Prairie Wildlife

Petrified Forest National Park has been working with Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site to translocate Gunnison’s Prairie Dogs (Cynomys gunnisoni) from a location where they are in conflict with humans to another location where they can thrive and support their ecosystem.

The 2022 prairie and peregrine falcon monitoring season at Pinnacles National Park is almost here! It will begin officially on January 18th, when the park will implement its annual raptor advisories. The monitoring season corresponds with the falcon breeding season, and the monitoring-informed advisories help rock climbers and off-trail hikers avoid disturbing these amazing park predators when they are most vulnerable.

The falcon monitoring team at Pinnacles National Park began their field season in January. They started off noting which pairs of prairie and peregrine falcons were staking out which cliff faces as nesting territories. Now, after recording all of the season’s small dramas, they’ve watched the newest generation of falcons take to the skies. It’s on the small side, but a bit bigger than last year’s.

If you had to travel over 2 months to reach your destination, which animal would you depend on to get you there? In this lesson and activity, students will predict and experience the three common modes of transportation along the Santa Fe Trail as a relay. They will consider the role of animals in commerce and Westward expansion during the fur trade era.

Falcon numbers at Pinnacles have been fairly stable over the years. And while this breeding season is not over, if all current nestlings survive and manage to leave their respective nests, nest success will be a bit below average. But there are a couple of interesting dynamics at play if we look closely. One is the still-mysterious relationship between the two falcon species, both of which rely on the same cliff sites for raising young.

Coyotes and American badgers sometimes hunt prairie dogs or ground squirrels together using their complementary hunting skills – the badger can dig below ground and the coyote can chase prey aboveground. Although this relationship is described by Indigenous people and early European settlers dating back to at least the 19th century, little research has been done to understand the circumstances in which these two carnivore species work together...until now.

Pinnacles' captivating, cliff-nesting prairie and peregrine falcons wrapped up their 2023 breeding season in late June. A normal number of adults nested, and visitors did their part to shield the birds from disturbance. Still, nest success was low, especially compared to the high numbers of fledglings raised in 2021 and 2022. What could explain some of that variability? Wildlife Biologist Gavin Emmons has a compelling hypothesis about one factor that may be at play.

Experiments with fipronil-laden prairie dog bait suggest the insecticide can be a powerful tool for reducing the "Black Death" in wildlife, especially if integrated with other methods.

Driving up from Louisiana to begin my internship with the San Francisco Bay Area Network, I was warned about how hot Pinnacles National Park would be. I thought California hot and Louisiana hot had to be different and remember saying “at least I’ll be able to impress them with my heat tolerance.” Spoiler: that did not happen. The falcon monitoring work done in Pinnacles is intense, even on the “fun tour.”

After a day of falcon monitoring, Wildlife Biologist Gavin Emmons led me and two other interns on a hike to visit the High Peaks at Pinnacles National Park. We had a side mission of removing a climbing advisory sign. Climbing, as in rock climbing, is a popular sport that involves scaling rock walls, indoors and/or outside. Pinnacles is a popular spot for those who enjoy outdoor rock climbing. But Pinnacles’ rock formations are also popular with the park’s nesting falcons.