Prairie dog lawsuit threatened

SALT LAKE CITY – Conservation groups served notice Thursday they intend to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for refusing to study whether to give federal protection to prairie dogs known for their ability to warn one another of danger in explicit detail.

One expert, Con Slobodchikoff, a biology professor at Northern Arizona University, said the Gunnison’s prairie dog has the most sophisticated communications yet documented among nonhumans.

They can whistle different alarm calls for different predators that signal particular manners of escape, his studies have found.

The alarm calls also describe the general size, color and speed of the predator, he said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service says poisoning all but wiped out the Gunnison’s prairie dog from 1916 to 1961, but that more recent decades may have sustained a recovery in parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

The agency said in a Federal Register notice that it had no reliable estimates of the current population, but acknowledged available habitat for the prairie dog has been shrinking and that the plague can decimate isolated populations, though it’s less clear if prairie dogs are occupying new territory when they move from old stomping grounds.

Filing notice of a possible lawsuit Thursday were the Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians, a half-dozen other conservation groups, five biologists and dozens of others.