Prairie Dogs: Dolphins of the Land
“…they are in shape like little woodchucks, and are the most noisy and inquisitive animals imaginable. They are never found singly, but always in towns of several hundred inhabitants; and these towns are found in all kinds of places where the country is flat and treeless.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt and others traveling West in the early 1900s wrote about these little creatures whom French explorers in the mid 1700s called “petits chiens,” or “little dogs” because of their bark-like vocalizations.
In these prairie dog towns lived families, known as clans or “coteries,” typically consisting of one or more adult males, several females, and their pups. Early writers described them poetically, like George Wilkins Kendall who called them “a wild, frolicsome, madcap set of fellows.”