Predator and Prey on the Prairie

collage, watercolour and gouache 2022 22”h, 30”w

The black-footed ferret is one of North America’s most endangered mammals. Once thought to be extinct, the species was rediscovered in Wyoming in 1981, after which efforts were made to give black-footed ferrets a second chance for survival, including by (successfully) cloning a female ferret thirty years later. One of the animals the black-footed ferret hunts is the prairie dog, and large numbers of prairie dog prey are required for the survival of the ferret in the wild. Prairie dogs are also essential to the life of the prairie for the diversity of grasses (the main character in my illustration) and native wildflowers. The burrows prairie dogs dig provide protection and dwelling places not only for themselves but also for their ferret predators, as well as for burrowing owls, rabbits, badgers, weasels, snakes, salamanders, insects and even foxes. But prairie dogs are highly susceptible to the sylvatic plague. In my depiction, protected man-made prairie dog burrows are sprayed with antibiotics from medical drones. A mastodon carcass—a reminder of the megafauna that once roamed the prairie—is repurposed as a protective enclave for the plague eradication treatment. More burrows are protected images of a grass genome that represent fencing (another reference to man-made interventions on a once-pristine prairie). I was born at the edge of the prairie, and one of my earliest memories is the seemingly endless expanse of prairie dogs, their burrows and their chirping, with nothing interrupting their habitat between Denver and Boulder. “Now most of the endless prairie is suburban sprawl”.

• 3-dimensional
• Diagrams
• Gouache
• Watercolour