The (Prairie) Dog Days of Summer

I've become completely fascinated with prairie dogs. In all my research, the most entertaining and helpful article I've read is The Friendly Nuisance by Dorothy and Lewis Nordyke. It is just one of many zoological articles collected in Marvels and Mysteries of our Animal World, published by Reader's Digest, 1964. It begins, "The sociable little prairie dog who has burrowed deep into the heart and folklore of western America has had as rough a battle for survival as any sod-busting homesteader on the wild frontier. The prairie dog is found only in lonely country, but there is nothing he like so well as conveniently close neighbors of his kind. He enjoys a highly developed community life, living gregariously in a craftily engineered colony of burrows and mounds known as a town." Being myself more similar to the prairie dog's cousin, the city squirrel, I nevertheless thoroughly enjoy the company of prairie dogs. We city animals can learn a lot from our country cousins, with their different ways of thinking and living. If we would stop long enough to get to know them and see past the differences in our fur and the size and bushiness of our tails, we'd be so much the richer for it. Not only will we benefit socially from getting to know our cousins, we will also be safer, as "there are always sentries standing at rigid attention with their eyes alternately roving the sky and the ground. At the sight or sound of anything unusual, the sentries yap out warnings." I believe I have seen some of these sentries, and the most prepared among them are even armed.