When Eavesdropping Pays Off

Summary

Short Wave Podcast Episode Summary: "When Eavesdropping Pays Off"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Short Wave
• Host: Emily Kwong and Regina Barber
• Publisher: NPR
• Episode: When Eavesdropping Pays Off
• Release Date: June 25, 2025

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1. Introduction to Grasslands and Prairie Dogs

The episode opens with an exploration of grasslands, highlighting their critical role in carbon storage. Emily Kwong sets the stage by emphasizing the vulnerability of grasslands:

“Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystem on the planet, which is a problem because they store a lot of carbon.” [00:20]

Andy Boyce, an ecologist with the Great Plains Program at the Smithsonian, shares his experiences studying these ecosystems:

“The prairie looks a little bit different wherever you go, and it changes hugely season to season.” [00:43]

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2. The Keystone Role of Prairie Dogs

Prairie dogs are introduced as a keystone species crucial to the grassland ecosystem. Boyce explains their multifaceted impact:

“Prairie dogs are food for a huge variety of species. Out on the prairie, prairie dogs physically modify the environment in a ton of ways... they build burrows that other species use. They graze vegetation to create this really short grass habitat that a lot of animals like to nest and forage in.” [04:13]

This section underscores how prairie dogs maintain the grassland structure, ensuring it doesn't transition into forests or savannas by clipping woody vegetation.

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3. Investigating the Curlew-Prairie Dog Interaction

The core of the episode delves into the research conducted by Andy Boyce and his former intern, Andrew Drielin. Their study explores whether long-billed curlews use prairie dog alarm calls to detect predators.

Kwong frames the research question:

“...if these long billed curlews with nests near prairie dog towns were actually taking advantage of the calls of prairie dogs to be alerted to predators.” [05:04]

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4. The Badger-Inator Experiment

To test their hypothesis, Drielin describes an innovative method involving a "badger inator":

“I took a taxidermy badger and I strapped it to a remote-controlled car... we would either have a speaker completely silent... or we would have a speaker playing a recording of prairie dog alarm calls in response to the badger.” [06:25]

This setup simulated a predator's presence, allowing the researchers to observe the curlews' behavioral responses under different conditions.

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5. Observations and Behavioral Responses

Andy Boyce details the curlews' reactions:

“The thing about long billed curlews that made this whole study work is that they have two totally different ways of sitting on the nest when they're incubating... if they are threatened, they just totally pancake.” [07:16]

This binary behavior—head up when safe and head down when threatened—provided clear indicators of the birds' perception of danger.

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6. Key Findings and Their Significance

The study revealed significant insights into the survival strategies of curlews:

“When the curlews could actually hear the prairie dog alarm calls... it made a three times difference in terms of the effectiveness of that behavior.” [08:09]

This finding suggests that prairie dog alarm calls serve as an early warning system, enhancing the curlews' ability to evade predators like the simulated badger, which are opportunistic predators.

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7. Conservation Implications

The decline of prairie dog populations poses severe threats to grassland ecosystems. Boyce highlights the drastic reduction:

“Prairie dog populations are sitting about at about 2% of what they were historically... they have been systematically persecuted through poisoning and shooting.” [09:17]

The introduction of diseases like sylvatic plague from Asia further exacerbates their decline. Drielin emphasizes the broader ecological repercussions:

“There are other imperiled grassland species that rely completely on prairie dogs. If we want to have black-footed ferrets... birds like mountain plovers... we need prairie dog conservation.” [11:29]

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8. The Role of Indigenous Nations in Conservation

The episode acknowledges the vital contributions of indigenous communities in prairie dog conservation:

“We worked on Fort Belknap Indian Reservation... I was just so impressed with all the work that they were doing to maintain this ecosystem.” [10:58]

Their efforts are crucial in preserving the grassland ecosystems with limited resources.

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9. Broader Environmental Impact

Maintaining healthy prairie dog populations not only supports biodiversity but also aids in carbon sequestration:

“Intact prairie holds way more carbon than tilled agricultural land.” [10:26]

This underscores the global significance of grassland conservation in combating climate change.

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10. Conclusion and Call to Action

Boyce and Drielin conclude by reiterating the indispensable role of prairie dogs:

“We can't effectively separate bird conservation for those species with prairie dog conservation.” [11:29]

Their research not only sheds light on intricate ecological relationships but also serves as a call to action for enhanced conservation efforts to protect these vital species and the ecosystems they support.

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Produced by: Burley McCoy
Edited by: Rebecca Ramirez
Fact-Checked by: Tyler Jones
Audio Engineer: Robert Rodriguez
Senior Director: Beth Donovan
Senior VP of Podcasting Strategy: Colin Campbell

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This episode of Short Wave eloquently illustrates the delicate interdependencies within grassland ecosystems and the pivotal role prairie dogs play in maintaining ecological balance. Through innovative research and collaborative conservation efforts, the episode highlights both the challenges and hopeful strategies in preserving these threatened environments.

