The
other day I was doing one of my weekly walks through the prairie dog town. The
prairie dogs seem to be doing well! Not as many of them as there used to be,
but it is looking fine! Then I heard it, a prairie dog just mimicked a
hawk call! He (or she) stood up on his (or her) hind legs and opened his (or
her) little mouth and I heard a sharp long hawk call! It was amazing! I knew
that they had lots of words but not that they would mimic other animals!
I ran
home as fast as I could. I quickly opened up my computer, turned it on, and
started researching prairie dog language. There is nowhere on
the Internets that I could find anything written about prairie dogs
mimicking hawks. It could have been something that they just learned to do but
more likely a hawk passed nearby when the prairie dog chirped and I heard
the hawk over the chirp. Though I did find this article about prairie dog language It is really neat how humans
can hear the difference between two different words in prairie dog speak! Maybe
someday we will be able to speak in their complex language! We could communicate
with these wondrous beings!
 |
| Con Slobodchikoff |
Con Slobodchikoff did a lot
of work on prairie dog language. He has a special computer program that breaks
down noises. He uses it to analyze prairie dog “chees” (chirps). Here’s how he works: he gets people to walk
through a prairie dog town and looks at what the prairie dogs say in response
to the people. Though the word for “human” is quite different than the words
for other predators, it varies quite a bit from human to human. He had an idea
about what the different chirps were; the prairie dogs were describing people!
He did a lot of tests with people wearing different colored clothing and of different heights and weights.
Slobodchikoff
did another test where he built two wooden towers, each at one end of a prairie
dog town. He strung a wire between them. He hung three cardboard cutouts on the
wire. One was a triangle, one was a circle, and the
other was a square. The prairie dogs seemed to be able to tell the difference
between the triangle and the circle but not the circle and square. He said this
is because the triangle looks like one type of predator and the circle and the
square look like another type of predator.
What if prairie dogs are
much more advanced than humans and have their own computers and buildings and
stuff? Maybe they have a whole civilization underground. Would it not be
wonderful to know that humans are not alone in being intelligent? Some people
even say that prairie dogs worship god. They are really not too different from us;
actually they are quite a bit like us! It is amazing to think about and I could
spend hours rambling on about how they could be aliens come here to study us or
could not even know we are more than an odd stupid humanoid that will attack
them; but I think I have filled this post with enough information for now.
Again thank you for reading and goodbye!
