AWI is partnering with the Humane Society of the United States on emergency disease mitigation in South Dakota’s Conata Basin, home to the world’s largest remaining colony of black-tailed prairie dogs ...

Prairie Protection Colorado has sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture three times in six years for supporting lethal ...

The concern comes after Tina Jackson, who led the species’ recovery across 12 states–including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, ...

“It can take just one infected flea.” One common carrier is a widely loved, misnamed rodent: the prairie dog. Plague-bearing fleas thrive in the warm burrows of prairie dog colonies then seek ...

Without prairie dogs, ferrets had nothing to eat. Around the same time, fleas began spreading plague — yes, plague — in the Great Plains. That killed even more prairie dogs and ferrets ...

Even though prairie dogs are a keystone species across the West with shrinking population numbers, they are as-yet not federally protected.

It is transmitted by fleas often carried by rodents in the wild, including rats and prairie dogs. Plague occurs when infected ...

In the early 1800s, the ferrets occupied burrows across the West, but their populations plummeted due to plague, habitat loss and systematic efforts to eradicate prairie dogs. An initial attempt ...

When an epidemic of plague struck prairie dogs within South Dakota’s greater Conata-Badlands ecosystem last spring, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service black-footed ferret biologists and their state ...