After a month’s gestation, the litters are born. In the dark quiet of specially prepared nesting chambers, the babies appear, hairless, sightless, uncoordinated, weighing but 14 grams (0.5 ounce). They live in grass-lined nests for seven or eight weeks, attended almost constantly by the females as they develop. Growth is rapid. At 28 days they are crawling, and by 32 days the finely furred pups can walk and bark. Soon their eyes open and they fully resemble the adults. Until now the pups have known only darkness, blind passageways, and a single adult. One day soon they will be led upward.
That first moment above ground marks for them another birth. Now their senses experience a sudden flood of light and sound, coolness, wind, a world of shape, motion, and perspective, whose staggering brightness extends forever beyond their own rim of familiar scent. Huddled together and shivering in the wind, they are at first loath to accept this world of sight and sun, so different from the soundless wrappings of dark, warm soil. But soon, as with all young animals, curiosity leads them to investigation and then to boldness.
The range of the prairie dog extends from Canada to Mexico and at its widest point from eastern Kansas to western Utah, with the blacktail’s range a bit more extensive than that of the whitetail. The range of the rare black-footed ferret, a predator, is nearly identical. The prairie dogs protected at Devils Tower are blacktails.
Each day the young spend more time above ground. Nearby, the mother remains alert for danger and solicitous, accepting the maulings of her playful and increasingly independent pups. Although ranging farther and farther afield, they remain obedient to their mother, and scamper back to their burrow when commanded. The first few weeks above ground is a time of weaning, learning, and conditioning.
During their first few days in society, pups have the run of the town. Boundaries that adults respect do not exist for them, as they wander about, inspecting every feature of their new world. The young have an insatiable need for body contact and much time is spent at play, and in grooming and kissing, activities that seem to reinforce the social nature of the prairie dogs. Adult males tolerate the young for a time during this period of general acquaintance. At first the pups attempt to nurse from any adult they encounter, and these misguided attempts are not rebuked, even by the males; they are turned into grooming sessions.
Life on this greening land seems too good to be true. Entertainment is everywhere. Grasshopper nymphs, which the adult prairie dogs occasionally capture and consume unceremoniously, provide them with hours of chase and stalk. Food is everywhere and easy to obtain. Imitating their elders, the pups sample the wide array of grasses and forbs surrounding every burrow.
Like the young of all the other animals they see, the pups have no way of realizing that their debut coincides with the season most favorable to their survival. So they scamper about in witless abandon, uncautious and innocent, ignorant as yet of the harsher outlines of their world. For a time, their place in the community is as idyllic as the soft-winded afternoons of spring. But on the Great Plains, spring is at best an uncertain season, its lifespan often breathtakingly short. As the days pass, the dominant males that patrol their territories rapidly lose patience with neighboring pups. Those that stray outside the invisible boundaries of their clan’s living-space are now met with annoyance. Soon the displeasure turns to snarls and bites. More and more, their own mothers refuse them milk. Nipples bleeding from the constant pesterings of their young, the mothers finally move out altogether, to establish new burrows of their own.
To survive predatory perils, the new generation of prairie dogs, like countless previous ones, must master a two-pronged defense system evolved over millions of years. First, the pups must learn to engineer a burrow system with alternate escape routes. Second, they must learn to live in a highly organized social order, heeding its signals and respecting its boundaries.
Prairie dogs are divided into two general classes, the blacktailed and the whitetailed. Blacktails inhabit the semi-arid regions of the Great Plains; whitetails live in the higher elevations of mountain parks and foothills. But it’s difficult to generalize, for Devils Tower and Wind Cave National Park, in South Dakota, are in the Black Hills and the prairie dogs at both are blacktails. The dog town at Devils Tower occupies a level grassland bench between the Tower’s base and the nearby meandering Belle Fourche River. Blacktails are protected in their more typical arid topography at two other National Park System areas: Badlands National Park in South Dakota and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.