Where can prairie dogs be found today?

Answer 1

Black-tailed prairie dogs live in colonies or "towns" that range in size from as small as one acre to several thousand acres. The largest prairie dog colony on record was in Texas, and was about 100 miles wide, 250 miles long and contained an estimated 400 million animals.

Five species of prairie dogs in North America (Utah, Gunnison, White- tailed, Mexican, and Black-tailed) live in colonies. However, the black-tailed prairie dogs live in contiguous, territorial family groups called coteries.

Black-tailed prairie dogs are found east of the Rocky Mountains in the states of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. They are also found in the southern part of Canada and the northern part of Mexico. Small colonies of black-tailed prairie dogs are still intermittently distributed throughout most of this range. But presently, there are only seven relatively large black-tailed prairie dog complexes remaining in North America (each more than 10,000 acres). Collectively these seven colonies comprise an estimated 36% of all occupied black-tailed prairie dog habitats in North America. Three of these large colonies live on tribal lands in South Dakota managed by the Cheynne Rive Sioux, the Rosebud Sioux, and the Ogala Sioux Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The other four are on Buffalo Gap National Grasslands in South Dakota and Thunder Basin in Wyoming, both managed by the Forest Service/USDA, Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana and on private land in Mexico.