Black Plague Update

The empty white-tailed prairie dog communities around Snake John Reef on the Colorado/Utah border may not be as empty as they appeared.

I contacted sensitive species biologist Brian Maxfield with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources today. He thought the communities were doing pretty well.

Maxfield speaks like a man dedicated to his profession and someone who knows what he is about. He added some new information to the more dated reports we recently commented on here.

Maxfield told me his team released 31 black-footed ferrets into the Snake John Reef area rather than the 10 noted in the Deseret News story, 10 of which had been inoculated with the sylvatic plague vaccine.

Badgers and coyotes, who also inhabit these borderlands, are more likely to decimate larger prairie dog communities than ferrets, he said. The black-foots will move to another colony long before their food supply diminishes to a critical point.

I was happy to learn that prairie dogs have not been neglected in the fight against sylvatic plague either. Maxfield said an oral vaccine has been developed that can be spread over feeding areas and ingested by the dogs. Tests for that vaccine are ongoing and as yet inconclusive.

I also learned from Maxfield that all these vaccine tests are actually under the direction of the U.S. Army, which he said handles all plague research. He also said it was the U.S.G.S. that got his research data first.

Maxfield said he was currently busy working on a study of flying squirrels in the Uinta borderlands area so he had been spending his days in higher country lately. The Northeast Regional Office of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources will conduct a “poll” of the black-foots at Snake John Reef in August and I wangled an invitation to tag along. The teams begin after nightfall looking for what Maxfield called eyeshine. When they catch a ferret they identify it by virtue of a subcutaneous tag implanted earlier and log its health data.

I hope Maxfield is right about those prairie dogs being okay at Snake John Reef. I will be able to make a personal report after my August ride-along. All I have now is the attached video (No Dogs) of the empty mounds. Compressing the file to fit here as video compromised its clarity, but you should be able to see what I mean.

I also admit I’m a little worried when I hear that yet again their distant cousins are getting more attention.