor at a local church on the weekends and trapped meadow voles for scientist James Nichols during the week. Fifty years old, with a round belly and balding hair, Rob always wore three layers of heavy cotton shirts, even on the hottest of days.
“Sweat keeps you cool,” Rob would say. Water kept against skin. I found no reason to doubt him; his logic seemed sound.
We began checking traps at dawn so that we would be done before the heat of the day, working our way up and down a grid of trap lines in the tall, humid fields of Maryland. We checked to see whether the door was shut on each small, shiny, aluminum box trap that was placed under a neatly cut, rectangular square of plywood to keep it from baking in the sun. Each trap location was marked by a four-foot wooden post planted into the ground, painted white on the top so we could find it in the thick grass.
As we walked through the grid, checking and closing traps, Rob would chain-smoke cigarettes. Finishing one, Rob would kill the ember on the top of a white post, pinch off the quarter-inch of tobacco from the filter and neatly leave the white tuft on top of the post. “Something for the deer” he would say as he placed the used filter in his canvas shirt pocket before pulling out another stick. He wheezed as he walked in the heat, fifty feet between traps, pouring sweat from his brow that dripped down into the folds of his neck and was absorbed in his faded cotton layers. Yet when he had an animal in hand, his round plump fingers were dexterous and gentle. He held the small brown vole barehanded, gripping it by the scruff of its neck, knowing the intent of its sharp incisor teeth but avoiding little nips, reading me data to record on the clipboard. Trap 5M, female, VP, medium nipples . . . 230 grams.
Finishing our grids for the day and resetting traps, we drove back to the office, passing ponds and mowed fields that served as study plots for other scientists. Groves of mixed hardwood trees covered with little metal tags and brightly colored flagging, signs of scientists at work. On the forest floor, metal cages and trays lay at set intervals, collecting falling leaf litter. I wondered who had that job, who found something of interest in what I thought was ordinary. Taking the route past ponds filled with cricket frogs and painted turtles, just before the gravel road gave way to pavement, we passed by a dirt road between two ponds that was blocked off with a sawhorse and a sign that said “Restricted Area—Whooping Crane Staff Only.” On quiet days in the surrounding fields, I could hear the sounds of cranes coming from across the motes of ponds. Goose-like calls that were more awkward and guttural. Having seen pictures in my bird field guide, I envisioned the vibrations starting
