The Glutton
American Prairie Reserve, Montana
2021
This prairie dog didn’t seem to be suffering from any malnutrition due to the drought. I don’t know much about prairie dog towns but it sure seemed like their presence in an area was detrimental to about anything growing nearby–we saw large areas around them devoid of vegetation or nearly so. This particular prairie dog and his/her buddies were busy extending their tunnel system into some greener pastures surrounding one of the stripped areas. Since prairie dog towns have been part of the prairie ecosystem forever it seems, I’m sure this apparent devastation is nothing to worry about on an ecosystem scale, but for any individual critter of a another species in the area competing for the same food source I can see it might be of considerable concern.