Prairie Doggin

This week was again spent doing prairie dog habitat monitoring, but we are nearly done, and then it will be time to file away all the data we've collected. Many of the sites we've been evaluating do not actually have prairie dogs on them, but at one time did. I think they will be translocating pest prairie dogs from agricultural lands to these places. When they do, the biologists have makeshift tunnels and burrows for the dogs, which are made of large PVC pipes. Eventually, the dogs will colonize the area and make thier own burrows. We saw plenty of abandoned PVC and natural burrows while doing our surveys. We also did get to actually see some prairie dogs, which was good. We also worked with the state DNR again, catching and banding song birds. Although we didn't catch as many birds as we did last time, there was quite a different variety, so we got to see different birds than we saw last time. Some of the new species we caught were a black-chinned hummingbird, Bullock's oreol, Black throated sparrow, house finch, and a Lazuli bunting. Mist-netting and banding song birds is one of my favorite projects I've worked on so far during my internship.