THE RESEARCH SEASON HAS OFFICIALLY ENDED here at the Valles Grande, VCNP, New Mexico, where John and the Squad have finished capturing and marking all of the emergent juvenile offspring of the year. The final order of business every year is to run our predator-pull experiments at our research site to study alarm calling behavior among prairie dogs with and without offspring. With that data acquired, and all prairie dogs marked, John and the Squad have gathered and put away all our traps, burrow markers, bait and supplies, and our observation towers.

It was a successful first year at this new colony, with over a hundred new prairie dogs on the books. John will be back to the Valles Grande in September with a small team to recapture all of our prairie dogs so they can be marked again after their next molt (during which they put on their winter coats). But until then, research will be on pause as the prairie dogs focus on fattening up for the cold weather to come. Stay tuned!

REDONDO MEADOW HAS COME BACK TO LIFE. From 2013 through 2016, John and the Squad conducted research on Gunnison's prairie dogs (GPDs) at a site called Redondo Meadow in the Valles Caldera National Preserve (VCNP), approximately six miles west of our current 2017 site at the Valles Grande in VCNP, where we continue to study GPDs. But after the field season ended in 2016, the Redondo Meadows colony fell victim to plague and nearly every single prairie dog at our research site was dead before John returned to re-mark them two months later.

It was after this plague event that John established the new research site at the Valles Grande. But throughout the 2017 season, the Squad visited the Redondo Meadow site and found two surviving members of the stricken colony: a four-year-old female original resident who they recaptured and marked "Head", and a one-year-old female who'd been born in 2016 and who they recaptured and marked "RAB" (Ring Around the Belly). With a couple more prairie dogs scattered outside the study site, the outlook was not entirely optimistic but still hopeful (always hopeful). We do not know at this point if our survivors were infected with the plague (and perhaps had antibodies or some type of resistance) or managed to avoid infection.

A couple of days ago, after spending the season photographing the new colony at the Valles Grande, Mariana Rivera Rodriguez (field assistant and former squaddie) went back to Redondo Meadow with the goal of capturing and marking any surviving prairie dogs. Gladly, she found Head and RAB not only alive and well, but each mothering a litter of new juveniles. Who the father may be, we cannot say, but he is likely one of the prairie dogs lingering on the edges of the study site and occasionally coming nearer. Regardless, Mariana and John are optimistic about the prospects of a repopulation of Redondo Meadow.

The next couple of weeks, as John and the Squad finish trapping and conducting alarm-call experiments at the Valles Grande, Mariana will be trapping and tagging the mothers and offspring at Redondo Meadow. Let's hope for as many females among the offspring as possible, so that not too many of them disperse.

Plague affects not only prairie dogs but other rodents and other mammals, including of course humans. You can read more about plague at our CONSERVATION page.

WE'VE BEEN BUSY as bees trapping and marking all the new offspring of the year. We continue to take behavioral data, but our days are consumed with trying to catch every single juvenile. Depending on her level of protectiveness, we will usually try to catch the mother in the early morning and put her away in the shade before we set surroundings for her babies. Some mothers will become agitated when they see a surrounding around their nursery burrow, and to avoid causing her to transfer her babies to another burrow, we keep her out of sight to minimize her stress.

Sometimes we wish we could only just talk to these prairie dogs. "Go on in the trap now, the sooner you get caught the sooner we can pull these traps entirely!" But alas, they are wild animals and do not always cooperate with research. Nonetheless, the squad is having the time of their lives watching the little juveniles popping in and out of their burrows, rolling around in play, and standing tall to look around. The long hours in our observation towers are less arduous when our study subjects are so adorable. Whether it's your first season in the field or your 44th, the novelty never wears off.

THE BABIES ARE OUT! During the month of May, the adult and yearling prairie dogs were occupied with fattening up, and John and the Squad kept keen eyes on regular behaviors but especially signs of infanticide. While infanticide (the killing of babies) is less common among Gunnison's prairie dogs than it is among black-tailed prairie dogs (see our page on INFANTICIDE for more), a number of infanticide events were witnessed last year at our previous study site in Redondo Meadows. Here at the new site in the Valles Grande, the team did not witness a single infanticide in May or see any aboveground signs of an infanticide having occurred.

