Celebrate Prairie Dog Day
February 2nd has been nationally recognized as Groundhog Day since 1841, but in recent years, wildlife organizations officially added Prairie Dog Day to the date as a way to inform and educate the public on how important they are to the prairie ecosystem.
Urgent Call to Action
A Colorado mall developer takes lethal path with plans to kill approximately 5000 prairie dogs to construct a supermall in Castle Rock. Protestors hope to force Alberta Development LLC to delay their extermination plans until June 1, to give conservationists time to find and prepare land where the prairie dogs can be safely moved, while the females will remain underground with their babies. If the developer proceeds with the current timeframe, it will cause thousands of prairie dogs that aren’t trapped and killed to be fatally entombed. READ FULL STORY HERE.
Federal Prairie Dog Conservation Report Remains Grim
WildEarth Guardians released their seventh annual Report from the Burrow to coincide with Prairie Dog Day and the grades given to federal and state agencies on the success of managing prairie dog populations remain poor. The report reveals that “while a few states and federal agencies are improving their prairie dog conservation efforts—the generally deplorable status quo, where these intelligent, ecologically important animals are treated as pests and widely poisoned, gassed and shot—remains largely unchanged.” Grades range from a B shared by the National Park Service and the state of Arizona to an F given to the Environmental Protection Agency. SEE THE REPORT HERE.
Goodbye to PrairieDogPress
Since October 2012, PrairieDogPress has been the marketing arm of Keystone Prairie Dogs with footnotes to the KPD website linked at the bottom of each article published at the online news site Allvoices/Pulsepoint. However, due to changes in that company’s platform to sponsored content only, freelance contractors will no longer be able to publish on the site, though their pages will remain as copyrighted property of AV. Therefore, since the Examiner column KPD utilizes for wildlife and prairie dog content prohibits such promotion, KPD launched its own political and social commentary Facebook platform designed to broaden exposure. The new page is called “Keystone Prairie Dogs Sunnyside Left” and we invite everyone to stop by, check it out and give us a “like”. IT CAN BE ACCESSED HERE.
Also, Keystone Prairie Dog website recently added two new pages: Newsroom and Memes. CHECK THEM OUT HERE.
Thanks for your support of America’s meerkats and have a great spring everyone!
Exposing the Big Game 
In the 1990’s, my nephew and I began to live trap hundreds of prairie dogs here in Santa Fe, NM due to rampant, ticky-tacky development. We knew little about trapping them, and even less where to “relocate” them, but we went ahead anyway, setting our traps, working most days (when we were not at our jobs). Most of them probably did not survive the relocation (it is very stressful & they like certain habitat).
As time went on, we drew publicity, got some volunteers, and started a group, “People for Native Ecosystems,” named as such, because we quickly learned that live trapping should only be an absolute last resort. Poisoning by the City of Santa Fe, The College of Santa Fe, & private land owners was on-going. We did protests, etc. The real vision for this group was to stand firm, not compromise, and work on leaving those prairie dogs who lived on city land to be protected–where they were. That was the original charter, but after I left for a few years to Maine, everything was watered down, and the prairie dogs were “relocated” to places where many were shot by ranchers/hunters. When I returned, I learned that an ordinance had been passed that ordered prairie dogs to be “relocated” from development sites (which was understandable, ( I suppose) for the private land stuff, but the city also became one of the major entities that got rid of most city prairie dogs by “relocation,” which mean’t that most of them did not survive elsewhere, and the city has been a main culprit in poisoning as well, when they can get away with it.
Today, there are very few colonies left here, and most are isolated, and small. This is happening all over western lands. Every shopping mall I pass by here in Santa Fe is built on the bodies on these animals, along with squirrels, rabbits, snakes & other native life.
The western public lands ranchers also continue their assaults on these & other innocent wildlife. It never ends.
Prairie Dog Day? Sure.