Transcript

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[Emily Kwong]

You're listening to Short Wave from n. Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystem on the planet, which is a problem because they store a lot of carbon. One third of all carbon on land is found in grasslands, and Andy Boyce has spent a lot of time standing in them. Sometimes the grass is knee high, sometimes it's only stubble level.

[Andy Boyce]

The prairie looks a little bit different wherever you go, and it changes hugely season to season.

[Emily Kwong]

Go to Montana in early June, and the prairie is loud and teeming with life.

[Andy Boyce]

There are several species of shorebirds flying around, singing, defending their territories. There are innumerable small hidden species of songbirds.

[Emily Kwong]

Andy studies birds, in particular the long billed curlew. A curlew is a shorebird about the size of a chicken with a mottled brown coat and a long thin beak that curves. And curlews build nests in the prairie. Now Andy is an ecologist with the Great Plains Program at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology institute. And in 2020, he and then intern Andrew Drielin were tasked with catching one of these birds.

[Andy Boyce]

But we were really having this problem with this one individual curlew where we would get within 5, 10, 20ft of her and, you know, she would flush off the nest before we had a chance to capture her.

[Emily Kwong]

Prairies are also home to to prairie dogs, these burrowing ground squirrels that live in networks of burrows known as towns, which can stretch hundreds to thousands of acres. And when Andy and Andrew got close, the prairie dogs started calling.

[Andy Boyce]

And I think I said, well, like, you know, guys, I kind of think these prairie dogs are giving us away.

[Emily Kwong]

And Andrew, who later became a grad student in the lab, wanted to find out.

[Andrew Drielin]

So Andy planted the seed of this idea and it really got my, like, mad scientist energy up. And I decided to test this wild idea as part of my dissertation.

[Emily Kwong]

So today on the show, why eavesdropping on prairie dogs is a legitimate survival strategy. Plus, how Andy and Andrew mimicked a predator on the landscape.

[Andrew Drielin]

I took a taxidermy badger and I strapped it to a remote controlled car and made what we lovingly call the badger inator.

[Emily Kwong]

Hi, I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from npr.

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[Emily Kwong]

Learn [e-mail] Andy and Andrew Prairie dogs, in addition to being very adorable, they're ecologically really important. Prairie dogs are what's known as a keystone species. What is that? What role do they serve in the grasslands?

[Andy Boyce]

Yeah, totally. So in general, when we say keystone species, we mean an animal, an organism that has a disproportionately large effect on an ecosystem relative to, let's say, its biomass. Prairie dogs are food for a huge variety of species. Out on the prairie, prairie dogs physically modify the environment in a ton of ways. So they build burrows that other species use. They graze vegetation to create this really short grass habitat that a lot of animals like to nest and forage in. They can't stand to have any sort of like vertical structure in their colonies, probably because they like to have long sight lines. They don't like perching places for predators. And this habit they have of clipping woody vegetation on the landscape, you know, it's something that keeps grassland, grassland like grasslands thrive with disturbance. They need it, otherwise they'll become forests or savannas.

[Emily Kwong]

So let's dive into the study that you and your team worked on. You all wanted to know if these long billed curlews with nests near prairie dog towns were actually taking advantage of the calls of prairie dogs to be alerted to predators. Andrew, how did you go about setting, studying that?

[Andrew Drielin]

Yeah, so the first step is to actually find a long billed curlew nest, which takes hours of work sitting out on the prairie, watching very closely to, you know, track a female or a male until they change incubation duties at the nest, because their nests are super well concealed and so pretty much the only way to reliably find a curlew nest is to watch for that changing of the guard and see that switch happen. And then you essentially. Once we found that curlew nest, we would then flag out a little race course for our badger inator on wheels and we would come back a couple days later after we gave the curlews a little bit of downtime. And we would do one of two things. We would either have a speaker completely silent, not playing anything, or we would have a speaker playing a recording of prairie dog alarm calls in response to the badger.

[Emily Kwong]

And the badginator is a taxidermied badger that you strap to a remote control car to be a predator like proxy to see if it would like set off this chain of events. This like prairie dog call alarm. Alarm system.

[Andrew Drielin]

Exactly.

[Emily Kwong]

Okay.

[Andrew Drielin]

And I'm literally like a football field away looking through a telescope while piloting the badger nator. And so it actually took a decent amount of coordination to like pull it off. And we're hiding either behind a work truck or behind a camouflaged hunting blind, you know, just trying to be like as inconspicuous as possible. And we're like essentially comparing the difference in the curlew's anti predator behavior and that hunkering down on the nest with and without the prairie dog alarm calls to see if it gives that early warning advantage.

