Far From the Prairie, Professor Makes Waves

"They are herbivores, strictly," Hoogland says. "Except for eating babies."

Hoogland didn't set out intending to study prairie dog cannibalism. As a young researcher, he first tried to study a species of ground squirrel, but they just mated and then scattered. Despairing of ever being able to keep track of them, Hoogland says, he actually cried.

Then, in the early 1970s, he found prairie dogs. The animals spent most of their life within the same few acres -- and a good bit of it above ground, where he could watch them. Perfect.

"Within 10 minutes, I remember saying out loud to myself, 'I could study these things for the next 10 years,' " he recalled.

It turned out to be a much longer commitment than that. Hoogland found a job at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, which has an office here in this Appalachian college town.

It's not that there are any prairie dogs in Maryland; there aren't. The appeal was the flexible schedule: Hoogland's bosses let him live with prairie dogs for more than four months a year.

This month, Hoogland left for the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado, home to a colony of white-tailed prairie dogs. He and a team of assistants plan to capture all the animals and paint their fur with identifying numbers, racing stripes or other designs. Then they will climb up in seven-foot-high towers and watch what ensues.

And watch.

And watch.

They will note which dogs "kiss" each other, pressing their teeth together in a greeting gesture; who fights with whom; who spends the night in whose burrow.

They will watch up to 14 hours a day, every day -- doing work that can be tedious and tense at the same time.

"It always looks like nothing's happening," said Mark Hoogland, 29, one of Hoogland's four children, who often helped with research and were home-schooled to accommodate the family's schedule. "But then somebody sneaks into somebody else's burrow, and that's what you've been watching all day long for."

They have seen all kinds of things from their perches. There was mating-season chaos, in which males tried to keep females sequestered underground -- before they escaped out a back entrance. There were insights into prairie dog altruism: The scientists dragged a stuffed badger across the colony and noted which dogs would give an alarm call to warn others. Some warned their relatives. Some saved only themselves.

Then there was the baby-killing. Hoogland didn't notice it for seven years, because it usually happens only underground. One of his early clues was the sight of a female prairie dog emerging from another mother's burrow, licking blood off her claws.

"It was almost like I was watching Macbeth," he said, thinking of Lady Macbeth's attempts to wash an imaginary "damned spot" of blood from her hands.

Hoogland says he's still not sure exactly why they do it. It may be simply for a high-protein meal.

"You wouldn't find out a lot of these things unless you were just terribly persistent," said Pete Gober, a field supervisor with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Pierre, S.D. "He never gets tired of it."

Hoogland says he still isn't.

"People say, 'Don't you see the same things?' " Hoogland said. "Never see the same things. Always something new."