Now that the year's offspring are beginning to emerge (which happens 5-6 weeks after birth), they are exploring their surroundings and experimentally eating grasses and greens. We now have the opportunity to compare litter counts from our ultrasounds to litter counts upon emergence. By comparing these counts, we can determine how accurate we are on our ultrasounds, and how many juveniles failed to emerge where they were expected. Despite inevitable losses pre-emergence, once the babies start coming aboveground in early June it becomes a boom of curious, cute, but vulnerable little prairie dogs.

For the next several weeks, John and the crew will be busy trapping and tagging the new offspring in order to add them to the study population. Each new individual is given unique eartags, and biological measurements and tissue samples are taken. Juveniles are marked by litter, and each litter is marked identical or similar to the mother. For example, female RR3's babies are all marked with the same marking (Ring around the Rear 3 - RR3). On our datasheets, we label each baby as an RR3x. Female babies receive one additional marking - a cap of dye on their head or tails to differentiate them from their brothers.

To trap baby prairie dogs, we bring out our smaller single-door Tomahawk live traps (which are more sensitive to the lower weight of a juvenile) and we surround nursery burrows with traps, so that litters cannot intermingle before they are all marked. By catching and marking whole litters as quickly as possible, we can be certain that in the majority of cases we have marked each juvenile as belonging to the correct mother. Sometimes nursery burrows that are connected underground make this endeavor harder, but we watch carefully where mothers go to bed at night to make sure we are identifying their babies correctly. In the end, we will have over a hundred little prairie dogs with black dye on them, frolicking about as they play, forage, and explore their surroundings.

The occurrence of infanticides drops dramatically once juveniles have emerged in June, but infanticides may still occur for a number of reasons, especially if a baby wanders too far from his or her home burrow - in these cases, an adult or yearling male will sometimes attack the baby, and if the baby cannot get away a killing can occur. The far bigger threat, however, comes from predators both terrestrial and avian. Coyotes, badgers, weasels, and birds of prey will quickly come to notice the little prairie dogs that have emerged from underground, and attempted predations may increase during this time. Depending on the colony to sound the alarm is especially critical for the babies, as they are still learning how to be vigilant while aboveground.

WE BEGAN CONDUCTING ULTRASOUNDS on pregnant females last week. Using non-invasive ultrasound technology, we can locate fetusts in utero (in the womb) and conduct counts for every mother. Ultrasounds are critical to answering our research question on offspring survival in Gunnison’s prairie dogs (GPDs). Prairie dog litters can range from 1 to 8 babies at extremes, but more commonly number 4 to 5, born after a 28-day gestation period. Counting fetuses in utero gives us an idea of how many babies to expect when they emerge aboveground 5-6 weeks after birth. Without an underground view into nursery burrows, we can only infer maternal care activities using aboveground cues John has come to define over the years - nesting material collection, mound work, aggressive burrow defense, increased foraging, and tell-tale nursing rings around the female's teats.

Infant mortality before litter emergence can be attributed to many causes, including a failure to adequately care by the mother, a failure to thrive by the infant, and even infanticide (rare among GPDs but accounting for over 35% of infant mortality in black-tailed prairie dogs). In early June, if only two babies emerge from a nursery burrow where we expected three, we can infer that one of the offspring did not make it. Where in the timeline between gestation and litter emergence that baby was lost, we could not say. Perhaps it never made it out of the womb.

It is important that we take care when conducting ultrasounds to get as accurate a count as possible, as it would compromise our data if more babies pop up from the nursery burrow than were counted in utero. Over the last few years, the crew has done a great job with the portable ultrasound machine John uses in the field. Though not easy to conduct, ultrasounds give us a unique and incredible view of prairie dog fetuses in the womb, as bone illuminates white on the screen and backbones can be seen with surprising clarity. Sometimes, even a moving foot appears presses up toward us, and even the most hardened research assistant softens at the sight.