LEARNING TO LIVE WITH PRAIRIE DOGS - A pair of Montana ranchers is showing that cowherds can exist in harmony with these native animals

National Wildlife, April-May, 2001 by Christie Aschwanden

The sound is unforgettable-like a hundred preschoolers let loose on the prairie with only squeak toys for communication. But the noise doesn't emanate from stuffed animals; it comes from real ones-thousands of black-tailed prairie dogs whose heads bob up and down as they scurry in and out of their burrows, chirping and squeaking warnings and greetings. Their buzzing metropolis stretches across the dusty eastern Montana landscape, as far as the eye can see.

One hundred years ago, a prairie dog town this large would have been commonplace. Back then, the tan-furred, 12-inch-tall burrowing rodents inhabited more than 100 million acres of prairie grasslands from Mexico to Canada. A single town in Texas covered an estimated 25,000 square miles and housed approximately 400 million prairie dogs. But habitat loss, shooting, large-scale poisoning and plague have decimated black- tailed prairie dog populations during the past century and today the animals occupy less than one percent of their historic range.

These facts alone would make this town's size remarkable, but what's more extraordinary is its location: smack dab in the middle of Ned Tranel Jr.'s Twin Buttes ranch near Roundup, Montana. Most livestock ranchers in this part of the country despise prairie dogs, viewing them as pesty competitors for forage. But Tranel sees things differently. "Everything goes together," says the 37-year-old-rancher who, with his sandy brown hair and chiseled face, could easily pass as a brother of football star John Elway. "There's a harmony, and if you're out of sync in one place, you're going to be out of sync everywhere." Together with his father, Ned Sr., Tranel is demonstrating that ranchers and prairie dogs can live in harmony.

Born and raised on an Illinois dairy farm, Tranel Sr., 65, has spent most of his life tending cows. After earning a Ph.D. in psychology, he married and moved his growing family to a 2,500-acre ranch north of Billings. Though he spent much of his time building a successful psychology practice, his family life centered around the ranch. Most of his children moved away, but Ned Jr., the fourth-oldest, returned home after college and went into the ranching business with his father. They started with about 11,000 acres, and in the past 15 years, Twin Buttes has grown to nearly 77,000 acres.

This is no hobby ranch; Twin Buttes turns a profit. The Tranels credit their success to their environmental ethic. The only way to make ranching profitable, they say, is to work with the elements of the ecosystem, instead of against them. They say it's just not economically feasible to spend precious labor and money killing wildlife. They encourage their cattle to live like any other grazing animal on the plains, which means coexisting with prairie dogs and other creatures. The Tranels refuse to trap or kill wildlife on the ranch, even predators such as coyotes.

It's not that the Tranels are partial to coyotes, they just don't see the sense in killing them. "I'm not sure what good a coyote does us, but if you start killing one animal, where do you stop? We don't know what species you can eliminate and still keep the system healthy," says Tranel Sr.

Twin Buttes is prime prairie dog habitat. The land here is vast and open-it curves as if the wind has left ripples on the fluid landscape. Golden grassland stretches from horizon to horizon. The ranch now has about 2,000 acres of prairie dog towns and they're still growing. The towns are punctuated by short mounds marking burrow entrances, which lift toward the sky like miniature volcanoes. These mounds prevent flooding, draw air into the burrows and provide the critters with watchtowers. Prairie dogs spend most daylight hours aboveground, but retreat underground at dark and when predators strike.

The basic prairie dog family unit, called a coterie, consists of one male and several females and their young offspring. Contrary to folklore, prairie dogs don't breed like crazy, says John Hoogland, a biologist at the University of Maryland and author of The Black-Tailed Prairie Dog: Social Life of a Burrowing Mammal. Prairie dogs don't mate until their second year, and only about half of those born each year survive. This high mortality rate is caused in large part by a mysterious spree of infanticide and cannibalism instigated by the female coterie members (excluding the mother). Except for these cannibalistic episodes, prairie dogs are herbivores, and eat mostly native grasses.

It's no accident prairie dogs have been called "nature's lawn mowers." Their towns are as manicured as Florida's best golf courses. Prairie dogs carefully chew down the vegetation around their towns to eliminate predator hiding spots, and they often get a hearty meal in the process. Ranchers view this mowing as bad news; that's grass their cows need. Around 1902, C.H. Merriam of the U.S. Biological Survey declared that prairie dogs diminished grassland productivity by a whopping 50 to 75 percent. These figures have stuck in ranchers' minds ever since, but no one is sure how Merriam came up with the numbers, says U.S. Forest Service biologist Dan Uresk.