Gunnison’s prairie dog is a native colonial rodent of Colorado’s southwestern basins and mountain valleys. Open occurrence databases hold 822 records for it in Colorado, a modest tally for an animal that lives in dense, conspicuous towns.
Where it digs
This prairie dog favors shortgrass and shrub-steppe flats and high grassy parks, and its Colorado range sits mostly in the southwest quarter of the state. Records concentrate in Montezuma, Gunnison, Saguache, and Chaffee counties, with more on the Rio Grande and San Juan public lands. In a colony the animals sit upright at their burrow mouths, and the burrow systems themselves loosen soil and sustain the plants, badgers, raptors, and other wildlife that lean on prairie-dog towns.
A watched species in Colorado
Unlike most of the secure mammals around it, Gunnison’s prairie dog is ranked S3, vulnerable, by NatureServe. Sylvatic plague and habitat conversion have thinned and scattered its colonies, so while it is native and locally common where towns still stand, it carries a conservation flag that the surrounding grassland rodents do not.
Active spring to fall
Records build from early spring, hold through the summer, then drop to nothing by late autumn. Gunnison’s prairie dogs pass the cold season in torpor and hibernation deep in their burrows, so the winter gap on the record is a colony gone quiet below ground, not one that has disappeared.
Full species profile
