Prairie Dog Talk

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!