When I headed to Montana to visit the American Prairie, I had bison on my mind. They are the quintessential plains animal and North America’s largest land mammal. But what I didn’t expect was for a rodent to pique my interest and steal my heart.

The black-tailed prairie dog lives in Montana and is the most abundant of the five prairie dog species. Even still, it has lost 95% of its historic habitat. This adorable critter plays an outsized and sometimes complicated role in life on the prairie.

Prairie dogs have long been considered an agricultural pest on working lands, and they have an extensive history of being the target of government-sponsored extermination efforts. American working lands are important: They grow our food. But as I sat at American Prairie’s Antelope Creek Campground a

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