The Wild Neighbors Living Beneath Our Buffalo Range

Turns out, the prairie is a lot busier than it looks.

There are cities beneath our feet out here.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Prairie dogs have been building underground towns on this ranch long before we arrived. Tunnels, chambers, nurseries, escape routes. The whole thing. And they run a tight operation.

They post sentinels at every entrance. Different alarm calls for different predators. A hawk gets one warning. A coyote gets another. Scientists are still working to fully decode everything they're saying to each other. Prairie dogs can even describe the size, shape, and color of an approaching predator in their calls. Whatever language that is, it works.

This summer we had Travis Livieri from Wildlife Prairie Research out on the ranch along with a team of biologists — Lindsey, Pam, and Emma — to explore the towns, walk the networks, and get a clearer picture of what's happening beneath the surface.

What they found was a prairie doing exactly what a prairie is supposed to do.

Nine Towns. 690 Acres. One Very Busy Underground.

We currently have nine active prairie dog colonies on the ranch, covering approximately 690 acres. Our largest colony alone spans about 280 acres. To put that in perspective, that's a single connected underground community stretching across more ground than most people will ever walk in a day.

Each colony is its own living system. The prairie dogs live in family groups called coteries — related females, one unrelated male, and their young. They know their neighbors. They have territorial boundaries. They have dialects that vary by location.

They have, in other words, a functioning society.

What the Biologists Found

Travis and the team spent time on the ground mapping the colonies, documenting wildlife, and observing the relationship between the prairie dog towns and the broader ecosystem.

A few things stood out.

Every colony supports a healthy population of burrowing owls. These small, long-legged owls don't dig their own burrows — they move into abandoned prairie dog tunnels and set up home. Without the prairie dogs, there are no burrowing owls. It's that direct.

The buffalo already knew this. Our herd is regularly found grazing and resting around the colonies. The grasses near prairie dog towns grow back richer and more diverse after being clipped and disturbed. The digging aerates the soil, increases water infiltration, and creates patches of native forbs that don't appear anywhere else on the ranch. The buffalo seek these patches out. They have been doing so for thousands of years.

And then there was the badger.

Spotted hunting within one of the colonies during the visit, the badger is exactly the kind of predator that keeps a healthy prairie dog town in balance. Predation pressure keeps the colonies from overgrazing. It keeps the population moving, digging, and maintaining their burrow systems. The badger isn't a threat to the towns. It's part of what makes them work.

A Keystone Species

Prairie dogs are what ecologists call a keystone species. Remove them and the whole structure changes. Over 150 wildlife species depend on them in some way — directly or indirectly. Burrowing owls. Badgers. Black-footed ferrets. Hawks. Eagles. Foxes. Coyotes. Each one connected to the next through a chain that starts underground.

In the past 150 years, we have lost 95 to 98 percent of prairie dogs throughout their historical range. What was once a species numbering in the billions across tens of millions of acres has been reduced to scattered colonies on a fraction of their original ground.

What we have on this ranch is rare. And we intend to keep it that way.

Coming Back This Fall

Travis and the team plan to return this fall for another visit. We'll continue mapping the colonies, tracking changes, and building a clearer picture of how the towns are growing and evolving across the ranch.

We'll share what we find.

The prairie doesn't need much from us. Just the space to keep doing what it does.