The flickertail up close
Locals call it the dakrat or flickertail, and both names fit. It is a thickset squirrel about 11 to 12 inches long, yellowish-gray to tan above with a pale belly, and it flicks its short, dark-fringed tail when alarmed. Farmers have called it a gopher for generations, but true gophers are pocket gophers, a different family entirely, and prairie dogs are heavier cousins with their own genus.
Within its range the main confusion is with other ground squirrels. The thirteen-lined ground squirrel is smaller and carries obvious stripes. The Franklin’s ground squirrel is darker and longer-tailed, an animal of taller grass. Richardson’s is the plain, pale one of open, short-grass country, and its upright sentinel pose at the burrow mouth is often the first thing a traveler notices.
Short grass, deep sleep
This squirrel wants open prairie, grazed pasture, roadsides, and the mown edges of towns: any place where the grass stays short enough that it can spot a predator coming. Its burrow systems riddle that ground, and its habit of standing tall beside them makes it one of the most conspicuous mammals of the plains.
The calendar is the remarkable part. Adult males vanish underground by early summer, females follow, and even the young are down by fall. Hibernation can stretch past seven months, and males emerge in late winter, sometimes while snow still covers the ground. The seasonal record shows it plainly: reports surge from March into early summer, then fade to near silence while most other mammals are still active. Some of that hush is real absence, a landscape full of sleeping squirrels.
Colonies, alarms, and a pest reputation
Richardson’s ground squirrels live in loose colonies where each animal knows its neighbors. A sharp whistle sends the whole town scrambling, and the squirrels discriminate among calls, reacting harder to some dangers than others. They eat grasses, forbs, and seeds, with insects and carrion mixed in, and they are themselves staple prey for hawks, badgers, coyotes, and weasels.
Their taste for crops and their burrowing in fields have made them targets of control campaigns for a century. Despite that pressure they remain widespread, and in places they have adapted readily to human-altered ground, colonizing pastures and town edges where short turf suits them.
Secure on the plains
The IUCN lists the species as Least Concern. Montana holds the densest cluster of US records, with North Dakota close behind and smaller numbers in South Dakota, Minnesota, and the Iowa edge of the range. Records thin toward the south and east not because the squirrel fails there but because its short-grass habitat does. It remains what it has long been: the background mammal of the northern prairie, abundant enough that most people who live beside it never learn its real name.
