My Prairie Dog Theory

Not California?

I’ve been wondering about those prairie dogs that I found in my yard in January and for which I set up temporary digs in my home office. I was looking in the area where the hole had been in the floor through which they escaped, and there is no evidence that it ever existed.

I thought about the guy who claimed to be my neighbor, who gave me a photo of the prairie dogs to show that they were safe on the prairie near his house. I think that he was lying. I’ve walked to where he pointed, up to where my street dead ends into a grove of eucalyptus trees, and it isn’t very prairie-y. He said the picture was of his back yard, but I’ve looked several times and Nebraska simply isn’t nuzzled into the eucalyptus. Their aren’t even gopher holes in or near that grove, which is odd considering that they are so plentiful everywhere else that a local subspecies have gained the ability to chew through asphalt and line their underground nurseries with my socks and underwear.

I can accept that they did not wish to stick around in my stuffy little office, but migrating to Nebraska, or maybe the Dakotas, is way out of their league. It is possible that they moved the prairie from up the street to the Midwest somewhere. They can dig like the dickens, they’re social, cooperative, and co-dependent (but not in an alcoholic way), so they could have dug up a giant patch of land. If one prairie dog found a cell phone and another helped hold it, a third could have called information and had information dial the number for them, even though what they charge for that service is a complete rip-off. They could have found a trucking company and rented a flatbed with a driver to load it up and get their village to the Midwest. I don’t know what they’d use for money.

I think that that guy who showed me the picture was one of those people who help get prairie dogs across state lines. He probably isn’t even my neighbor.