Black Plague and Snake John Reef

Nobody was home.

It was a huge community -- signs of construction everywhere. And yet no eyes looked out, no sounds of alarm, no watchers.

The east side of this part of Snake John Reef on the Colorado/Utah border showed not a living prairie dog watching from any of the hundreds of burrows scattered across the dry grasslands when I walked this area during the last of May this year. Finding out why is one of the rewards of walking these borderlands.

It turns out parts of Utah, Colorado and other western states have been experiencing an uptick in sylvatic plague, what a Utah State biologist called "the prairie dog version of the black plague" (Deseret News and Utah Wildlife Division).

Prairie dogs, though, are low on the social ladder for ranchers and others who scrape a living from these parts. The white-tailed dogs Cynomys leucurus that inhabit this section of borderlands apparently haven't risen much higher. The furry barkers are related to squirrels but are basement dwellers unlike their high rise cousins. Horses and cattle can break a leg crashing through the rooftops and worse, these dogs eat grass. There's not much of that to go around.

It's not all bad news out by Snake John Reef though, thanks to some other, more highly esteemed residents. Those would be the once "most endangered mammal on earth," the black-footed ferret, which, incidentally, has a singular appetite for prairie dog. That means the ferret also gets the plague.

The rarity of the ferret merited a special effort to develop a vaccine that would keep it from being wiped out. The 16 fortunate prairie dog colonies in the Snake John Reef area were blessed to have the company of 10 black-footed ferrets, half of which were vaccinated, half not. The idea was to see if the vaccinated ferrets beat the plague. The prairies dogs were apparently not consulted.

On both sides of the fenceline that tracks the state border are vacant mounds. Ferrets are nocturnal critters and a watcher wouldn't expect to see any in the daylight hours. But the neighborhood would have a guard dog yipping a warning in strategic locations, and a few gleaners scurrying through the grass and saltbush.

That day there were no yips, no watching eyes, no furtive dashes for cover. Just the wind at Snake John Reef.

To be continued...