Lately I have been worried about the prairie dogs. They live next door in the empty lot near my classroom. I know they live there because of the mounds they make. Also, I have seen them. They pop out of their holes and stand tall on their hind legs in that way we all envision. That is all I have really observed them doing. I think they prefer to nest with their families. I know little about this species except they burrow underground and create little homes for themselves. I imagine a network of tunnels connecting them like roads in a neighborhood. Unlike other urban areas where I have seen prairie dog colonies, I never see their carcasses on the road. I am glad, because my gut always feels a little pinch when I see dead animals on the side of the road. I am thinking this group is pretty intelligent and have adapted to their environment.
This lot is like a rectangular state bordered on all sides by less geometric ones. On one narrow side: a busy street, one long side a neighborhood of trailer homes which wrap around most of the other narrow end. The other long side is split between two neighbors: a cemetery and my building. All of these are places built for humans, not wild burrowing creatures. I think I have come around to my worry.
Defining this lot as “empty” is a human construct. This lot is anything but to the natural world. Multiple species of grass and native plants grow there. Birds play there and fill their bellies with what I am sure are hundreds of types of insects. And prairie dogs live there. What will happen one day is that like the space where my building now rests, someone will decide to build on that lot. What will happen to the wild things living there? Will someone take the time to relocate the prairie dogs? Are these the ancestors of prairie dogs who must certainly have lived below the ground where I sit at my desk and in the lot where I now park my car? Did some of them survive the heavy equipment that dug up their settlement and then smoothed it flat for a building’s foundation. Over on their Southeast corner where the cemetery lies is a fence, a border wall, of sorts. But the prairie dog can get under that, right? Maybe they are smart enough to know their days are numbered in the middle of that exposed lot, so they burrow deep underground beyond the fence into another place where underground dwellers lay. To me, that seems like a compromise and a symbiosis between the living and the dead. Coexisting ecosystems: growth and decay.
Maybe they are already making their way in that direction: the corner where they are least likely to encounter genocide. I don’t know if it is a possibility, but I hope it is. I would worry less.
JL, March 2021
© 2021 Joan M. Leinbach
Joanie On My Mind 