Image of Gunnison's prairie dog

Description:

"DOR I will post three records of this species from this same general area on this date. One of these three records is a roadkill observation, unfortunately. I will explain how I arrived at this ID and then cut and paste this entire explanation into the other records. I have to admit that I have been in this region many times in past years, back to 1978, but I never paid any attention to the prairie dogs, or I just assumed they were Black-tailed. Today as I was driving along hwy 434 north of Mora, I noted prairie dogs along the grassy roadsides, running across the road, etc. I saw that they had whitish gray tails rather than black tipped tails and that caught my attention right away. I know White-tailed Prairie Dogs are not in this area, but I realized that these were not Black-tailed Prairie Dogs (hereafter BTPD) with which I am fairly familiar. I noted that the ""towns"" of these animals were not as densely packed as are BTPD towns and that these animals did not remove all the vegetation from around the burrows. These animals also were somewhat paler above than most BTPD and seemed a little smaller. Looking in a few references I learned that Gunnison Prairie Dog (hereafter GPD) does get into this high elevation montane valleys (I was at 7500 ft elevation) and BTPD does not. After more observations I was fairly confident that these were GPD. Later, as I was returning south along this same road I saw the car in front of me strike and kill a prairie dog as it ran across the road. This was sad, but afforded me the opportunity to closely examine and photograph the animal. One of my photos shows a dollar bill next to the animal for size reference. The shots will show the tail, etc. I then sent the shots (DOR and live animals) to James Stuart (jnsturat on iNat) who is a friend and a biologist with the New Mexico Dept. of Game and Fish. His reply to me was ""Yes, these are Gunnison's. It sounds like you were near Guadalupita along the highway south of the state park where there is a pretty good colony of Gunnison's. Once you get out on the plains east of there, you start getting Black-tails such as south of Raton. So...that is my story and I'm sticking to it. I will eventually put links to the other observations here since they were all some distance from one another. These are the other obs of this species in the same general area: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/1872615 http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/1872606 More info on this species from James Stuart. Posted here with his permission. ""Gunnison's are mainly a species of medium to high elevation shrublands and montane meadows but also descend into lower elevation grasslands such as around Albuquerque and Santa Fe and are usually in rather small colonies that are easy to overlook. Black-tails are more colonial, forming rather large towns, and are strictly in open level grasslands, desert-grasslands, and prairies. Their burrow mounds are rather different with Black-tails building more prominent volcano-like mounds and Gunnison's with inconspicuous mounds. The two species occasionally overlap in range or come very close in the general area you are in -- the ecozone between the Southern High Plains to the east and the Southern Rocky Mountains to the west."""