[Andy Boyce]

The thing about long billed curlews that made this whole study work is that they have two totally different ways of sitting on the nest when they're incubating. So if they are not perceiving any sort of threat, they're sitting on the nest on the ground, they've got their head up, they're looking around for stuff. But when they're threatened or they perceive a predator on the landscape, they just totally pancake. So their long head and bill pressed totally down to the ground, doing their best impression of a cow pie basically.

[Emily Kwong]

So you mean a pile of poop?

[Andy Boyce]

Oh yeah, yeah, totally.

[Emily Kwong]

Go on, go on, go on.

[Andy Boyce]

Well, yeah, there's this long standing hypothesis that they are basically like, they basically like mimic bison. Piles of bison dung on the landscape.

[Emily Kwong]

I love birds. Okay, go on.

[Andy Boyce]

So anyway, because they have this binary behavior of basically either head up or head down, we can tell when they're perceiving a predator.

[Emily Kwong]

What did you ultimately find in the data analysis?

[Andrew Drielin]

Yeah, so I felt a huge wave of validation upon seeing the results. When the curlews could actually hear the prairie dog alarm calls. It made a three times difference in terms of the effectiveness of that behavior. So they hid when the badger was three times further away.

[Emily Kwong]

Is this a matter of life and death for them?

[Andrew Drielin]

That's what we think, absolutely.

[Andy Boyce]

Because these badgers are opportunistic predators. They're out there cruising around, just hoping to see something and smell something.

[Andrew Drielin]

Yeah. The reason that we think this is extra important for curlews in particular is because they typically only have one nest, a breeding season. So literally, all of their eggs, all four of them, are in one basket for the entire summer. And then if that nest gets eaten by a badger, then they have to wait a whole nother year, go through a whole nother migration cycle before they can have another nest.

[Emily Kwong]

All of it makes me wonder about the work that prairie dogs are doing then and on grasslands. Aside from being adorable, they are one of a few keystone species in this habitat. Just to imagine it, I mean, if something were to happen to the prairie dogs, how would it impact the grasslands?

[Andy Boyce]

Yeah, well, I have bad news, like things have been happening to prairie dogs. So we are right now sitting at about. Prairie dog populations are sitting about at about 2% of what they were historically before sort of Euro American expansion through the west, really. So they have been systematically persecuted through poisoning and shooting. There's also this introduced disease called sylvatic plague, which has been introduced from Asia, which decimates prairie dog populations. So, honestly, the system that we were working in is amazing, and it allows us to uncover some of these ecological relationships with prairie dogs. But it's really rare. Prairie dogs are gone from most of the grasslands that they used to occupy. And I think that's one of the reasons we feel working on them is really important, because uncovering these amazing things that they're doing on these landscape that potentially benefit other species we want to conserve will hopefully motivate increased prairie dog conservation efforts going forward.

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah, I mean, if prairie dog populations shrink, what's at stake for the grassland ecosystem, especially considering how much carbon is stored in grasslands?

[Andy Boyce]

Yeah, we know that intact prairie holds way, way, way more or sequesters way, way, way more carbon than tilled agricultural land. So it's really important to keep grasslands, grasslands. And I think as a society, we view the center of country, the Great Plains, as the breadbasket. Right. And we see these landscapes as almost entirely for production, and they are hugely economically valuable. But because of that, we don't have giant grassland national parks all over the country like we do in mountains or deserts or northeastern forests.

[Andrew Drielin]

And in terms of the prairie dog conservation story, another important angle is how much work indigenous nations do in terms of conserving and restoring the prairie dog ecosystem. We worked on Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, which is home to the Ani and Nakota nations, and just being out there on that landscape which cows were grazing on, the prairie dog towns, I was just so impressed with all the work that they were doing to on with very little resources to keep this ecosystem something close to what it formerly was.

[Andy Boyce]

You know, Andrew and I are like, you know, hardcore prairie dog stands and aficionados at this point. But like there are other imperiled grassland species that rely completely on prairie dogs. If we want to have black footed ferrets in this world, we need to do prairie dog conservation. Birds There's a tremendous amount of money and interest in bird conservation if we want to continue to have mountain plovers on this landscape. Horned larks, long billed curlews, burrowing owls, all these species rely on prairie dogs. So we can't effectively separate bird conservation for those species with prairie dog conservation.

[Emily Kwong]

Andy Boyce and Andrew Dreeland, thank you so much for coming on Shortwave.

[Andy Boyce]

Absolutely. Anytime.

[Andrew Drielin]

Thank you so much for having us. Emily.

[Emily Kwong]

Short wavers. You know what I'm gonna ask. Please follow us on the NPR app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Your support truly helps the show. This episode was Produced by Burley McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Beth Donovan is our Senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior Vice President of Podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from npr. Can I hear your best prairie dog bark impersonation?

[Andrew Drielin]

Just a little like.

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