Entrance to Prairie Dog State Park, Kansas — Photo by Mike Blair
“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.” – Aristotle
Adventures with Pepper: Day 12
Prairie Dog at Lake Arrowhead State Park in Texas. The Kansas prairie dogs were too quick for my camera. — Photo by Pat Bean
Kansas’ Prairie Dog State Park was indeed a great place to spend the night, so I spent two.
Pepper and I had a peaceful camp site that offered a tree-framed view of Keith Sebelius Reservoir out Gypsy Lee’s rear window. While I saw several of the critters for which the park was named on the drive in, birds were the only wildlife I saw in the camping area.
These included an osprey that hung out in a tree overlooking the lake, killdeer near its shore, a lone great blue heron that sat on a rock in the water about a hundred feet from shore and turkey vultures frequently hovering overhead.
Black-tailed ferret, a cute little thing but deadly to prairie dogs, which make up about 90 percent of the ferret’s diet. — Wikipedia photo
But it was the sighting of the black-tailed prairie dogs roaming free in this high plains grass prairie that delighted me most.
That’s because I once participated in an endangered wildlife project that didn’t bode well for a pack of these prairie dogs that roamed the Utah-Colorado border.
The project involved transplanting endangered black-footed ferrets, thought to be extinct until a pack of about a dozen of them were discovered in 1981, into their midst. Prairie dogs are the black-footed ferrets favorite food, even though the two species are near the same size.
The discovered ferrets were captured and entered into a breeding program and some of the offspring began being transplanted back into the wild. Today there are slightly over 1,000 ferrets once again inhabiting North America.
If the number of prairie dogs I’ve seen in my travels are any indication, they are surviving quite nicely – thankfully.
Book Report: 54,312 words. The number is better than it sounds because I cut almost as much as I edited.
The Wondering Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.
Bean’s Pat: I Can’t Afford It http://tinyurl.com/8vnkbw8 I’m pretty thrifty but it’s good to be reminded every now and then that it’s OK to say no to things we want but may not need.
Pat Bean's blog 