Ambulance Driver Files A Day in the Life | Kelly Grayson
The black-tailed prairie dog, Cynomys ludovicianus, is a burrowing rodent whose range once stretched from southern Saskatchewan to Chihuahua, Mexico. They are still common across much of the western and southwestern United States.
Prairie dog colonies range from populations of five to many thousands of individual animals, and are arranged in a fairly sophisticated social structure. The typical black-tailed prairie dog colony is divided into two or more wards based on topographic features, and wards in turn are subdivided into two or more social groups called coteries. These coteries are comprised of individuals in polygynous relationships, usually a dominant male and a harem of females of breeding age. Individuals within the same coterie are amicable with one another and often hostile to outsiders.
Prairie dogs have a highly sophisticated system of vocal communication with distinct alarm calls for flying versus terrestrial predators, bipeds versus quadrupeds, even individual animals. Their calls even relate the proximity, direction, and approach speed of a predator. They've even been known to "lie," making false alarm calls to expose members of rival coteries to an approaching predator. Indeed, their system of communication is so sophisticated that some researchers consider it a language complete with its own unique grammar.
Farmers and ranchers consider prairie dogs vermin who spread bubonic plague, compete with their livestock for forage, destroy crops and endanger their livestock with their burrows. The science on the issue is mixed, with some studies showing that in some ranges, prairie dogs do compete with cattle for forage, while in other ranges, their feeding selections actually promote plant biodiversity, resulting in better forage for cattle.
All this just demonstrates that prairie dogs are hardly socially unredeemable evil little disease vectors, the Norway rats of the American West. They get a bad rap.
That said, it sure is fun shooting the little bastards.
If you're an animal lover and hate to see dead critters, or read about people shooting innocent furry little critters, or your blood boils at the prospect of shooting a critter for reasons other than sustenance, might I suggest you mosey on over to I Can Haz Cheeseburger and browse pictures of adorable little LOLcats.
Do not read what comes after the break.
Okay, so I slaughter prairie dogs with gleeful abandon, and I leave the bodies where they lie. I don't skin 'em and eat 'em, and I haven't killed the prairie dog I'd mount and hang on my wall (yet). I don't cull the older, aged prairie dogs, and I shoot males, females and juveniles alike.
Keep in mind, this isn't colony management, it's pest eradication. We don't shoot the sick and genetically inferior ones to maintain a healthy herd. We're trying to get rid of them all. The fact that we never succeed merely keeps the population in check.
Prairie dogs have approximately a gozillion natural predators, and predation is the #1 limiting factor on colony populations. Problem is, in farming and ranching country, many of their natural predators are in decline, either directly through farming or ranching operations, or indirectly through loss of habitat and prey populations. I've seen farmers shoot hawks (something I won't do) and coyotes (which I will do in a heartbeat) indiscriminately, both of which are natural predators of the prairie dog.
That leaves man, the apex predator, to take up the slack. Every prairie dog I shoot means a meal for a fox or hawk or coyote. The carcasses are invariably gone by morning.
Predator buffet line.
But let's be honest. I ain't shooting them becase I'm concerned about Wile E. Coyote's nutritional well-being. I'm shooting 'em because it's fun.
It also happens to be challenging.
Let's also stipulate that this is not hunting. Hunting involves strategy, and tactics, and some measure of restraint and discernment on the part of the hunter. The odds are heavily in favor of the game animal. Hunting is an integral part of game management.
Prairie dog shooting, however, mainly requires skill as a rifleman, and a rifle with enough ass to reach out there a long way. Prairie dog shooting is pest eradication. And unlike poisoning or seeding the colony with plague-infected carcasses, it only impacts the prairie dogs. No sick raptors, foxes, coyotes or farm dogs dying slowly from eating poisoned carcasses.
Prairie dog hunting near Secret Location, CO takes one of two forms: You can either find yourself an active town, park your truck and find a good rest, and snipe them at your leisure from a few hundred yards out, or you and a few friends can form a skirmish line and approach an active town by stealth. If you're lucky enough to surprise them, you can get in about 30 seconds of barrel-melting prairie dog wingshooting before they get skittish… and then you snipe them at your leisure from a few hundred yards out.
Time to saddle up, Christina. Get your prairie-dogging gameface on.
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I've done it both ways, and both are fun.
Far left: Vine, the human spotting scope. Next to him, AD with 20/20 vision struggling to see at 4x what he sees with the naked eye.
Up close (and by close I mean anything inside 150 yards), I prefer my Dad's old Winchester Model 74 in .22 LR. That rifle is perfectly balanced for me, and it feels just like an extension of my arm. I feel perfectly confident taking shots with that rifle that honestly fall far outside the envelope of optimum .22 LR performance. I'm talking whacking prairie dogs 150 yards away, offhand. No, I don't hit them all, but I hit more than half of them, and my misses are close enough to keep it interesting.
Winchester Model 74 .22 LR, running headshot at 100 yards. Yeah, this is me bragging.
I've got rifles with longer reach, but frankly, I'm not as proficient with them as I am with that Winchester. I've got a Savage bolt-action in .17 HMR that LawDog just lurves, and I saw him plug several at 200 yards at this year's Blogorado, but give me a 200 yard offhand shot and my choice of rifles, and I'll pick the Winchester .22 every time, because I know that rifle.
Ambulance Driver and LawDog, keeping the world safe from marauding hordes of Cynomys ludovicianus.
The first year we went, Matt G. and I sniped for a couple of hours, and then went walkabout through the town while KatyBeth sat on the berm and spotted for JPG. It was pretty cool to see my kid glassing for the old man; him listening solicitously to the precocious five-year-old as she prattled on about pretty much everything, and her scoping out the field for likely targets. Occasionally, you'd see JPG lean over and listen as KatyBeth pointed somewhere. He'd settle into his rifle, and the report would reach us a second later, and…
… scratch one prairie dog. The old man is pretty formidable with a rifle or pistol in his hands.
This year, I popped a few with my rimfires, but I had to upgrade to FarmMom's Tikka bolt-action in .223 for the really long shots. At least one of these prairie dogs was taken at 350 yards:
See the priaire dog pelt in front? That's what you get when you hit one under the chin with a .223, facing you on all fours at 300 yards.
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Jay G. popped a few with the MG Arms K-Yote, and probably would have scored on more had we quit screwing around. When I finally egged him to take out the laser rangefinder and started doping the ballistics on my handy iPhone app, he really started making some impressive shots. As it was, the only one we came close to recovering was this one:
I suppose we could have reeled him out of there by the entrails, but that would have been icky.
That was 381 yards with a custom AR15 for whom the manufacturer claims 1/3 MOA accuracy. I don't know if it's that good, but it's plenty accurate enough. The only rifle we had that could have bested it was Old NFO's .22-250, and sadly, we never even took it out of the case.
One thing you learn quickly when shooting prairie dogs is that, unless you catch them well away from their burrows and kill them D-E-A-D, they will go to ground. We find a lot of our kills down in their burrows. Often the only sign you've hit one at a distance is the characteristic thwok of a bullet hitting flesh, and the raptors that suddenly appear at the burrow entrance, mantling over the free meal they've found there.
All in all, it's a pleasurable way to spend an afternoon, and scenery like this is just a bonus:
And after a day of challenging shooting, congratulating friends on shots made and ribbing them on shots missed, good food, good beer and good companionship are just a short drive away. And though you may have wandered far afield searching for the next shot, the long walk back to the truck is tempered by a sunset like this:
That's Blogorado, and that's why I'll always come back.</