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National Geographic : 1979 Aug
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(Continuedfrom page 275) will need to survive. Watching a new whitetail litter at the Hutton Lake National Wildlife Refuge near Laramie, Wyoming, I noticed that ev erything passing overhead-from harmless horned larks to preying hawks-sent the pups diving into their burrows. Little brown yo-yos, popping up and down, up and down, they apparently inherit sensitivity to things zooming overhead but soon learn what is harmful and what isn't. By late summer, among blacktails and whitetails alike, you can hardly tell young of the year from adults. Among both age groups the major activity seems to be eating; the animals must store fat to tide them over the winter. Their diet is mostly grasses and leafy weeds, and they must consume great quantities. Each animal, it is estimated, eats more than twice its own weight each month. Come late October, all whitetails-resi dents chiefly of higher elevations with long er winters-are snugged down in their grass-lined underground nests for a long winter sleep. The plains-dwelling black tails don't hibernate; they undergo a mild torpor for a few days at a time during periods of harshest weather. Almost always, how ever, some individuals are active. A dog town in summer presents a pageant of prairie life. One dawn two summers ago I was watching blacktails at Wind Cave Na tional Park. Fresh piles of dirt told me that a marauding badger had been active over night. A solitary coyote wandered by-the prairie dogs eyeing him closely. A couple of cottontails and a jackrabbit took cover in abandoned blacktail holes. The town was alive with birds-killdeers, prairie horned larks, meadowlarks, and plovers. Ferrugi nous hawks, red-tailed hawks, and sparrow hawks flew past. Now and then the sudden movements of bison and pronghorn startled nearby prairie dogs. Here in protected terrain, I was savoring a scene reminiscent of two hundred years ago, when only Indians and a few mountain men could have witnessed it. Early explorers of the West knew the prairie dog well. The expedition accounts of Coronado (1540-42), Louis-Joseph and Francois de la Verendrye (1742), Zebulon Pike (1806-07), and others mention prairie dogs. Lewis and Clark in 1804 reported that An outfoxed coyote noses around an escape burrow, while a lone
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