To the Finish Line

Your mission should you choose to accept it is to locate 76 specific prairie dogs and administer vaccine boosters and placebos in the next 10 days before the vaccine expires.

Day #5 in a 15-day work week lived up to its promise to be the first in a series of 10-hour days, as we’ve shrank from a crew of 10 to 4, working 3 plots and 280 traps. Still, I prefer this over vege.

While waiting for the minimum two weeks between administering the vaccine and the booster, we worked a pilot flea & plant study, to see if there was any correlation to the quantity and type of vegetation vs. flea loads on PDs. The theory that was being tested was that colonies with plenty of forage leads to more grooming between prairie dogs, and therefore less fleas. For this study, we had to set up on colonies that had not been dusted for fleas – not an easy find what with the advent of plague in Conata Basin this summer – so that flea counts would not be otherwise affected.

Trapping prairie dogs that have never been trapped before takes persistence and time, which meant shorter easier days, but nothing to show for it sometimes for a week or more. I went from processing 30+ PDs a day to zero. The highest number of captures on a vege plot was a meager 6.