BlackTailedPrairieDog_Collapse_Graves_Russell_DoddCityTX_1February2022_Reel4091.mp3

Russell Graves [00:00:01] 1901, I think it was, the U.S. Department of Agriculture come out with a Yearbook of Agriculture, and that year they estimated prairie dogs occupied something like 63 million acres of land in, in the United States.

Russell Graves [00:00:17] And, and a few years later, in 1905, a guy named Vernon Bailey, who was the chief naturalist for the, for the U.S. Biological Survey, said that he'd found a prairie dog town that stretched from the Concho River in San Angelo all the way to Clarendon, Texas. And so that's, you know, that's a 250-mile long prairie dog town.

Russell Graves [00:00:36] But at the time they were quoting that prairie dogs reduced the productivity in this same, during this early 20th century, the federal government was reporting that prairie dogs reduced the productivity of rangelands from 50 to 75 percent. And, you know, so that kind of simmered.

Russell Graves [00:00:52] And then, by the 1930s, the federal government started sponsoring ranchers to poison prairie dog towns and try to just eliminate them from the plains.

Russell Graves [00:01:02] And that is kind of during that 1930s, and you know, that happens to coincide with the greatest man-made ecological disaster our country's ever seen. And that's the Dust Bowl because of improper farming practices.

Russell Graves [00:01:16] So you've got this double whammy of poor farming practices and that were, that were government sponsored and government supported. And then you've got this ecological disaster from a wildlife standpoint that we're going to go put out poison and poison out all these prairie dog towns in this ecosystem.

Russell Graves [00:01:33] I mean, that's, it's during, probably and my dates may be off a little bit, but probably from the '30s until the '60s is when the prairie dog, the numbers really, really collapsed in the country.