| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Prairie Dog Empire: A Saga of the Shortgrass Prairie. By Paul A. Johnsgard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xvi + 243 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95.
Forty years after producing the first of nearly fifty books, Paul Johnsgard favors us with Prairie Dog Empire. In 2002, Johnsgard attended a meeting of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, which was considering whether to in-itiate a conservation program for black-tailed prairie dogs. Conservationists and biologists testified on one side, ranchers on the other. The commissioners sided with the ranchers: no state-supported program would be forthcoming. Dismayed, Johnsgard picked up his pen, both to write and to illustrate his latest book.	1
He begins with a short history of the shortgrass prairie. Next is "A Buffalo Nation," the saga of bison from their discovery and exploitation to their conservation and recovery, followed by five more chapters devoted to plains wildlife. These begin with the ecology and status of the five species of prairie dog endemic to North America, including behavioral information—one of Johnsgard's fortes—and features the black-tailed prairie dog, the best studied of the group and the focus of the book. The remaining chapters in this section deal respectively with mammalian predators (e.g., black-footed ferrets), associates of prairie dog towns (e.g., burrowing owls), other plains wildlife (e.g., pronghorn), and raptors (e.g., ferruginous hawks).	. . .

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